The Road to DefCon 22

It’s that special time of year again (already!?). Summer is swiftly coming to a close and I’m stupid busy planning for that infamous weekend of mayhem known as DefCon. This conference is a good opportunity to learn something new while also bringing your own flavor to the stew. Here are a few ways I’m getting involved (and you can too!) :

The Darknet Project

Last year Jeff’s friend, Smitty, started a new type of competition called the Darknet Project, loosely based on the novel, Daemon. This event is a live RPG meant to lead you around the convention following clues, learning new skills in order to solve puzzles and ultimately progressing a quest line. Due to chance, he recruited me to develop his brand and make a bunch of spiffy propaganda to help promote the project. Long story short, the contest is going to span more this year and we had a larger budget for visual stuffs.

So far I’ve revamped the site… rebuilt the logo… and have prepared flyers, stickers and shirts for the occasion! The tangible forms of the digital images are looking sharp so far. I’m also relieved all of this is done well ahead of time.

If you didn’t know about the contest last year, I strongly encourage you to check it out. There will be a kit to assemble in the Hardware Hacking Village that will yield a spiffy badge which will allow communication with other Darknet participants. There will also be a ton of other stuff to get involved with… so much that I shouldn’t attempt to scratch at the details of its scope.

My Own Personal Disruptions

With Smitty now running Darknet, Jeff picked up the torch last year and took charge of DefCon’s more classic contest, Crash and Compile. In addition to designing visuals for him, I was asked to be a part of the team whose role during the contest is to “distract” the competitors who are drinking… and simultaneously attempting to write code. As a means to do this effectively, I wore the “strap-on” Mark and I developed for our art project, Lick. It’s basically a fat piece of tubing attached to a thick belt that has a lollypop poking out of a gem encrusted 3D printed mushroom… which rotates on a stepper motor :

I prompted competitors to lick the lollypop… and towards the end of the contest when they were good and drunk, some actually did. =]

This year I have to do something different of course, but how on earth do I one-up a flashy licking apparatus such as this? Well, I have an idea worked out that’ll do the trick… which I’ll reveal a build log for closer to the event. ::evil snicker:: It has to do with voices and ponies.

Propagandameister

I updated the logo for the Crash and Compile pint glasses again =] Jeff went ahead and got pilsner glasses this year for a change of pace. I think they look sharp! Everyone competing (or distracting) will get one of these :

Our Name Badges

Last year I created name badges of working artistic circuitry for our immediate group. I drew the designs by hand and added SMT pads in Eagle, then etched them at home :

This year Mark and I had our badge designs professionally fabricated with OSH Park. I can’t wait to document them… Pictures of the finished product will come in my next post (the unfinished boards alone look fabulous but they’re a secret for now)!

Robot Army @ Defcon

One of my biggest frustrations all summer has been in keeping our army of robots on the back burner. The project is still in a fetus stage of development due to the fact that most of our time has been spent in the fulfillment of our Kickstarter. Never-the-less, I’m trigger happy about showing the damned things off…

As such… Mark and I will have a presence at DefCon this year on Friday night, which in the end, I’m quite excited about. The prospect of setting up and babysitting the display until 2am is sort of daunting, but having a chance to maraud around in a space all our own in an environment where anything goes is quite enticing.

At some point next month, Mark and I are shipping our little disassembled babies out into the world. We can’t wait to get feedback from our supporters, not to mention seeing what cool stuff people do with our design. By September we can return to our effort of completing the collective. From then on… it’s all about preparation for the next big thing (100+ robots strong).

We’re at no loss of crazy stuff to prepare for in the next week. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and some of the new ones we made at Maker Faire this spring. Conventions are just an excuse to travel and drink, right? Cheers to that! See you all in a week!

Robot Army : Brains!

