The latest 3D printing project to come out of Splatspace is this set of volume and tone knobs for a 10-year-old’s Fender electric guitar.
As the 10-year-old’s father (and creator of the knobs) says:
This is the true purpose of home 3D printing technology: to make children’s heads explode. (And to make them practice their guitar without complaining.)
This past Saturday, members of Splatspace joined with other volunteers to mentor kids during Efland-Cheeks Elementary’s fifth Robot camp. Efland-Cheeks is a Title I school in rural Orange county, and has been integrating robotics into its fifth grade class program since receiving a Toyota Tapestry grant in 2010.
Robot camp is one part of that program, where over the course of the day fifth grade students design, program, and build Lego Mindstorms robots for a sumo-like “battlebots” style competition.
Robot camp is entirely free to the students, and as such is reliant on volunteer support. As part of continuing mission to help with STEM education and bring maker ideas to classrooms, Splatspace regularly assists with volunteers for the event. It’s hugely important to these kids, and really rewarding for volunteers.
And now, on to the robots!
As with previous times, Robot Camp was a blast for everyone, and we’re really hoping to see these kids do great things with the inspiration from the day.
This Saturday we’re doing something very special: Splatspace is teaming up with Atomic Empire!
We’re going to be there from 1pm to 4pm, showing off all sorts of cool things in the intersection of games and hackerspaces and makers, like improving your games with 3D printed parts, some original 3D printed games, and improved ways to prototype new games if you’re interested in game design.
If you’re interested, there are more details on meetup, where you can also RSVP if you’re coming. We look forwards to seeing you!
Yesterday I posted that Techshop was going to be doing a Raspberry Pi workshop. In fact, it will be a talk. All the same information, but there won’t be the workshop component as at the TriLUG event and the hack day at the Space.
My apologies for the confusion.
Here’s this week’s schedule.
If you missed the TriLUG Raspberry Pi talk and the Raspberry Pi dat at Splatspace, you’ve got another opportunity!
Pete Soper of Splatspace is giving an introduction to the Raspberry Pi talk at Techshop, on March 9th. He’ll be covering much the same material he covered at TriLUG–the history of the device, a description of its capabilities, and development examples and resources.
The event is free to members of Techshop (not of Splatspace) and $5.00 for non-members. It’s a great opportunity to check this material out if you missed the earlier events.
If you’re following along on our meetup, you already know this, but Digital Fabrication tonight was cancelled because of schedule conflicts for the hosts. Digital Fabrication is semi regular, so keep an eye on our meetup page and here to find out when the next one is.
This past weekend members of Splatspace joined Cory Doctorow at Flyleaf Books. Doctorow was here for his book tour, and was doing a great talk on internet freedom, attempts at balkanizing the internet, and the legal issues surrounding use of the internet. He also, of course, said a few words about his friend, the recently departed Aaron Swartz. As part of his presentation, he points out that hackerspaces have an important role to play in joining a community that will help fix our digitial infrastructure, both technologically and legally.
Because of that role, Doctorow has been inviting hackerspaces to join him along his tour–it was in that capacity that he gave us a few minutes before his talk to talk about the space.
The entire event was a blast. We presented one of Jeff Crew’s 3D printers (Big Red, the sibling of the printer in the space, Big Blue) and the Pirate Box with a new acrylic case. We also talked about Splatspace and it’s ongoing efforts with schools and libraries. We printed a variety of small trinkets as handouts and demonstrations, and had a variety of CC licensed media on the piratebox, along with installers for Tor and Truecrypt for all platforms.
We met a lot of new people at the event, and got a lot of interest in the space and our projects. If you’re one of the new faces we met, we hope to see you at the space soon!
It’s a bit late, but here’s this week’s schedule:
We hope to see you at one of our events this week!
Big news!
Cory Doctorow is touring the country right now promoting his new book, Homeland. That tour brings him to Chapel Hill on Saturday, at Flyleaf Books.
This would be cool enough in its own right, but Doctorow has opened his tour to local makerspaces along his route–so we’ll be joining him on Saturday!
The reading is at 2pm, at Flyleaf books. We’ll be showing off some 3D printing, our piratebox install, and anything else we can put together in the next few days.
We hope to see you there!