Ashley is taking over a print shop with a rich heritage as well as several beautiful presses, a Linotype machine and dozens of wood and metal typefaces.  She plans on doing custom work as well as running classes and building up a community around the lovely art of printmaking.

Bay View Printing Company is in the final days of its fundraising drive on IndieGogo to raise money to pay for some renovations to the space to make it more amenable to Ashely’s goal of making this a community-driven space.  The IndieGogo campaign has some great rewards like private lessons on the Vandercook press.  I’m so thrilled this is coming to Bay View that I have challenged Makerspace members to donate and will match up to $500 in donations!

Bay View is extremely lucky to have a new creative space!  If you want to support them, hurry up, though!  The IndieGogo campaign ends at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, 2014.  As of this writing, they have raised $7,635 out of the desired $11,000.  Let’s help them out and welcome our exciting new neighbor!

Read a bit more about the space at these local outlets:

• Journal Sentinel: New owner keeps ‘letterpress’ alive at century-old Wisconsin print shop
• Bay View Compass: Artist acquires vintage print shop

I started by building a shelf to hold the photo booth (and double for an extra shelf in the garage for the other 364 days of the year).  On the shelf, I set up an HDMI monitor, driven by my laptop and a logitech webcam for the camera.  The electronics were simple: I had an orange sanwa arcade button attached to an arduino to trigger the photo to be taken and another Arduino connected to a thermal printer from Adafruit to print out a link to the photo.  On the computer, i had a Processing sketch to drive the display, perform the countdown when the button was pressed and send the filename to the printer.  I also ran a little python app that pushed the images to Google Cloud Storage.  An AppEngine app displayed the photos.  I was in a bit of a rush to finish Saturday as I spent half the afternoon at Fantasticon and in my haste I forgot to add page navigation links to the front page.  Oops!  Ah well.  I had the site updated after i tore everything down for the night.  I had one trick or treater ask me if I had “like a Raspberry Pi in there or something” and I said, “Nope, but i have a couple of Arduinos!”.  “Cool”.  Cool, indeed.

None of the individual pieces of the project were very difficult and it all came together pretty nicely.  The most gratifying part of the night was hearing from people that they had heard from other people to come over and get their photos taken.  Word spreads quickly in Bay View!  I’ll be posting all the code to a github repo shortly and I’ll update this post with the link when I’ve done that.

For next year, I plan on making a couple of changes.  First, I want to have a nicer enclosure for the photo booth and something more permanent to mount the button and printer in than the white cardboard box i cut holes in with an X-ACTO knife.  The second thing I want to do is make some interchangeable front pieces for the booth.  I could use this for lots of events and it would be great to be able to bolt on something that was more thematically appropriate than a painter’s drop cloth with holes cut in it and secured by shiny duct tape!  Ah well, it got the job done and after a while it was dark enough that no one could see my shoddy craftsmanship!  That brings me to my final change for next year: lighting. I had one 250W light ready for when it got dark and it basically sucked.  To everyone who showed up in awesome costumes once it was dark: I’m sorry.  I’ll have better lights next year so everyone can get a great looking photo, even if you don’t come out before the sun goes down!

Here are a few of my favorite photos from the booth.  I hope everyone who stopped by had a good time and enjoyed your photo!  I’ll see you again next year!  In the mantime, head over to Bay View Boo! to browse all the photos from the evening!

(photo by Mike Massie)

The Ridiculously Large Jacks made another appearance at this year’s Great Milwaukee Race!  Members Jason Hillesheim and Mike Massie helped me run 64 games of jacks with teams from the race and a couple of families that stopped by to see what the hubbub was all about!

The Great Milwaukee Race is an annual scavenger hunt race that sends teams of 2-4 sprinting across downtown Milwaukee after decoding clues to various locations where they will be asked to do various challenges.  Some stations had teams exercising, putting together an outfit from thrift store clothes, making funny poses, rock climbing or playing games of giant jacks!  The Makerspace has been a proud sponsor and participant every year.

This year we were at a super location – in front of “The Calling”, Mark di Suvero’s sculpture near the Milwaukee Art Museum.  As you can see from the photo above, “The Calling” looks like a giant jack, so we were particularly pleased!

Well, we used to have that problem, anyway.