Ok, I feel warm and fluffy right now… in a nostalgic sense. Our brain boards just came in the mail this morning from OSH Park. This was one of the last big checklist items that we were waiting on. The box contained over 300 little hexagons and deceptively weighed more than I was expecting. As I opened it and laid the sheets of royal purple and gold across the table I relived the memory of sitting at SYN Shop sometime last summer when I drew this :

This was the first brain sketch. It would be the fourth board I ever designed in Eagle, and the very first I would ever send away to have professionally fabricated :

Since then Mark, with all of his engineering prowess, has taken over the task and made an even better brain for the deltas. It’s taken us five revisions to get it just right…

Along the way during fulfillment of our Kickstarter, we’ve made friends with the awesome people who fabricate our boards. The gang at OSH Park are makers like us fueled with geek-genius. They offer a service that goes above and beyond what any other like theirs has ever been willing to do. They’ve simply figured it out, and as a result produce excellent boards with the quickest turn around time available to hobbyists like Mark and I. This is important because their having created a faster more affordable service is ultimately enabling us to do what otherwise would have been too expensive a decade ago (Mark tells me that five revisions would have been upward of 500 dollars in the not-so-distant past).

Working with other businesses established by fellow makers is resulting in an amalgamation of awesome. With the power of these new resources combined, everyone can become a little factory, no longer at the mercy of the big and scary prospect of handling production overseas alone.

I’m so very excited and pleased to show off these works of art. So much has gone into them and even more will come out once we get this project to its lofty apex. =]

 

Robot Army : Production Mode + Lime Light

Mark and I are FACTORY

Now that the hype and excitement of Maker Faire has passed, we’ve buckled down and gone headlong into Fulfillment mode. Last week we started bagging things, like steel balls and hardware :

The acrylic base pieces are in a cue to be fabricated, and our Rev. E brain boards will be sent in sometime this week once we verify that these- yes THESE are the final rendition to be included in the kit. Our friend Andrew from SYN Shop is also helping us mass produce our parts on his fleet of 3D printers.

The production of the robot parts is what will potentially push shipment back the most. Luckily though, Andrew also taught us how to make use of our second extruder so that we can print the same amount of parts in half the time. Since we’re getting twice as many parts in a day as we were before, we might just make up some time!

Oh yeah, 930 servos… O_O

Making 250 kits ourselves isn’t too much stress. We can handle doing mostly everything on our own and as a result have complete control over the whole process to assure quality. (behold Mark’s adorable kitting notes) :

Sadly though since we’re going to be busy putting stuff together, we won’t have much time to build any more of our own robots or work on development of our installation for a bit. The kids will have to hold tight just a little longer before we get them doing the cool stuff they were meant to do. Hopefully seeing us ship their siblings away in boxes doesn’t traumatize them too much.

In some less than spectacular news, it looks like we more than likely won’t be showing Light Play off at DefCon this year. This might just be a blessing in disguise, so I’m not too poopie-faced about it. On the bright side, we think we’ll be making another Silicon Valley pilgrimage with the deltas in November for “Hackers”, which is supposed to be a weekend-long retreat in the hills where a small amount of tech-savvy avant-garde meet for a con that has the show-and-tell aspects of Maker Faire with the mystique of DefCon. Mark and his friend Tsutomu have gone many times. They both say I’ll love it, so hopefully it works out that I’m able to make this year my first. I’m dying to discover the elite maker-innovator mecca…!

Down Town Podcast

So it’s been a couple of months since the kickstarter ended and we’re starting to get a little bit of press at last! Upon returning from Maker Faire, Mark and I were featured on the Downtown Podcast which showcases local hardware startups and other cool things going on in Las Vegas. We had a blast joking around with a beer in hand on camera. Our interview turned our pretty good. I’m happy to say we’re getting the swing of explaining our project on the fly! This appearance also lead to another write-up the following week…

#VegasTech

#VegasTech wrote probably the most detailed, organized, and properly cited article anyone has done about our project yet : Robot Army. I’m happy to know that they’ll also be doing a writeup on SYN Shop too in the near future! Our Hackerspace needs the push right now!

