Fresh food

Days sort of seem to flow into each other when the light never goes out. Yesterday evening we (Johan, Kenny, Luis and I) decided to go fishing on the fjord with a borrowed boat, but before we went we had to put out a starting fire at the Shopbot (the CNC machine). It seems the machine missed some steps while running through a program, got stuck and made the vacuum suck up a couple of embers... which consequently started to smolder inside the machine. Mats (one of Haakons son's) came in after dinner and told us there was smoke coming from the Shopbot house... I think we where just in time.

So when that was over we packed our stuff and headed out onto the fjord, with two fishing rods. At first we didn't catch anything, so when we landed ashore at around 3.30 in the morning we found some mussels and cooked those as a snack. Cooking them on some damp seaweed you put on a open fire works fine, and gives the mussels a nice smokey flavor.

We then took the boat further onto the fjord and by chance discovered a really beautiful spot to fish. Kenny was the first to catch a pollock and shortly after I caught one as well. I took one raw bite of the fish (first time I bite a fish that is still wriggling) and cooked the rest in some seawater. We had some cooking pots with us so steaming the fish was really easy.

When Johan caught a fish as well we walked around the shore a bit (very nice and peaceful around 9 in the morning) and then took the boat back to shore (with a nice detour of course).

Being up most of the day and fishing all night makes you kind of sleepy, so this we slept from about 12 this morning till around 6.30. I'm now working on some timelapse footage I took, and will probably spend some time working on my bow design (I'm making a bow).

And it will not get dark...

Working, but ahead of time...

So I arrived safely in the lab in Norway... Got there and immediately got pulled towards the fjord with the guys here who made their own boats.
Guess what: they did float. So my Norway trip started floating on a quiet lake, between the mountains at the middle of the night, in perfect daylight.

Johan (on of the guys here) came up with a way of screen printing using the laser cutter and some anti-static bags in which they normally ship electronics, so I decided to make my own t-shirt. It worked out pretty well I must say. Check out the pictures below.

Norway is such a beautiful country, it never stops to amaze me. The mountains, the fresh air, the light 24 hours a day... It's just great being back here :)

Lasering the screen (attached to a wooden frame (also made with the laser))



The result after laser cutting (for the front of the shirt)


Put it on a shirt, wipe paint on it...


And there you go!

Loose ends again

So I'll be leaving for the Fablab in Norway again this monday. Just one more night shift (after the one I'm in now) and the plane takes off.
In Norway I'll continue on building a multitouch table using the FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) technique as described here, help as much as I can during the Kokompy camp that is currently being held (about adding functionality and usability to the cad.py program that Neal Gershenfield wrote to control all the machines in the labs from one interface) and I want to try to make a longbow like this one with the shopbot (for the handle) and some kind of lamination process for the limbs.

But today I also bought a new sleeping bag (which supposedly keeps me warm even at minus 20) and a new travel backpack to go on a long trip in the mountains. It's time for some reading about the

.

and some quiet and calm moments up in the mountains.
As Laozi said:

Gravity is the source of lightness,
calm the master of haste.

New life and a new trip

Prototyping for an upcomming workshop in the fablab in Amsterdam, I made a small bristlebot... I nicked the idea from Matt Ratto from the Humlab (also their blog) for making small robots using unbalanced motors (vibration motors, like the ones used in vibrators and gamecontrollers), arduinos and toothbrushes. If you place the motors on the toothbrushes and let them vibrite, the robot sort of brushes over your table (surface needs to be flat though). It's really quite easy to make!
check out the video:



Cool eh?
Now the thing is to give it some sensors (i'm thinking just IR for distance, mounted on some servos) so it keeps from vibrating of the table.
not as far yet as these guys though:



And if you like that, don't forget to watch this:



Incredible machine is it not?

On a different note, today I booked a flight back (yes back) to the lab in Norway... Finally! I'll be leaving the 23th of june, and stay there till the 25th of august. After that it's back to school for one more year...

How would you like your egg? Scrambled, cooked, flying?

And yes, it is that time of the year again, time for the Fablab annual Easter egg competition!.
My colleague Ales Schaub is working hard to get his entry finished before the deadline tomorrow night at six. At that time we will all log on to the Polycom conference (the MIT lab is running a continuous online conference) for the judging. And I guess I will be one of the judges... Probably going to be a though job! I heard that they are working on a flying egg in Norway...
So make sure to check back in here for the entries and of course the winner, who will be awarded with a free trip to the Norwegian lab... How I miss that place...

