Metal Mind

[metalmindcircuits-blog]

Make: Beta Team

Katie has been accepted to the Make Beta Team! This means you'll be seeing us blogging here about the prebuilds she'll be doing for Make Magazine! And that we'll be heading to the Maker Faire in NYC this September! Yeah! Let us know if you'll be there and we'll be on the look out for you.

squee!

[metalmindcircuits-blog]

Red Mountain Makers

The Red Mountain Makers are still going strong. At our last project meet up we built BEAM bots. We salvaged some motors from old VHS players.

Beers and bots.

At our next meeting we're building potato guns, so obviously this is exciting.

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We managed to track a little bit of the Transit of Venus yesterday, even though it was pretty cloudy.

The next one will happen in 2117. Seeing the image of the sun and the tiny black dot in the right corner finally come into focus was way more exciting than anyone was expecting (though you can't see it in the photo due to my crummy camera).

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Treasury: Transit of Venus Viewing Party

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Transit of Venus

-from Katie

Seeing how the first projects I've posted have been astronomically-minded, it may be no surprise how excited I am about the Transit of Venus coming up on June 5th (6th if you live in the Eastern Hemisphere).

Edmund Halley first discovered that the transits of Venus could be used to measure the Sun's distance from Earth, and therefore the size of the solar system. Although it turned out that atmospheric diffraction made absolute accuracy impossible.

I first learned about the Transit of Venus through Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon, a post-modern, surrealist (almost fanfiction-esque you might say) account of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon's work as astronomers in the middle 18th century. I even wrote a seminar paper about the male gaze and projection and refraction in the novel as a junior in college! (As a side note, before I was a tinkerer, I was an unremittant book nerd).

The next pair of Venus transits will occur over a century from now on December 11th, 2117 Dec 11 and 8 years after that, on Dec 8th, 2125.

To commemorate the last transit of our lifetimes, I'm working on some keepsakes to memorializes the event. I'll be selling them at the next Btree Flea event, and later they'll be up at the Shop!

Transitofvenus.org has lots of info on how to watch the transit safely, and ways to record it with telescope mounted cameras and rear projection devices.

[metalmindcircuits-blog]

Birmingham's First Hackerspace

Since the end of March, we've been part of a group working on starting a hacker/makerspace in Birmingham. We had our second project meeting on Tuesday. One of our members, JD, taught us some Arduino basics. If you're interested in joining us for a meeting, check out our Meetup group. If you don't know what a hackerspace is, learn about them at Hackerspaces.org

More pictures of the meeting below the cut:

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Treasury: Spring Shapes

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Blueprint for Summer

1. River Swim

2. Sober up with Pizza

3. Go home and make stuffed animals while watching Empire Strikes Back (these little guys are for the shop so that counts as work, right?)

Also, we just got a Flickr account set up, so check it out

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Seth got this old Tektronix oscilloscope working. The display is awesome, if not very sensitive. We hooked up the sequencer he built a couple of weeks ago and it couldn't read too much from it. Still, really cool looking.

[metalmindcircuits-blog]

New Etsy Shop

Metal Mind has opened up an Etsy Shop:

Metal Mind Circuits

(Lepus the Rabbit)

Our first line is a series of hand embroidered constellations by Katie. They feature white LED's as stars, are equipped with an on-off switch and run on a 2032 coin cell battery

The project was a great exploration into astronomy and mythology, and one of the first times I've worked with circuits and fabrics together. My orignal idea was to use conductive thread, but since I wasn't utilizing that thread within the embroidery design, it was loosely tied between the leds, the battery, and the switch. In a situation like that (swinging thread with electricity flowing through them) a short is basically inevitable. So I ended up just soldering wire directly to each component.

[metalmindcircuits-blog]

Lucky Man Presents

This past Wendesday, Seth packed up his circuit bent instruments and demonstrated them at Lucky Man Presents, a new variety-show-esque-artist-highlight-thing in town. Our friend MackONE performed too, along with I Feel Capital, and Kevin Lehner

(bleep bleep bloop bloop.)

(demonstrating how to make your voice sound like the Dalek)

(Seth and David laughing at rude electronic noises)

The show was rad, I drank a lot of good beer in a new bar, and it was a pretty cool way to find out about new projects going on in Birmingham.

The interview/performance should be up soon on the Website