Robot Army : Family Photos

While waiting for parts and components to funnel our way, Mark and I got around to taking some promotional photos of our brood. We have these 30 cool robots and soon enough we hope to start displaying them around town. Getting the word out about them is a must, and nothing conveys the idea of a dancing field of light wielding minions better than long exposure shots like these!

I can’t wait until all 200 of them are built and dancing. ^.^

To see the whole album visit here : Long Exposure Shoot

Maybe we’ll try getting them to spell out words… =o

Robot Army : Maker Faire

Mark and I rolled into Vegas yesterday right before the sun started to bow out of the sky. We stopped at Chipotle and picked up some over-stuffed puppy bags to push into our faces with beer upon finally returning to the house we left in pieces a week earlier. It felt like we had survived the apocalypse. After that ice-cold Carona we untethered everything from the clump in the back of Mark’s Kia and began dragging things into the house where they belonged. Once all three pallets of robots made it onto the table we both collapsed on the couch and giggled in delirious exhaustion.

Maker Faire was exactly like it was last year; bursting with stimuli. The visuals were nonstop, even being trapped in our booth the whole time… which was right next to the bleeding stage Arc Attack performs on. I don’t care for tesla coils. They’re cool, but I don’t trust the continuity of physics enough to be so close to man-made lightning. I even told the Arc Attack guy that, not realizing he was the Arc Attack guy. Oops. In any case… none of our kids got zapped. The show didn’t interfere with our installation. I didn’t die. So I guess I’m over my phobia. Heh.

The faire in itself was grueling. It had all of the monotony of booth duty at a trade show compounded with the claustrophobic *loud* nature of a rock concert. We had to invest in hearing protection just to get through the hourly performances, which was really just an excuse to buy cool yellow and grey Ryobi earphones. These came in handy for sneaking a sample of what people were whispering to one another around our booth. The headphones canceled out loud sound yet amplified near-by speech with the tiny microphones mounted on their front; great for ease dropping.

I’m ecstatic to report that setup went smoothly and we had no major failures. I had to get over the idea of other people controlling my babies… and again like at the Mini Maker Faire in Vegas, the small children couldn’t help from waving their hands around like seizuring addicts to see the robots whip around at neck-braking speed. In spite of all the jarring back and forth, they held up just fine, and by the second day I stopped being an obsessive mother and finally just let go.

Make posted a nice little article about the installation on their main page right before the show… I even got interviewed real quick by one of their editors which resulted in a video. Sweet!

After the lights turned back on at the end of the day we got to mingle with the other makers at the show. Mark and I met fellow inventors as well as some people who we’ve been in contact with through email since the launch of our Kickstarter. We finally got to hob-knob with the OSH Park crew, who we exchanged swag with and were promoting like hell in our booth for all the fantastic work they’ve done fabricating our boards. I saw some people I met from last year’s “bring a hack” dinner who were exhibiting with a laser shooting gallery. I also met a fellow kinetic artist whose area of interest is in drawing machines, the like of which I’ve been fascinated with since my early days in tech. I found a video this morning featuring Dan and his super sharp “Makelangelo” here :

All and all this was an amazing experience. We learned a lot and will likely change the format of our presentation as a result. The army will keep growing and the installation will naturally evolve over time.

Mark and I agreed not to set foot inside the war room until Monday… maybe even Tuesday… so until then I think I’m going to indulge in some frivolous Team Fortress 2. For those who we met this weekend, it was a pleasure making all these awesome memories with you. I hope to see you all soon enough (maybe at Defcon).

Robot Army : All Systems GO!

Ok, ok… I’m done lamenting about the late nights. They work… I’m happy. Time for a beer and some heavy hype building. Share this with your friends and stop by our booth at Maker Faire if you plan to be there. =] Robot Army FTW

Robot Army : Less Than a Week Away

So the video above condenses a whole weekends worth of work into ten minutes. In the beginning we don’t have anything flashed or calibrated… and the arms aren’t even installed yet on the newer robots. By Sunday night all three pallets worth are working in sync and are ready to be fine tuned.

As it’s Monday, I’m straightening out kinks now so that we have as smooth a time as possible once we arrive in San Mateo. Mark is required to work at Blue Man all week up until we leave, so he had to grind out the majority of the code/networking related stuff over the past three days so it’d all be done by now.

We’re still flashing them with tweaks to the delta math which effect their range of motion… still working on a solution for the LED cables being a hair too short… still trying to get answers from MAKE in regard to our booth. Time for a bloody Marry. I wonder if I can put a taco in my bloody…. like eight layer dip but with vodka drizzled on top then sucked through a straw. Why does that sound appealing?… my god.

I’m not quite sure how so much got pushed back to the end like this. At any rate… WE’RE SHOWING OFF STUFF AT MAKER FAIRE! WOOOOOOO!!!! I totally never expected to be doing all this so soon. This past year has yielded a ton of experience. =] I remember walking past this massive white colonnade in the lobby of an abandoned building every morning when I lived in Chicago, imagining my installation of dancing light flowers inhabiting the space. That was back in 2011!!! Through all distractions and detours, I am finally getting to show off this idea. ❤ ❤ ❤ The army of dancing lights is sitting next to me as I type and all the stress and work is completely worth it!

Here’s our KS update from last week BTW :

Like our Facebook page too!

Elemental Mood Lighting : The Moving Bits

First I have to show off how nicely the prints turned out! Some of these larger pieces were printed over night for nine-hour periods and were completed without fail (which is surprising). In the morning there would be a loaf of stone sitting on the printer bed :

Mark is responsible for creating these seamless linear designs on the face of the stones :

We ran out of natural filament by the time we got to the ‘wind’ stone, so it’s in a silver/gray color instead. This one was printed last because unlike the other three stones, its design is on the upper portion which overlaps the wedge pieces that pop out. It called for a little more fuss and planning when designed :

Over all, I’m extremely pleased with how they look so far. I can’t wait to paint them though….!

I spent most of this past weekend getting the mechanical parts in working order. For this project, that’s actuating those three wedge slices on each face of the stone to slide out when ‘activated’ :

I’ve had some tiny servo motors lying around from a couple of summers ago when I first started making delta robots… this is the perfect chance to finally use them. They fit nicely in the center of each column.

The LEDs also needed to be mounted somewhere on the top. The only realistic place to put them was in between the wedge pieces in the three corners. Luckily for Mark and I, we have a million little RGB LED boards for our Kickstarter kit (which we’re also working on fulfilling right now), so we were able to repurpose a few of those conveniently size squares. The mounting plate I design ended up looking like a very odd throwing star once it was printed :

Alas, their design has two functions: to hold the LEDs, and to funnel the three push rods through the center to the motor, keeping them nicely aligned.

The servo bracket attaches to this LED throwing star piece like so :

And the whole ‘core’ drops down the center of the stone through the top, resting on the foam core inside :

This design is nice because all of the wires for the LEDs and motor fall straight down to the bottom plate of the stone, where one of our brain boards will be running the whole show (We also have a few prototypes of this board from our KS kit hanging around, and since they use the ATMegas 328 and already have designated servo and LED headers, they’re perfect for this job) :

We have it rigged up so that when you hit a button, the stone opens and the LEDs slowly turn on. We also need to get all of the motors calibrated so that the wedges come out to the correct spot on cue and then suck back in all the way when deactivated.

The next step is to replace the button with some sensor input! Mark will likely work on perfecting that part while I texture and paint the outside of the stones. =]

 

Fifth Element Stone Mood Lighting

Now that we’ve ordered all of our bits, pieces, nics, knacks, and parts for Maker Faire… Mark and I are left with a brief lull while we wait for things to show up. Instead of relaxing, we decided to do a ‘weekend’ project to fill the time.  The Sci-fi contest Hackaday is holding right now seemed like the perfect thing to overt our attention to, yet keep us sharp and in our maker headspace. As such… we’ve chosen to make a sic-fi themed prop from my personal favorite sci-fi, The Fifth Element.

This same article can be found on my hackaday.io page for this project here : The Earth Stone

First of all, if you haven’t seen The Fifth Element, all you need to know is that we’re making replicas of these fancy things below which will operate with mechanical and electrical parts instead of spooky earth magic like in the movie =]

Mark and I decided that regardless of what the outer facade was made of, the inside of our stones needed to have a solid but light core which would give them structure and keep a consistent size throughout the four. Foam core will do the trick for this. As such, we modeled the shapes in their final dimensions in CAD and then worked our way inward to determine the measurements for the core.

The foam core bases were kept as one whole piece, scored in the areas where it needed to fold in on itself. Easy enough :

I must note that initially we were going to glue floral foam to the outside of these, carve the markings into them, plaster the surface, and then paint them to look like stone, but lets face it…… we have a 3D printer.

Mark modeled the facade of the stones in CAD. We decided for the sake of printing in safe bursts (in case of fail), it would be smart to break the model into many ring shaped pieces which would stack onto one another. The lower green section is actually six separate smaller pieces :

So far today we were able to complete the ‘Earth’ stone… because it has straight lines carved into it instead of wavy ones and is thus the easiest one to recreate. Mark and I printed six rings for the carved bottom half, and two slightly thicker rings for the solid upper half :

It took the whole day to print all these pieces… but once they were done, I jammed them rather violently onto the foam core centerpiece (tight fit) :

Each ring sits on a small groove/lip of the piece below it, so they lock together like puzzle pieces. The added pressure of the foam core forcing outward keeps them all firmly in place. The final structure is solid and extremely light weight :

Aside from the design on the outside of the stones, we needed to plan for the moving parts at the top. The upper portion has 15mm wide slots in the center of each face. These are the parts that “open” at the end of the movie when the stones activate. We modeled three triangular slices that swing out on some wire as hinges :

These metal wire bits slide into slots Mark made in the wall of the main piece :

The wedges fit in place like so :

These pieces will actuate via servo and wire pushrod. I plan to start on the servo and LED mount tomorrow while the pieces for the next stone are printing :

So yeah… this is our Earth stone so far. Like I said, technical part comes next… and I’ll post an update as soon as I get this one activating and glowing all pretty-like. =]

I think we’re doing ‘water’ next btw. Stay tuned.

So, I won a tablet…

Two weeks ago Mark and I attended the Atmel Tech on Tour seminar. This was my first time going to one of their events like this, so I didn’t know what to expect. The exercises brought back memories of being in my first electronics class in college, which also happened to be a grad level course I had no business being enrolled in. It felt sort of like I was drowning the whole time, but Mark was there to fish me out of any confusion I had while trying to navigate their massive programming platform.

At some point before the lunch break our teacher… ugh…. person giving the talk (who thought I was Mark’s ‘secretary’), informed us that Atmel was holding a sweepstakes for a Galaxy tablet which you could enter by submitting a selfie taken with the Atmel trailer in the background. Sweet! I may not be able to program very well, but I can take a picture with my phone just fine. =X

It was a windy day. The gusts sounded (and felt) as though they were going to send the little classroom trailer rolling through the parking lot. Mark and I did the best we could to take an interesting photo in such conditions. Long story short… I got an email today informing me that the dorky picture above won their contest… which is pretty nice!

I won this (and I honestly don’t know anything about Galaxy tablets, but hey… as I don’t own an iPad, this might be a nice tool) :

Thanks Atmel for all the robot brains we’ll be ordering in the near future… and the tablet! ❤