Pumping Station: One

There’s a few members here at PS:One that are currently out of work and are making the most of the money we have.  We don’t get to go out very often so to bring cheer to our year we decided to start Chili Club.  We cook during the day when everyone else is at work and have a delicious time.

Our first meal was Chili, a fantastic recipe from Tyler Florence.  After simmering the chili for two hours on our induction cooktop we swapped to the crock pot and started on the cornbread.  Things got a little more interesting because cornbread on a cast iron skillet is supposed to be made in an oven, which we don’t have.  Fortunately the induction cooktop has temperature control, which worked perfectly after covering the top of the pan.

We were using the hashtag #ssssswwwwwiiinnnneeeefeaver on twitter in honor of SNL. Chili Club is going to be a once a month, stay tuned for next months meal!

On December 3, Jeff rebooted Transistor Thursdays with a “Solder Your Own Freeduino” class.  I had never played with an Arduino before, so I excitedly took the class.  I soldered it together, jumped for joy when the tests worked, and did the classic Arduino “hello world” of making an LED blink.  I played around with that for a little while, and then I got other ideas.

As anyone who has seen me play with my Commodores knows, I enjoy getting things to make noise.  Blinky is fun, but for me, loud is even more fun.  I went to my locker, cut a speaker off of a circuit board that I had already harvested for a few other parts for other projects, and hooked that up to the Arduino.  I then started familiarizing myself with the music coding commands…and didn’t stop until I had my Arduino playing something that was guaranteed to inspire people to throw ping pong balls at me.

The fact that the Arduino code loops over and over again until you cut the power meant there was only one song I could possibly choose for this:  The Song That Never Ends.

My flex resistor jacket is finally finished. After a month and a half of failures and a whole bunch of setbacks, the PS:One logo is finally embedded with twenty big LEDs which are attach to a circuit board and a flex resistor. The LEDs only light up when the right elbow is bent to a certain extent. It runs off of two AA batteries held along with the circuit board in a pocket on the left shoulder.

The jacket was premiered (sort of) at Digital Breakdown on Dec. 18th to help promote PS:One. Bunches of recently printed stickers didn’t hurt either. Luckily, the jacket is perfect for dancing.

Thanks to Jeff Kantarek and Jordan Bunker for their huge amounts of help on this project. Without their expertise this jacket would not be glowy.

Go ahead! The link below this post will take you to V1.1 of the PDF How-To to build one yourself, with step-by-step instructions and a pretty exhaustive materials list. Also some pictures, but perhaps not as many as there should be. Regardless! Is the PDF confusing or vague? Any questions? Go ahead and e-mail me at eli.skipp@gmail.com so that I can update the PDF and so that your questions can get answered. Happy hacking!

Fabric Light Bright PDF

[EDIT!]: This project is under a Creative Commons license!

Fabric Light-Bright by Eli Skipp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Are you charging your lazors? No? Would you like to? Then stop by Illinois Institute of Art this Thursday, November the 19th at 7 o’clock in room 213 for a crash course in internet memes, taught by PS:One members Jim Burke and Eli Skipp. The hour long class will go over what memes are, the history of memes, the origin of the term, and everything else you could ever possibly want to know. Free pizza, free knowledge.

Note: as internet memes are constantly being invented, rising, and falling again into obscurity, this will be the first installment in a series of classes.

Address, times, etc. are listed on the calendar to the right!
(Image via encyclopediadramatica.com)

Years ago, I found this website describing the author’s discovery melting aluminum by throwing a soda can in a campfire. He went on to describe the tools he used later on to melt the metal to produce model rocket nozzles. The tools were primitive, but still surprisingly effective. Ever since I read that page I’ve wanted to do it myself, but living in Chicago apartments, I didn’t have much opportunity to build a furnace and run it.  Since I’ve joined Pumping Station: One I finally have the opportunity I need to build an aluminum foundry and begin casting metal parts and art pieces.

I read about the topic a bit more online and decided to build Lionel Oliver’s Flowerpot Foundry. It was a pretty simple design that I thought I could make pretty cheaply (so if it didn’t work it wasn’t much of a waste). After two weekends constructing the furnace and a few attempted melts and some advice from some Navy nuclear technicians, it worked like a charm.

The basic construction of the foundry is a metal popcorn bucket with a flowerpot surrounded by concrete in it. The heat is generated from ordinary charcoal burning in the flowerpot. Ventilation holes at on top of the lid and at the bottom of the flowerpot help the fire to burn hotter & faster while letting smoke escape. I won’t go in to too much detail on the construction since Lionel is trying to sell a book on the topic, but my photographs of the process are on my flickr.

It was very exciting to see soda can after soda can go into the crucible and turn into a pool of shiny metal, then pour it in a muffin tin and get a solid ingot of aluminum. It felt like quite an achievement to turn such simple things into a furnace capable of getting that hot! But this is just the beginning. We’ve melted the metal successfully; now we have to make something useful from it. Lost foam seems to be the easiest process to get started with, so that’s what I’ll be pursuing next.

While surfing the net yesterday, myself and fellow members of PS:One came across a home built delta bot. What an awesome idea! I wanted to build one too, so today I scrounged around PS:One to see what we had laying around.

I managed to find a box with RC stuff in it… including 3 servos. Remembering that Josh had bought an erector set last night, I set to work putting together the “arms” of the delta bot. After they were assembled, I started getting lazy… so instead of using metal or wood to build a base for something I knew was temporary, I slapped the rest of it together with cardboard and hot glue!

Not bad, for an hour of work, I think.

Note: The motor on the end of the arms serves no purpose except as a weight… I wanted to see if the assembly could hold it.

Delta Arm from tensorflux on Vimeo.

What started yesterday as a mailing list quibble ended up turning into a demonstration in escape artistry.  When two directors start goading each other back and forth all day, one of them is bound to get bound.  All that posturing ended with me intending to follow through on a joke before the start of this Tuesday’s meeting.

Stocks are really an elegantly simple contraption to make.  Two 2×6s, a couple hinges and a jigsaw later, and our president is being helplessly doused by ping pong balls in public court.  After the initial ‘test fitting’ I had the opportunity to put the recently acquired Shopsmith through it’s first paces by rounding out the neck and wrist slots for added comfort with the drum sander attachment.

For future reference, the following links are not considered official PS:One business, nor necessarily safe for rainbow-phobic workplaces:

• http://www.hulu.com/watch/104731/castle-vampire-weekend
• http://pony.noisebridge.net/

More pictures after the jump.

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