Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time
by Steven Osborn · 17 Sep 2013 · 310pp · 34,482 words
.org/∼phk 4 http://creativecommons.org 5 A gerber is a common file format for describing layers of a PCB (printed circuit board). 6 http://dorkbot.org 7 AVC – Autonomous Vehicle Competition, avc.sparkfun.com 8 www.etsy.com 9 http://dangerousprototypes.com/ 10 A machine that picks up small components
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be seen all over the Web inside thousands of projects across the globe. Laen is heavily involved in his local maker community, specifically the local Dorkbot group (dorkbotpdx.org), where he helps out in numerous ways. I learned to design circuit boards using Eagle CAD at a local workshop that Laen
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how that started. Osborn: It was really a need to scratch your own itch, or solve a problem for your buddies and makers in this Dorkbot group. So the next question is: Why purple? Laen: That was just sort of a lucky accident. I had just switched providers. This one had
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a lot more options than green. Then someone brought to Dorkbot a development board from Nuvoton,4 a little arm board. It was this gorgeous purple color, and I was like, “I want that.” So the
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without that feature, I would be losing a lot of money and time. Laen: Not when this was the OSH Park PCB Order, but the Dorkbot PCB Order, people would just e-mail me their files and put it on the panel, and it would come back a couple of weeks
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learn from failure, but in order to learn that, you’re going to need some confidence early on. It’s tough. We have people in Dorkbot who come in and say, “Hey! I’ve got this idea for this cool thing I want to do. I want to hook this Dance
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town, then going to the electrical engineering department and seeing what’s posted on the bulletin board [will help you discover them]. Dorkbot is awesome, but I think that Dorkbot Portland is unique among them in that we have huge meetings every other Monday. Osborn: You mentioned Dorkbot13 several times. Can you
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talk about what it is and how you got involved in that? Laen: Dorkbot is people doing strange things with electricity. The idea is to join people doing art with electronics—artists and engineers—to make cool electronic art
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late because many teams underestimate the time it will take to deliver a product. 11 www.thingiverse.com 12 http://learn.adafruit.com 13 http://dorkbot.org CHAPTER 5 Zach Kaplan Founder and CEO Inventables Zach Kaplan found his passion over a decade ago somewhere at the intersection of design and
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his notable career as a computer programmer, Ward is a capable electrical engineer who enjoys building weekend projects at home to share with the local Dorkbot group in Portland, Oregon. Steven Osborn: So Ward, have you always had this natural curiosity for inventing things? Ward Cunningham: Yeah, absolutely. I tell people
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myself out because I’m doing it for fun. The other thing that really got me going was a get-together—a meet-up called Dorkbot—that meets in places around the world, including Portland. They love the making. They’re dedicated to electronics or technology meeting art. And to me
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and I would think about something I could do, and I would say, “If I built this on Sunday afternoon, could I take it to Dorkbot on Monday, and while we’re all sitting around and talking about different things we’re working on, could I put it on a table
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pretty soon you’ve got a storehouse of things to do. Osborn: Can you give me a couple examples of things you’ve brought to Dorkbot or that you built just for your own interests? Cunningham: Well, one thing that got me going was this professor teaching robotics years ago. He
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blue-sky days calculus color filter computer program continuous traffic/editors Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike creek sensor database DC power design patterns digital thermometer Dorkbot earth orbit electrical engineering electronics essay pattern giant gossip network glass furnace golf game Grievers high school high voltage hypothesis-driven mental process intuitive understanding
Avogadro Corp
by William Hertling · 9 Apr 2014 · 247pp · 71,698 words
day." "Exactly. Thank you, Leon, you can sit down. Class, let's talk about transparency and government." Leon slumped back to his desk. * * * "Nice going, dorkbot," James called after class. "What happened to not sticking out?" "Look, the mesh is just cool. It's the way nature would have evolved electronic
Bad Science
by Ben Goldacre · 1 Jan 2008 · 322pp · 107,576 words
hi-tech electronic component mounted in the centre, and a copper coil around the edge. Last summer I bought one and took it to Camp Dorkbot, an annual festival for dorks held—in a joke taken too far—at a scout camp outside Dorking. Here, in the sunshine, some of the