Objects in Common Worksession – RAW and unprocessed

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In collaboration with Medialab Prado Constant organised the worksession ’Objects in Common’ as the final event in a series that started in 2015 with ’Funcionamientos: Objects in Common and Diverse Bodies’ followed by ’Interactivos? Material Cultures in the digital age’ and ’Grigri Pixel: makers and energy in African cities’.
The series ’Objetos Comunes’ wants to explore “other ways of doing” such as design for functional diversity, situated digital manufacturing in for example African cities. It takes making ordinary/common objects as a point of departure.

During the week of the 7th to 12th of March 2016, 25 makers and thinkers have looked at the potential but also at the problems of sharing practices, processes of manufacturing and the documentation of physical objects. Taking both the permission to reproduce and the availability of source files as a given, there are still many questions to ask about the actual common-ness of digital objects and their potential physical life.

On this page you can find the raw archive of the notes that were taken during the worksession.

– Themes of the session

MONDAY 07/03
— Spaces+ relations (fablabs, hackerspaces, makerspaces ..)
TUESDAY 08/03
— Repositories, sharing platforms, documentation (manuals, videos).
WEDNESDAY 09/03
— Resources, materials and relations (geopolitics, ecology,
economy)
THURSDAY 10/03
— Licenses and the relations they produce.
FRIDAY 11/03
— Digital to physical(fileformats, vectors, limitations,
transformations)

– Who participated:
Everyone answered a questionnaire, the answers were bundled together in a booklet (thanks PW).

– Images of the worksession:

– Raw html files of the notes we took, including authorship colours and post live spelling chaos

 

A subjective first summary of this worksession will be presented at LGM 2016

 

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Call for collaborators – Interactivos 15 – Material Cultures in the Digital Age.

Interactivos

Call to collaborate in the project workshop Interactivos?’15: Material Cultures in the Digital Age, that will be carried out from December 2 to 16, 2015. Collaborators will participate in the production of the selected projects. The workshop is complete with a series of conferences and meetings and takes place in the framework of the project Common Objects, in cooperation with Constant vzw.

Free registration. Deadline: November 30, 2015.

Medialab-Prado offers free lodging to collaborators in youth hostels during the workshop (limited seating, shall on request and by order of registration).The last day to ask for a place is November 23.

For more information.

Click here to follow all the information about “Objects in Common” program.

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Constant, Interactivos & more on Rtve, Radio 3, Spanish national radio

On the 2nd of December, Interactivos starts in Medialab Prado in Madrid, on the topic of “Objects in Common”.
Six projects were selected and they will work intensely on their subject/object matter for two weeks.

A small interview was done on the topic of these Objects in Common and more on fablabs in general on Radio 3 of Spanish National radio Rtve.

Our contribution (Susana Moliner Delgado & Wendy Van Wynsberghe) starts around 39min10sec.

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Diverted Objects

Invited by Constant, on Saturday the 12/09/2015 LibreObjet organized a workshop in their atelier, with the central idea of the fork.

There were three times two hours of making lamps.

Ingredients per person or design team:
– 3 meter of white cable
– one broomstick
– two 220 lamp sockets
– one white led
– wire
– thinner pieces of rounded wood.

In session one, you make an “original”.
In session two, you fork another lamp.
In session three, you fork another lamp.

For example these two:

Diverted light bulb

Bulby snake

Per lamp, you filled in a identification slip, indicating what your fork is based on and explicitly mentioning the license, the other maker – designer etc.

Here are all images of the workshop.



This is a timelapse video of it:

This is an image gallery of all objects.

All these diverted objects are on display in Rue du Fort 5, 1060 Brussels, from 17/09/2015 till 25/10/2015.

Here are two atmospheric night video’s.

There is a Free Art License on all of this content.

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Etching Pcb’s with Vinegar & Peroxide

When you want to make a printed circuit on a small scale, there are several methods to do this. One involves specific chemicals, which are not so great. In these tutorials, vinegar and hydrogen peroxide is used, which should be more environmentally friendly.

With a laserprinter you print your circuit on glossy paper, using the Toner transfer method.
The etching itself is the process where the printed circuit stays and the copper is etched of.
Here you see the procedure explained in French, here in English.

These links are documented as a mnemonic.

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Crowdprinting – Let’s print a knitting machine together – ConstantV – Imprimons une machine a tricoter ensemble

RIMG0203_question(FR plus bas)

For 29/01 we need to 3D print a hundred pieces for exhibiting the OpenKnit knitting machine Wally 120.

We have started printing in Fablab-Brussels, but we need your contribution, as it is a slooooow process and we don’t have our own printer!

If have (access) to a 3D printer and you want to help:

–> Choose what piece you want to print and write it in the spreadsheet. It needs to be 50% infill, very fine resolution, high quality and very sturdy.
http://framacalc.org/crowdprint_openknit

Please print one or more of the following pieces and send them to us.

Constant
(machine)knit
Fortstraat 5
1060 Brussels
Belgium

—> Why would you print:
– The OpenKnit Wally 120 is an open hardware machine and in the true Floss spirit crowdprinting just makes sense.
– Our budget is very limited, so your 3D printed contribution will help to make this project happen.
– We will attribute all contributions in our window exhibition of 29/01/2015.

If you live in Brussels, come by at the opening on the 29th to have a drink – same address.

