Creativity is contagious — catch it!

Well, I humbly speak for the team…

  • from the first inspirations (Jennifer Nye, Abi Leggette and the WCS dance community),
  • to the practical applications engineer (Janeil Hill),
  • to the dreamer who has turned into the nuts-and-bolts design technician (Rick Hill)

…extending a hearty “Thank you!” to the fine folks at MAKE magazine, their publisher/owner and sponsor GE, for the following announcement:

On Nov 19, 2013, at 0:37, Stuart Gannes wrote:

Hi Rick,

We are fascinated by your project and would like to invite you to present at the finale on Wed Nov. 20. Presentation will be about 5-7 minutes, and the audience and Master Makers will be friendly. I am very impressed with your project. Let me know if you are interested.

Best Regards,

Stuart Gannes
Producer

——–

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 6:36 AM, Rick Hill wrote:

Stuart,

Thanks for the honour of the invitation. I’ll organise the notes for our team and present our project at the finale tomorrow. We’ve had fun in our learning/building and will gladly share the two-week journey with the audience and Master Makers.

Again, we appreciate the work behind-the-scenes by your team and the sponsors who helped put this event together. More importantly, we hope it inspires the next generation of Makers to make their dreams and imaginations a reality!

Regards,
Rick Hill
Team Tree Trunk

Sent from my iPad

——–

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 11:13 AM, Stuart Gannes wrote:

You’re welcome Rick. Looking forward to your presentation tomorrow.

Stuart

Don’t forget to sign your release 🙂

You only have to be 10% smarter than your tools

The Entrepreneurs Club announced a new contest today, specifically designed for youths aged 6-16.  Five winners will be awarded an all-expense paid trip to the annual Entrepreneurs Club, where the winners will be encouraged to pitch their dream projects for potential VC funding; alternatively, they will be given a small budget to develop a marketing plan to pitch their dream projects via crowdfunding.

The contest participants will attempt to accomplish the following goals:

  1. Design an autonomous rover*. (One winner will be announced for the best autonomous rover design.)
  2. Launch the rover into the upper atmosphere with a weather balloon**. (One winner will be announced for the best rover launch design.)
  3. Land the rover***. (One winner will be announced for the best rover landing design.)
  4. Retrieve the rover from its predetermined rendezvous point****. (One winner will be announced for the best rover rendezvous point design).

An overall winner will be announced that has shown the best combination of the most innovative and/or accurate achievement of the goals listed above.  In addition to the all-expense paid trip, the overall winner will be allowed to recruit new team members from any of the other contest winners or contest participants to pitch dream projects (primary team size may not exceed seven members).

*The rover must have onboard the following capabilities:

  1. Self-powered — may be any combination of fuel cell, ultracapacitor, nonrechargeable/rechargeable [alkaline, NiMH, NiCad, LiPo, nuclear, etc.] battery, wind, solar cell, or other means clearly documented and demonstrated to the contest judges.
  2. Guidance control system — may be a combination of GPS, 3D visual mapping, solar, magnetic, or other means clearly documented and demonstrated to the contest judges.
  3. Data logging system — must have a means to record location data and broadcast location data periodically, no less than once a minute (location data may include GPS coordinates, geotagged/timestamped photos or other means (see number 4 below) to record and show the rover’s current location), keeping onboard its total journey information or other means of remote storage of data logging information clearly documented and demonstrated to the contest judges.
  4. Environmental measurement and collection tools — may be a combination of air/land/water temperature, humidity, water salinity/pH, atmosphere/soil/water contents, biological sampling, or other means clearly documented and demonstrated to the contest judges.
  5. Additional features will be allowed as long as they are clearly documented and demonstrated to the contest judges.
  6. NOTE: Keep in mind that the rover may arrive at the rendezvous point by air, land and/or water.  The most/efficient use of all three will increase the chance of winning for the contest participant(s).

** A list of preapproved weather balloon suppliers will be provided.

*** The rover landing may include the following:

  1. Balloon remnants still attached.
  2. Balloon remnants detached.
  3. Parachute deployment.
  4. Self-guided UAV (powered or unpowered).
  5. Descent deceleration thrusters.
  6. Aquatic vehicle capabilities (surface/submarine).
  7. Additional landing features will be allowed as long as they are clearly documented and demonstrated to the contest judges.

****The rendezvous point must be preapproved by the contest judges before the rover is launched.  The time from launch of the rover to retrieval of the rover at the rendezvous point must take no longer than 48 hours.  The contest participants and their preapproved equipment must be in full view of the contest judges and/or their official representatives during the 48-hour period.

Designing the interactive artwork

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Well, with two days to go, the robot hacks team is down to conpleting the final pieces on top of the interactive artwork — no pressure!

We wanted to have some influence from historical modern architecture so off to the library we went.

Here are some images that will influence tonight’s design:

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And I shall try to avoid artwork with premonitions builtin!

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Of course, there’s current/contemporary architecture to consider, too.  Maybe in a separate blog post.

Robot Hacks — communiques, part uno

Original message ——–
From: Stuart Gannes
Subject: Important update from Make Greetings

Robot Hackers,

By now we hope all of you received your Robot Hack packages and we’re eager to learn what you are doing, or even planning to do with them. Based on your responses we plan to feature your projects on our Nov 20 finale. You will have a chance to join the Hangouts on Air and show the Community what you are working on. (We also plan to ask a few of our Master Makers to respond to your projects.)

Let us know the evolution of your idea, its current status, what’s next. Let us know if you were inspired by any of the Master Makers we have been featuring on our live sessions. A paragraph or a couple of sentences is all we need.Please respond by email before the weekend.If you haven’t yet posted on our G+ Community Page please do so. It’s filled with updates and interesting videos. And it’s growing like crazy!

And watch for an update about the Nov. 20 show. We will post that on Monday

Go Teams!

Stuart Gannes
Producer
————–

From: Rick
Subject: Re: Important update from Make Greetings

Stuart,

Thanks goes to you, Sherry H., Mike S., and all the others who’ve made this Robot Hacks event fun and informative. Our project is a set of dancing mannequins on a tabletop art piece and is on schedule to be completed early next week.

Today, we’re installing the servos and tomorrow installing the sensors, all of which were programmed in prototype stage during the first two weeks.  We’ll debug during the weekend.  The artist on the team will decorate the final piece after the weekend.

Our primary inspiration from a Master Maker is Erin Kennedy, a/k/a Robotgrrl.

We look forward to seeing how others have been inspired!

Regards,
Team Tree Trunk

Sent via the Samsung Galaxy S™III, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone

——–
From: Stuart Gannes
Subject: important update from MAKE

Thanks for the update Rick!

Stay tuned.
Stuart

——–
From: Stuart Gannes
Subject: Talk about your journey

Starting to see what’s brewing in your teams. Please let us know what you are doing. Don’t be shy. There are many newbies among us. For inspiration, check out this comment from one of the team leaders:

I also want to take this opportunity to thank you (MAKE and GE especially) for giving me an opportunity to dive in and really learn about Arduino and get some great hands-on experience with building robots. I’m a current AmeriCorps VISTA Leader serving with FIRST Robotics and I do work in my community with engaging kids and adults with robotics and STEM. However, I have never really had the resources or opportunity to learn so much about electronics and robotics, and my VISTA living allowance makes it difficult to afford the necessary equipment. Due to the generosity of GE and you guys over at MAKE, I can finally get my hands dirty! After watching kids experience the wonder of building a robot, I get to do it myself and share this project with my community. 

Can’t wait to learn about your journeys

Stuart

——–
From: Stuart Gannes
Subject: Every step matters

Greetings,

And thanks! to the dozens of you who already responded. Your stories are great and we are thrilled with your participation.

We’re still looking forward to hearing  – and learning – how things went for the rest of you. At the very least this will help us with our next Master Makers/Kit productions.

What inspired you to sign up? What do you like about the kits? What are you doing or think you might be doing? Send a note today if possible.

Every step matters!

Stuart

——–
From: Rick
Subject: Re: Every step matters

Inspiration for signing up was the challenge to a small group of friends to put our ideas into action, especially our recent discussion of an interactive yard art sculpture, using the Robot Hacks event for a chance to build a desktop prototype model.

The kit was a great brain teaser, giving us a set of building blocks along with a cookbook and the MAKE magazines to show how makers use available material to turn their dreams into reality.  The engineering notebooks brought back memories, good and bad, of our college engineering classes and our current jobs — excellent way, though, to remind participants to document both what you plan and what you do.

So far, this event has [re]opened our eyes to microcontroller programming; prototyping; test fixtures; use cases; the many uses of sensors such as PIR, LDR, and ultrasonic to control servos; the physics of pulleys, soldering, metalworking, gluing, wooden puzzle making; design preparation/presentation; marketing to the Maker community; realistic scheduling for a volunteer project and the esprit de corps of the Maker community in general as showcased in the panels/online hangouts.

We plan to continue working with the MAKE ultimate Arduino kit after this event, figuring out how to use the shields with Arduino in order to control more servos, motors and other gears for a much larger art project.

That said, the recent natural disaster in the Philippines has challenged us to rethink the direction of our next project — should our efforts be more effective if we turned our attention to a more humanitarian effort than abstract art?

Again, we thank you for encouraging us to add experience to knowledge and make something no matter how [im]practical.

We look forward to your synopsis of the types of projects that the dozens of Robot Hacks teams wrote you about.

Regards,
Team Tree Trunk
Sent from my iPad