Pumping Station: One

This month (tonight!) our guided tour speaker is Erin Robinson of Ivy Games.  If you’re a fan of adventure games and the game industry moves away from your favorite genre, what are you to do?  Erin decided to start making her own.  After a making a few award winning games and giving them away for free, she decided to make games her career and create Puzzle Bots, which was recently named one of the Pax 10.   Puzzle bots was produced through a small studio, which means it was made with a lot less money and a lot more hacker ethic.  Erin will be talking about what inspired her to take this difficult path, the process of making her idea into an actual product, and the awesome along the way.

The doors will open at 7pm, the talk will begin at 8pm. I hope to see you all there!

A quick note: my open source Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscope project has been mentioned in the MAKE blog.

Photo courtesey cliff1066™

If it’s been a while since you last laid your eyes on the nav bar of our humble website, now would be a good time to reacquaint yourself with it.  We’ve added a Media tab up top that contains all of PS:One’s official video (and soon to be audio as well).

We’ve been quietly recording talks and events over the last year and here is just a small selection of those recordings.  There are additional Guided Tours along with the rest of your favorite PS:One talks still in queue to be edited.

Many people have invested a lot of time and work to bring this content to a broader audience extending our reach into the greater community.   Carl Karsten was integral in showing me a less-cumbersome workflow for shooting and recording audio.  Also, Tim Saylor has scheduled so many great speakers for Guided Tours and made such a great help with production (and even taking over once as of this writing).

Now give your strained eyes a rest from this 20th century concept of “reading” and sit back to enjoy some syndicated PS:One goodness.

You! Over there bangin’ yer pots and pans, glitching toy circuits, playing that weird looking pipe thing! No, don’t stop! We want you to join us this Saturday, July 23rd for an open jam session. It’ll be at Nothin’ Less Cafe, located at 2642 N. Milwaukee Avenue (right next to the Logan Theatre), from 11 am to 7 pm. We’ll have some instruments set up, but feel free to bring your own mutant trombones or circuit-bent toys (or that thing from the picture above). If you want to bring a traditional instrument, that’s okay too. You don’t have to be a “musician,” just be ready to make noise. It’s free and open to the public, so come out and invite your friends. It’s part of the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival going on all weekend, so there’ll be plenty of things to see and do in the area.

(Picture licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, by SWARM Sounds on Flickr.)

Photo by Anne Petersen.

Adults who missed the thrill of Power Wheels or Little Tikes cars as a child now can go one better: by modifying the battery-powered child-size vehicles and competing at Maker Faire Detroit. Teams of DIY mechanic enthusiasts have been upgrading the small-scale cars far beyond stock performance levels to win prizes and bragging rights.

Among many other activities at Make magazine’s Maker Faire at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, July 31–August 1, the DieHard-sponsored Power Racing Series (PPPRS) will premiere. In its inaugural year the event was internal to PS: One, but this year brings teams together from far beyond the Midwest.

Jim Burke, a Pumping Station: One Director-at-Large and the Director of the PPPRS, said “I want Makers to meet face to face with a common project. Modifying and racing these toys is fun, creative, and challenging.”

This year, with DieHard Platinum batteries and chargers powering the series, nine teams from six different hackerspaces and makerspaces will compete in the three events of PPPRS: a drag race, a road race, and an endurance race. The PPPRS will be a main event at Maker Faire: Detroit, and families are encouraged to attend. We hope to see you there!

A quick reminder, we’ve gone back to weekly membership meetings.

That’s right – we’re having full meetings every Tuesday at 8pm.  Board meetings will happen at 7pm.

Quick facts about this change:

• 300 Seconds of Fame will begin immediately following the membership meeting and will continue as a monthly event on the second Tuesday of every month. Sign up with Anne if you want to have 300 seconds of your very own.
• This month’s Guided Tour will be the last of the series for the foreseeable future.
• The extremely fun 5th Tuesday Potlucks will also continue (immediately following the membership meeting).

Heat up them skillets and put on your eating face, Pumping Station: One is once again ringing it’s funny little metal triangles and yelling “Cooooome ‘n get it!” That’s right faithful onlookers, stop your bacon, get eggcited, and stop by PS:One for a pun-themed potluck.

Bring a dish to share and parcake in everyone else’s. While as the saying goes, becoming a vegetarian is a missed steak, it’s inevitable that there will be vegan and vegetarian options. If you feel like bringing some drinks, feel free, but don’t drink beyond the pint of no return or we may require you take a leave of absinthe. More than anything, come relish time to ketchup with friends!

Seriously though, food & puns, Tuesday the 29^th at 8:00 pm, we’ve got a microwave for reheating, but the cutlery may well be up to you. Bring your galores through the red doors! See you there!

This month we have two Guided Tour talks from a couple of great people doing very interesting things. In the June “It’s so awesome it’s probably illegal” edition of PS:One Guided Tours we’ll have the following talks:

This Friday, June 18th:

DIYLILCNC

A low-cost, open-source desktop CNC mill – http://www.diylilcnc.org

Chris Reilly and Taylor Hokanson will talk about the history and evolution of the DIYLILCNC project, some general bvackground of CNC technology, some of the shortcomings of the present state of CNC and how those are addressed by open-source hardware projects like the DIYLILCNC. We’ll also go over the specs of the DIYLILCNC, giving details about how it is built and its functions.

Chris Reilly is a Chicago-based artist, writer and teacher. He received his BFA with a focus on New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. Chris is currently employed as manager of SAIC’s Advanced Outptut Center, and a part-time faculty member teaching between SAIC’s Design and Film/Video/New Media departments. Since 2003, Chris has shown work in several solo and group art exhibitions in the US and Europe; he works with modded video games, virtual/augmented reality, scripting/programming and kinetic sculpture.
http://www.chris-reilly.org http://www.rainbowlazer.com

Taylor Hokanson is an artist and educator based in Chicago. His studio practice fuses functional design (as exhibited by the DIYLILCNC project) with artworks of a more conceptual nature (such as his Sledgehammer-operated Keyboard). Until recently Taylor taught digital production/fabrication at DePaul University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
www.taylorhokanson.com

Tuesday, June 22nd:

Unatronics

Making unusual and fun electronic musical instruments and turning it into a business – http://unatronics.com/

Maker and Circuit-bender Michael Una will give a talk about the steps involved in turning a hobby into a business. Topics will include business plan creation, logistics, and marketing. Michael will discuss the creation of his company Unatronics, demonstrate his products and discuss his development process.

These are some great talks that I’m really looking forward to seeing. The doors will open at 7pm, the talks will begin at 8pm. I hope to see you all there!

It’s that time again…the Unusual Musical Instrument Jam is tonight: Friday, June 11 at 7pm, at Pumping Station: One.

Come to the space with all of your loud things. We’d love to see your circuit bent toys, electronic contraptions, loud computer programs, microcontroller gadgets, MIDI controllers, absolutely anything–whether it was intended to make noises or not. If you’d like to be a little offbeat and bring your “usual” musical instruments, those are welcome, too. IF you don’t have any musical gadgets, don’t worry…there’ll be plenty to go around, or plenty of avant garde ways to make some noise when you come to the space.

It’s free and open to members and nonmembers alike, so bring your friends. See you there!

(Picture licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, by shankar, shiv on Flickr.)

PS:One GP, Pumping Station: One’s Power Racing Series team, is proud to present the video evidence of our early-bird test run.  In order to earn 100 points towards the main event at Maker Faire: Detroit, we were challenged to create a video of our car driving, at full speed, on a straight-away run of, at least, 100 feet.  You can check out the proof of our progress below: