A New Semester in the Makerspace

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The new semester has started, and things seem to be happening at a furious pace.

As part of professional development days preceding the semester, we invited faculty and staff for a makerspace update, and facilitated a prototyping workshop, solving problems having to do with babies and robots.

Flex Workshop Prototyping

Our staff did some outreach to invite students to participate in our community.

Falcons_Day

Also on the community front, we participated (for the third time) in the third annual Georgetown School Family Tinker Night, an event coordinated by our sister lab at Georgetown School. We brought out a 3D bioprinter and a plotter, and the ever popular Nova (our space bunny mascot) fresnel lens family face distorters.

Nova Faces

Meanwhile, back in the lab…

The jars we inoculated with mushroom spawn earlier in the month are thriving, and we’ll be scaling that project up soon.

Mycelium!

The Science Fish have returned from the library, as we plan and implement whatever v2.0 of our aquaponics efforts will look like. Yes, those are the same three fish – Phoebe, Phinley, and Phreud – still with us after more than two years, and yes, the water cleared up quickly and it’s crystal clear now.

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As part of the CCC Maker grant, we’re able to pay interns to do makerspace-related projects, and some of them are working on a large-scale, interactive periodic table of the elements, to be installed in our large lecture hall. Here Max Mahoney (Chemistry) and Nicole (makerspace facilitator extraordinaire) review some prototypes.

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We’re looking forward to starting the semester with a Grand Opening next week, and to continuing to advance various efforts, including FermSci and biotinkering, some salon-type events in the planning stages, and a million other things I’m probably forgetting. Onward and upward.

Fermentation Science, SCOBY Leather, and Makerspace Brew

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As part of an effort to integrate biology and biohacking into our makerspace offerings, we’ve been working on a fermentation science initiative, which will hopefully lead to workshops, activities, courses, and certificates. Fermentation science sits at the intersection of a number of disciplines, including Biology, Chemistry, and Nutrition, and with the addition of Internet of Things technologies for monitoring and automation, dovetails nicely with our ongoing aquaponics and smart garden efforts.

We’ve started experimenting with kombucha, with the goal of exploring the kombucha SCOBY as a renewable and novel makerspace material, inspired by Scihouse’s SCOBY leather experiments.

We’ve been fostering some kombucha SCOBYs…

SCOBY!

and eventually grew one out in a small rectangular vessel. We knocked together an acrylic drying rack on the laser cutter, and set the SCOBY to dry.

SCOBY Drying

It’s a little rough, but it is after all a version 1 prototype.

It Rubs The Lotion On Its SCOBY

We’re planning to develop an incubation box so that we can manipulate temperature variables, and have talked about all kinds of basic science sorts of experiments to see how far we can take the material.  We’re also developing workshops around lactic acid fermentation, and have created some nice krauts and ferments over the past month, including this red cabbage. Lots of opportunities to science this up too, and to monitor, tweak, and manipulate variables.

Purple Cabbage Ferment

Our eventual goal is to stand up a brewing program that should integrate nicely with the college’s viticulture efforts. We’ve got some work to do to get that up on wheels, but we’re nibbling around the edges by, for instance, growing hops. We repurposed some scaffolding – most recently the art gallery for our Making Social Change laser cut stencil project – as a hops yard.

Hops Tower

Despite some ups and downs with the automatic watering, one of the plants is flowering! Pro tip: raw hops cones are incredibly bitter.

Hops, Flowering

Stay tuned for Innovation Center Makerspace MicroTechno Brew.

Innovation Center Brew

Aquaponics Milestone – Data Display

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We reached an important milestone in the project this afternoon. The power trio of Nathaniel, Rebekah, and Nathan – the core of FLC’s Data Science Club – got the Raspberry Pi installed and working to drive the integrated monitor, displaying a rolling presentation about the science – chiefly the nitrogen cycle – that makes the aquaponics system work.

Guts

As with most prototypes, the presentation needs a few tweaks, but it’s great to see all of the system components coming together.

Tweaking the Monitor Rotation

Nathan is working on the Arduino sensor array, and we’re still waiting to swap the science fish with the aquaponics fish, the latter in the quarantine holding tank in the Innovation Center.  The plan is to swap the green arcade button with a blue one, to match the colors in the presentation, and the button subsystem needs some attention, but overall the project is finally starting to feel like it might one day be finished!

Nathaniel, Rebekah and Nathan Contemplating Raspbian

Kathleen Drives the Robot

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Kathleen Kirklin (FLC’s Interim President) took the robot for a spin in the library other day.

Kathleen Kirklin Drives Robot

I also had the chance to share with Kathleen and Gary Hartely (Dean) progress on the aquaponics project. The plan is to have the screen display some rolling information about the biological and chemical processes in play, interspersed with footage from the live fishcam that will be inside the tank. Pressing the big green arcade button will bring up charts and graphs of the in-tank (temp, pH, electroconductivity) and out-of-tank (temp, humidity, and perhaps one or two others) sensor data.