Keep yourself busy

E-mails tell us that by now most of the boot camp participants returned safely back home. And home is, among other things, where the work is. I started working on our project at the HKU, which deals with designing a 'concept room' for the dutch tax services. Nice challenge there, cause those guys really fucked up on software the last couple of years, and are now trying to make up for that, which asks for quite the attitude change on account of the workers.
I'm also starting conversations about fab related projects here in Holland, so more on that to come.

Still miss Norway though...

On a different note, anybody seen this weird article? I was thinking that this big earth changing event was going to happen around 2013 or so... when the last of the Mayan calendars ends. Could be those guys where not so precise in retrospect... just a couple of years of. In Norway iI was really enjoying the darkness (no, not the rock band), so could be the earth rotates in such a way that Holland will also have 2 hours of light a day... wouldn't that be marvelous?

speaking of Mayans, I've just seen the movie 'The Fountain' by Darren Aronofsky (director of 'Pi' and 'Requiem for a dream') and I must say, great movie. Perhaps not for those among us who don't like fairy tales or to much interwoven story lines (or indeed Mayans), but for them who like dreaming, love, life and death and the occasional meditative moment... do watch it.

D/A conversion

Yesterday we started building the Fab@Home 3D printers...
With these printers, that you can build yourself, you can print 3D objects using material that hardens after being squished from a syringe... rubbers, clay but also icing for your cakes and desserts.

We worked in teams, about 5 per team at the beginning, slowly diminishing in numbers as we went along. some people (me) worked at the wiring, soldering, cutting wires and connecting stepper-motors to controller-boards. others began assembling the acrylic, while still others started on assembly of the mechanical parts (ball-bearings and the likes).

Today, at around 4, our first models where being printed. One of the teams made a square block with a hole, but I wanted something more difficult... so i found a model of the Penrose Triangle (see this site for the model) to print.
Since this model contains overhangs it was not possible to print (people who know about 3D printing or CNC machines will understand this problem). So I first tried to make a support structure in Blender, but since that would also contain overhangs or be incomplete, we decided to print into a layer of water, and see if the material would get enough support from that.

The model still has to harden, but it's looking good.
Click on one of the pictures for more.

Think Global, Act locally.

I just posted on Fablab.nl, in reply to some people who are thinking about starting projects concerning clean and free energy. I'm really happy people in our country are starting to use fablab's for these kinds of questions. We should work together on these issues and not try to re-invent the wheel separately. We will be having a discussion about how to get the different lab's to work together more closely, so questions and additions are more than welcome. Post them as a comment to this blog, or simply send me an e-mail. (also: skyping, calling, sending pigeons... it's al good.)
Hope to see more of these projects spring in our little country.
For now, set your screen to go to sleep after 2 minutes, computer after 15, and yourself after a good healthy day's work.

And since this is my personal blog, here's some personal stuff.

Since Bas an I cooked dinner one night, everybody's been helping out and yesterday Johan and I where up... The day before yesterday Hans Erik made a really marvelous meal and was also almost unbeatable in table setting.
So we decided to do something completely different. Around 5 i build four fires, one for cooking, one for looking at and roasting marshmallows, one in the sauna and one in the hot-tub.
We then roasted a real big piece of lamb and sausages, made a salad and had some excellent bean-balls made by Kamau (real nice guy from Kenia). After dinner was over we all jumped in the sauna, the snow and the hot-tub (in that exact sequence). Drinking beer and whisky in a hot sauna and trowing people in the snow... It's not like we are bored here.
The day before that we wanted to go ice climbing again, but it was a busy day, so we went out around 23:00... when we where half up the mountain, waist deep in snow and we still had not found any decent ice, we decided to give up and just enjoy the view. Climbing a mountain in the dark, with half a meter of snow is definitely something else.

Shopbot

We have been using the shopbot to do some milling of the beams for a frame that Haakon (head of the house) wants to have inside of the lab...
We actually have used some stupid ways of milling, and after three days figured we could do the same in around 15 minutes as opposed to 3 hours... but that's why we are here of course...


On a different note, today was also for relaxing... so we slept till 3ish, had a slow start, and after dinner I sat in the sauna for about 40 minutes with Jasper, one of the Swedish guys who is planning to open a lab in
Malmo, Sweden.
He managed to convince me we should walk back trough the snow bare feet and with just a towel... stupid of me to agree really...