If you want to help build the OpenKnit machine, we will work on it on the Saturdays of February
Contact wendy atttt constantvzw dottt org

FRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRF
FRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRFRF

Pour le 29/01 il nous faut 100 pieces a imprimer en 3D, pourqu’on puisse montrer la machine a tricoter open source OpenKnit Wally 120.

On imprime déjà au Fablab-Brussels, mais il nous aurions besoin de votre contribution, car imprimer en 3D est un processus très lent et pas si simple parfois et on n’a pas notre propre imprimante!

Si vous avez (accès) a une imprimante 3D et vous voulez donner un coup de main:
Vous pouvez contribuer au projet en imprimant une ou plusieurs pièces et nous les envoyer par la poste a l’adresse suivante:

Constant
(machine)knit
Rue du Fort 5
1060 Bruxelles
Belgique

–> Choisissez ce que vous voulez imprimer et notez le dans le tableau. La qualité doit être très haute, 50% infil, très costaude..
http://framacalc.org/crowdprint_openknit

–> Pourquoi imprimer pour ce projet?
– Le OpenKnit Wally 120 est un projet open hardware et dans l’esprit du libre cela a du sens de faire un crowdprinting (impression par la masse).
– Notre budget étant très limite, votre contribution permettra la réalisation de ce projet collaboratif!
– On va attribuer tout les contributions dans notre expo du 29/01/2015.

Si vous habitez a Bruxelles, venez a l’ouverture le 29 janvier pour voire le travail et de boire un verre ensemble – même address.

Si vous voulez aider a construire la machine OpenKnit, faites nous signe on va travailler dessus les samedis de Février. Contactez wendy atttt constantvzw dotttt org

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Raspberry Pi tricks for exhibitions – glitches

So, there are some glitches to make omxplayer loop with a script on a Raspberry Pi. When the script loops a very short file, it starts to crash quite quickly. I want to reproduce these errors and look for a solution later.

One potential solution was to make the files being played bigger. So I looked for some commandline magic of glueing the same file to a copy of itself. This mencoder code looks for all mp4 files and sticks them together.

$ mencoder -oac pcm -ovc copy -o merged_file.mp4 `ls *.mp4`

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Raspberry Pi tricks for exhibitions

I wanted to use Raspberry Pi’s to show a few .mp4 films, especially on old televisions & analog screens

Here’s a list of tips and tricks:

– Default (a reminder): login = pi, password = raspberry

– sudo just works – no password –> you need it to halt & to reboot (and lots more, of course)

– I installed the system with Noobs, the easy way to install Raspbian.
This did force hdmi to be default screen output. The analog video out just stayed dormant.
–> So I edited the config file:
$ sudo nano /boot/config.txt
Scroll down to the bottom and hash/comment out (add a #) the bottom part, added by Noobs, with regard to hdmi.

– To play the video’s, use omxplayer –> it is a mediaplayer adapted to the Raspberry Pi (semiclosed) Hardware.

– The omxplayer controls do not have man pages in my version of Raspbian. Here you can find them online.

– The omxplayer -b –loop did not work for my video’s
So, with some help some time later, here’s a little bash script that you can run in the terminal (even without startx).

#!/bin/bash
while true
do
omxplayer lala.mp4
done

–> call it omxplayer4ever.sh and launch it with
$ bash omxplayer4ever.sh

The script needs to be in the same folder your film is.
You do still see the terminal lurking behind the video..

IMAG1099

In the meantime I have found this excellent post by Julien Deswaef, right on topic!

Thanks 😉

– Taking Julien’s advice on hiding the terminal
–> add setterm -blank 1 to your /etc/rc.local file

$sudo nano /etc/rc.local

Write it before the line exit 0, keeping that command at the end, then save the file and exit.
What you are doing here is hiding the terminal after 1 minute of inactivity. Just nudging a key on your keyboard revives it. If you add something/instructions/a command in the /etc/rc.local file, it launches it at start-up.

– to stop the video’s from playing -> do ctrl+c a few times quickly

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DD killed my partition table – Raspberry Pi woe’s

This post is a small mental note – a solution for a problem.
For the third time I have killed an sd card by using the command dd.
(they say something about donkeys – ezels in Dutch)

You use dd to copy – but it can destroy without mercy.
I followed the instructions on how to put Raspbian on Pi and I managed to ruin my empty sd cards..

I wiped off their partition table – gparted did not want to make a new one.
Luckily this detailed post on repairing your partition table revived the cards!

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=115769

Posted in Broken, Hack, Software | 2 Responses

eTextile Summercamp

title_4From July 27th to August 2nd in Poncé sur le Loir, Claire Williams and I participated in the eTextile Summercamp.

Along the week there were workshops and some talks – the reports & tutorials are still growing – including the recipes of the delicous food at Paillard:
Screen printing circuits
Energy Harvesting

And lots more here..

Driving back to Brussels we ran into very dramatic weather, very low visibility, driving 40km/h on the motorway for half an hour.

IMAG1045

This was, alas, a symptom for August to come..
To deal with our August-post-summercamp-too-much-rain blues, we decided to make some Stuffed Vine Leaves, according to the recipe of Ebru.

Locally found ingredients (Brussels):

ingredients

Drum Roll::DSC_2672

DSC_2674

Low and behold, clouds retreated – the dolmades were lovely..

So, this is a little blog post to all – to say Thanks! Wow! It was great! Wonderful! More! Bis! & to share some info in general..

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I just ran into this great word in German – if you are familiar with the concept of Schnaps:
Schnapsidee
Etextile summer camp.. Kein Schnapsidee..

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