I spent some time today with the lovely (if a bit limited) Cosm api. You may know Cosm by its former name, Pachube. I wrote a simple python script to parse out interesting, anonymous data from our access server logs and send it up to Cosm as a new feed, called Milwaukee Makerspace Access Control System with four data streams:

• Number of Unique Makers Accessing the space in a day
• Number of Unique Makers Accessing the space in an hour
• Total number of badge-ins per day
• Number of Access Denied messages per day

Cosm made it easy to graph the data and to send up new data points, but is limited to a gauge-style timeseries.  I can’t submit raw data events and use Cosm to aggregate them up by date or hour, so i had to do that in my local python code.  Their REST API is very simple, clean and well documented, though, which makes up for the limitations a bit.  They provide a graph-builder, but i didn’t like the way the graphs looked so i pulled the JSON data in and used the Google Chart Tools to produce some pretty graphs like this one:

Screenshot of the Access Control System Stats.

The stats are updated from our access control system every hour and are publicly available at http://mkemakerspace.appspot.com/access-control-stats/

We’re looking at doing some more fun stuff with the logs from the access control system at the space, like displaying the names of the members who have most recently badged in, making sounds when someone badges in or a key is denied.  I’m sure whatever we come up with will be noisy and large.

With the fiscal sponsorship provided by the Space Federation, we will be able to accept tax-deductible donations of equipment and funds from individuals and corporations. We have already been approached by several companies and individuals about helping out the space and the new setup will help us do more for the community in Milwaukee. More importantly, a non-profit structure has always felt right for the space. We collect dues so we can provide an awesome space for the makers in our community. All of our officers and members volunteer their time to make the Makerspace great and no one profits from the space directly – if you discount inspiration and collaboration, that is. The new structure formalizes one of our guiding principles in a way that will hopefully help us do more for our makers and Milwaukee itself.

The discussion to become a non-profit has been an active one throughout our history. Joining up with the Federation gives us experienced folks to work with and a bit less work on our side. We’re excited by the opportunities for the space and the community the Space Federation provides … and we’re in good company! Many of our favorite spaces around the midwest and the country are already members of the federation and we’re excited to start working a bit more closely with them. It’s also nice to work with more local folks – the Federation is based here in Milwaukee.

Things are still getting set up, but if you are interested in working with us in our new capacity, please get in touch with our board!

Even though we aren’t open yet, we’d like to share a couple shots of the space in progress. New Friend of the Space, Rodney, took a few excellent shots of the progress being made a few days ago. Thanks for helping out and thanks for the great shots, Rodney! We’ll have some more shots of things cleaned up a bit more shortly.

As much as we like photos, we are really anxious to open up our doors to Milwaukee again. Hopefully we’ll see you around the new space soon!

We haven’t found a home for all this stuff from Chase yet.

This is where our car area and the machine shop will be.

This is where the bulk of the machine shop will be.

Tardis and BVGN Egg from Pete’s Eggbot by Brant

We rolled in with Matt N’s CNC router and a bunch of his foam architectural pieces, the Makerbot and a few dozen 3d printed samples and after a while had the Replicator fired up cranking out Tardis models (Tardii???). Those were accompanied by a robot from Matt W, some proximity switch-controlled LED strands from Brant, Pete’s Egg Bot and Laser Kaleidoscope and a bunch of Shane’s intricate boxes and laser cut images. Whew! We came with a full crew and more stuff than would fit on our tables. :) We also may have blown the power briefly, but it was an accident, we swear. Even if we did, the sun was still shining for quite a while after that incident.

The surprise hit of our table was the Fruit Synthesizer i put together at, umm, literally the last minute. I was still tweaking it 15 minutes into the event! I used a Makey Makey connected to 2 halves of a watermelon, 2 pickles, a horned melon, a pair of bananas, Max MSP and GarageBand to make a really goofy synthesizer. The Makey Makey is a great little board that operates as a USB keyboard and mouse and lets you alligator clip to any conductive material to make a weird ad-hoc controller. I had intended to have it trigger guitar sounds, but it was way more satisfying as a drum kit, so we kept it set up as a drumkit for most of the night. I loved seeing people jump when they touched the banana and loud bass drum boomed out at them. We had some people coming back several times and bringing more people over to play with the kit. We did a lot of demos where I would high-five someone already connected to the Makey Makey to trigger the drums and one of my favorite uses was the couple that kissed to trigger the instrument. This simple project really engaged people in a fun and quirky way. Not bad for a project i threw out on a lark! We all had so much fun with the Fruit Synth that i am positive it will be making a comeback at future events.

