Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time
by
Steven Osborn
Published 17 Sep 2013
And there are groups all over the country. If you’re in a college 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 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. In most places, you go to a meeting and people will be presenting the cool things that they did.
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So I priced it out and saw that we could order a panel from Advanced Circuits3 with a three-day turn around, and get them back in a week. So that’s 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 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 purple came about and I was like, “This is great because I can go through Flickr and I can see which boards people made that were made through my service.”
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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, the art means just that: that it doesn’t have to go into production. If you build just one, that’s enough. You’ve finished your art piece. Osborn: It doesn’t really need a reason to exist or solve a problem, it just is. Cunningham:That’s right. I have a lot of parts 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, turn it on, and tell a story?”
Avogadro Corp
by
William Hertling
Published 9 Apr 2014
When governments tried to enforce wi-fi dead zones around their borders, Avogadro responded by incorporating satellite modems in the Mesh boxes, so that any box, anywhere on Earth, can access Avogadro satellites when all else fails. Between Mesh boxes and Wikileaks, it's impossible for governments to restrict the flow of information. Transparency rules the 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 communications. Cheap, simple, redundant, no dependency on centralization. I couldn't help myself." "Yeah, well, have fun in history. Maybe you can give your history class a lecture on Creative Commons."
Bad Science
by
Ben Goldacre
Published 1 Jan 2008
It has been covered in praise by The Times, the Daily Mail and ITV’s London Today, and it’s easy to see why: it looks a bit like a digital memory card for a camera, with eight contact pads on the circuit board on the front, a 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 nation’s more childish electronics geeks examined the QLink. We chucked probes at it, and tried to detect any’frequencies’ emitted, but no luck. Then we did what any dork does when presented with an interesting device: we broke it open.