Robot Observation

Lots to do, but within the next couple of weeks there should be some serious development work on all parts of the project…

Photos courtesy of Tony Humphreys.

The Fish Keepers

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Fantastic progress this week on the aquaponics project.  The Theater Arts department finished the display, and FLC Maintenance drilled the holes in the raised floor under the unit, pulled the power and Ethernet, and bolted the whole thing to the floor to make it topple-proof.  FLC’s Data Science club, spearheaded by Nathaniel Adams (student) and Rebekah Keeley (student) have taken responsibility for the technical implementation, including visual and interaction design, front- and back-end Web development, database work, and getting the Raspberry Pi configured and working with the Arduino, which is doing the data gathering.

Meanwhile Taylor Zenobia (student) and Katie Stackhouse (student) have taken charge of the biological systems, selecting the fish species, and arranging the in-tank decor.

Adding Water

They washed and added the sand, rocks, and plants, then carried the water quite a distance from the Innovation Center to the Library. We’ve got inoculated filter media from the Science Fish (they’re currently living in the IC), which should speed up the tank start-up process. Taylor has been regularly monitoring the water, and once the water chemistry is stable, we’ll look at adding the fish, a few at a time.

Updates: Aquaponics and Mosaic Tile Projects

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With the fall show winding down, Cameron and the Theater Arts crew are trying to get the aquaponics system wrapped up, and brought the near-finished display up to the library for a dry-fitting.

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I’m told they’ll have it buttoned up within a week, after which all the other work – getting the tank established, setting up and calibrating all the sensors, connecting all that to the network, figuring out the display and the giant “get tank vitals” arcade button – can continue in earnest.

We’re also close to getting the nine tiles for the first pane of the Carvey project finished, inspired by Jeff Solin’s Mosaic Tile project. Nathaniel and Rebekah of FLC’s Data Science Club carved up a version of their club logo to add to the other faculty and student tiles we’ve got so far.

Removing the carved tile.

The plan then is to mill (on the big ShopBot down in Theater Arts) a 3×3 tile “waffle” frame, with recessed wells for each of nine tiles. That will comprise the first of hopefully many such 9-tile collections, as additional faculty, staff and students create their own tiles, and all that work will be on display, either outside or inside of the Innovation Center.

Carvey Totoro

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Carving Done

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More Progress, Again on Two Fronts

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Old cabinets removed from the Innovation Center, which means that hopefully the flooring will be installed soon.

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Ian Wallace (Theater Arts) and his crew are making progress on the aquaponics system. Another day or so of work, and we’ll be able to start piecing together the electronics and other systems.

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Aquaponics Project Progress!

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After a rather lengthy pause in the project, owing mostly to institutional rhythms, Cameron Hoyt (formerly a student, now an employee of the college in the Theater Arts Department) and his crew began work on the structural skeleton of the aquaponics display.

Aquaponics Project

CNC + 3D Printing + Streaming Video

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Max and I spent some time in the shop this afternoon, brainstorming Chemistry activities that will make use of the new X-Carve and vinyl cutter, and working on the new Ultimaker 2 Extended+ that arrived the other day.  After some tweaking, we got the printer running, and decided to print this Dewalt DWP611 Thread-On Dust Shoe from Thingiverse (CC BY Noah Mackes).  Up until now, we’ve been using the X-Carve as a plotter, but Marisa Sayago (Professor, Art) and I have been talking about some printmaking ideas that involved cutting and engraving, hence the need for the dust shoe.

The printer reported that the job was going to take 17 hours, so Max and I decided to set up a webcam and do some R&D on Open Broadcaster Studio, which I have been considering using for the live fishcam that will be part of the aquaponics project.  We installed the software, plugged in the camera, put in the YouTube live streaming information, and it all worked perfectly right out of the gate.

Streaming Video of Ultimaker 2 Extended+ Printing Parts for an Inventables X-Carve

By the time I got home, the camera had slipped or been knocked sideways, but the print is still visible!

Open Broadcaster Streaming Ultimaker 2 Extended+ Printing a Dust Shoe for an X-Carve to YouTube Live

I’ve been working with technology for many years, but the idea that I can relatively easily monitor from home a 3D print job of a part I need and was able to download for a CNC machine that can be used to support (among other things) hands-on student activities in Chemistry and Art, while simultaneously testing a software program and a streaming service for another project that combines Library, Chemistry, Biology, Theater Arts, fish, and plants is, frankly, pretty neat.

I almost forgot – I made a Voronoi Totoro on the X-Carve (in plotter mode):

Voronoi Totoro