Fruit Synth with Tiny Banana Drumsticks

Aside from goofy fun, we had a couple hundred people rolled through over the course of the night and heard from a lot of people who were interested in the space and have heard about us. We’ve been really focused on getting the word out Makerspace and finding out that a lot of folks are hearing about and interested in Maker/Hackerspaces was really gratifying. We hope to see a lot of new faces at the space in the next couple of weeks!

We learned a few things, too. The first is that the interactive displays were a big hit. The second is that we should bring some stuff to sell next time! There were several families that wrote down “sparkfun” and “makey makey” and many kids who wanted to use a Makey Makey for a science fair project at school. We could have sold a half dozen of them if we had more than the one used for the Fruit Synth. The 3d prints were a hit, too, and we should probably have a bunch of Milwaukee-themed prints on hand to sell to folks for our next event.

Big thanks to Pete for organizing our presence at BVGN, the other artists that showed at the event and the folks at the new Bay View Alterra for hosting us all!

For a few more photos, check out the set Brant posted on Flickr.

This year, it doesn’t look like we’ll have a Frolics Parade, though. For the last few years, a corporate sponsor has footed the considerable bill for the parade. They are unable to do that again this year and the Bay View Lions Club is left without the funds for a parade.

David and I, along with several other Bay View neighbors have been working with the Lions Club to see if we can scramble to raise the funds for the parade. $13,000 is needed for the city and county alone to cover the permit, closed parking meters, re-routed buses, police officers and cleanup. Yow! I wasn’t aware that there was such a high starting bid for a parade. On top of that, many bands and groups require payment to travel and participate in the parade.

We quickly pulled together a website, voice mail and twitter account and a bunch of fliers to try to get the word out. David talked to every business from the White House to Hamburger Mary’s on KK last Saturday and had a lot of interest. We need to head back this weekend to see if we can secure any commitments from those businesses.

Members from the Milwaukee Makerspace have pledged $2,000 to kick things off, but we still have $20,000 to raise in almost no time. We’re giving it a week to follow up with Bay View businesses to see if we can arrange any commitments for funding.

If you love the Frolics Parade, ask your favorite Bay View Businesses if they are willing to help save the parade this year as you get a bite to eat, a cup of coffee, a haircut or a drink this week. If you have the means to make a significant donation yourself, please get in touch.

We’ve also thrown out a pretty cool incentive. For any group that donates $5,000, the Makerspace will build a float for you.

For donation and contact information for the parade, head over to the Save the Frolics Parade website at http://www.bayview-frolics-parade.com/.

On Friday April 20th, 2012, several members of the Milwaukee Makerspace participated in the Spring Gallery Night event hosted at BucketWorks and put on in collaboration with ArtWorks for Milwaukee.  Several hundred people came through the space to check out works from both groups.  ArtWorks also had a nice write-up of the night from their point of view. We love getting our crazy work out in front of people.

So, gentle Reader, I present to you an inventory of our Makers and Their Works:

• Kevin Bastyr
  • The Mahoganator – A noise box encased in a lovely Mahogany shell.
  • The Cacophonator – A noise box encased in a lovely welded metal shell.
  • Cast bronze tree-trunk table.
  • Angle grinder table from the One Tool Competition.
• Adam Cohen
  • Functional MagneTag prototype! Gallery night patrons were invited to run through the space playing MagneTag.
• Jason Gessner
  • Step – A step sequencer controlled by a Dance Dance Revolution Controller, Processing and Logic Pro.
• Matt Neesley
  • CNC Architectural Relief Sculptures.
• Pete Prodoehl
  • The Arc-O-Matic! A one-armed, 2 servo-enabled drawing robot.
  • Wooden Knuckles and Wooden Nickels.
  • Other crafty 3D printed replacement parts and creations.
• Vishal Rana
  • Laser Harp and Propane Tank Drum
• Shane Thielen
  • The Eye Wooden Block Sculpture
  • Laser Printed Periodic Table of the Elements.

Check out Pete’s Time Lapse Bot footage of the event. I’m seen messing around with my laptop a lot until I settled on a sound set I liked for the Step.

In addition, the folks from the newly-forming Spring City Launchpad makerspace in Waukesha were there to get the word out.

And if that wasn’t enough, Jason H. had 2 of Pete’s Drawbots collaborating at the Art Milwaukee Wedding after party!

Big thanks to Tim @ Bucketworks and the folks at ArtWorks for sharing the space with us and inviting us to the festivities!

More photos of the night shot by Brant are available on Flickr.