For the past few months, there’s been some behind-the-scenes planning to bring a Mini Maker Faire to Waterloo Region. For this to happen, O’Reilly needs to know there’s lots of interest in the area.

(From O’Reilly) Maker Faire is a gathering of fascinating, curious people who enjoy learning and who love sharing what they can do. It’s a venue for makers to show examples of their work and interact with others about it. Many makers say they have no other place to share what they do. DIY is often invisible in our communities, taking place in shops, garages and on kitchen tables. It’s typically out of the spotlight of traditional art or science or craft events. Maker Faire makes visible these projects and ideas that we don’t encounter every day.

To us, Maker Faire has been an awesome experience that takes place in many cities around the world. Kwartzlab has participated in the Detroit Maker Faire in 2010 and 2012, as well as taking the Toronto Mini Maker Faire by storm in 2011.

We’re looking for makers, hackers, tinkerers, artists, friends, parents, former roommates, and pretty much everyone else interested in seeing a Mini Maker Faire happen in Waterloo Region to fill out our Letter of Support form with a little information about yourself, and why you think it would be awesome to see a local Maker Faire happen in 2013. These messages will go to O’Reilly to be included as part of our application.

If you have a few minutes, please send a letter of support to help us get the ball rolling on what will be an epic addition to great local events in 2013. When do you, make sure to let @kwartzlab know on Twitter!

Again, the form is here: http://www.kwartzlab.ca/mfwaterlooregion/

On October 1st, 2009, Kwartzlab opened it’s doors and have been making & hacking ever since. Come celebrate Kwartzlab’s 3rd anniversary on Friday, October 19th with a night of fun and music from ARGYLE SPEEDO, AURALPLANE and SCHEMA FACTOR!

Tickets are $10 and can be purchased online:

Tickets will also be on sale at the door.

7:00 – DOORS OPEN
8:00 – ARGYLE SPEEDO
9:30 – AURALPLANE
10:30 – SCHEMA FACTOR
1:00 – LAST CALL

Kwartzlab is located at 283 Duke Street West, 1st floor. You can reach us either by the front foyer (door straight ahead) or via Breithaupt St. (red double doors). Parking is available on Breithaupt St. or in the GO Train lot across the tracks on Duke Street.

Hope you can make it out to help us start off our fourth year in style!

Participants are supplied with a free pumpkin to carve, along with a Kwartzlab kick – a programmable electronic kit that you can learn to assemble and solder yourself. The kit is setup to flicker lights just like a candle flame!

Along with the main event, we’ll soon be announcing free workshops happening in early November for Hacky Halloween participants to come into Kwartzlab to hack their kits, brainstorm ideas and more!

Hope to see you there!

Hacky Halloween is open to all ages and is free to attend. THEMUSEUM admission rates still apply to other exhibits.

Headshots from the Heart is an online marathon where a team of four players will play through as much of Borderlands as they can in a twenty-four hour period and encourage viewers to donate to Child’s Play, a charity which provides toys and video games to children’s hospitals worldwide.

There are many marathons online which contribute to causes like this one, but what makes Headshots from the Heart unique is that viewers not only have the option to donate directly, but to pledge an amount of money to be earned by the players each time they defeat a foe with a critical hit, or “Head shot”. This will force us not merely to play for twenty-four hours straight, but to play well, in order to earn your money for charity. Children deserve our best, and we at Headshots from the Heart intend to give it to them.

On top of the gaming itself, there will be live auctions going on throughout the entire event ranging from handmade crafts (check out the Borderlands figures and the kickass Megaman afghan!) to glasses, cases and even VIP tickets to see & greet The Tea Party! All that and more is on the block, so make sure you check out the enormous auction catalog on the Headshots Loot page! There will also be a Livestream of pure headshots action, interviews with players, guests from the video game industry and more!

The Headshots game-a-thon starts 12:30pm on Saturday and wraps Sunday afternoon. Check out Headshots from the Heart website for more info on the event, Child’s Play and how to make a pledge and/or donation.

This month’s guest artist Nik Harron is hosting the Opening Reception for his Geek of Nature show this coming Tuesday, November 8th at 7:oo pm during Tuesday Open Night!

Join the artist November 8 for an informal reception and brief lecture on the symbiotic relationship between scientific and artistic endeavour including amazing facts on the new science of epigenetics and the artist’s personal experiences working at a world-leading vision research laboratory.

Geek of Nature is a retrospective show of sciency paintings highlighting selected works from the past 10 years inspired by science. Concepts addressed by the work explore topics as diverse as creation and destruction, ecology, astronomy, fractal geometry, quantum wave/particle duality and the birth of the atomic age.

For more info, check out Nik’s Website at http://nikharron.com/geek-of-nature-show/

All we need is a decent laser, webcam and software to do all the heavy lifting for us. I decided to start off with a fairly popular combination in the realm of 3D scanning:

• Webcam: Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 USB
• Laser: 532nm 10mW 3.0VDC Green Laser Module with 89 degree line lens from AixiZ
• Software: D.A.V.I.D Laserscanner Trial

D.A.V.I.D appears to be the most mature software for 3D scanning, although it also comes with a hefty pricetag ($270-310cdn). I had hoped the trial could give me a little more than a feeling for the scanning capability, but I eventually learned that the trial is actually more crippled than it really needed to be.

Anyhow, to construct our 3D scanner:

The D.A.V.I.D. software requires a special background to calibrate it’s scanning capabilities, which is included as a PDF with the software package. Using our trusty plotter (thanks Don!) and a derelict piece of corrugated plastic I scrounged from our illustrious tool room, I got to work. I needed to split the calibration image fairly precisely down the middle so it ends up sitting at a 90 degree angle for the software to recognize it properly:

Assembling and securing the calibration panel is honestly the most difficult (not) step in setting up for 3D scanning. Once I had my mediocre facsimile of the grid, I fired up the software and went through calibration. You need to adjust the camera so it only sees your calibration grid. It doesn’t have to the the entire thing though, just make sure it can see the six guidepoints in the middle. With a little luck, you should see this in no time:

Once your all calibrated you’re ready to rock. I decided to try scanning at 800×600 (although a convenient post-scan dialog tells us the trial version of D.A.V.I.D only saves at a resolution of 320×200). Once we flicked the switch on the power supply, we got to work:

Now to scan an object, you run the line laser (very slowly) up and down the front of your target object. As the webcam records the laser moving over your object, the software detects the depth of the laser line in front of the calibration grid, giving you enough data to create a 3D surface of what you’re scanning:

The idea here is to make four passes of your object, while rotating it 90 degrees between them. The amount of rotation is very important for the next step:

The Shape Fusion step takes our four individual 3D scans and attempts to assemble a single 3D representation. First of all, you can edit each scan individually to remove any parts or artifacts you don’t want to have in your completed 3D model (in this case, the wood block the glue gun was sitting on). Once we’ve got that edited out, we need to merge the four sides into a single model, and we have a few ways of doing this. Since our object was rotated on it’s Y-axis during the scan, we try to merge our four parts along that option, using 90 degrees as our reference point:

Depending on how uniform your 3D scans were (mine were essentially a trainwreck), you should be presented with a rough model of what you were trying to scan. Last step is to ‘Fuse’ the four sides together, which will attempt to fill in any missing spots and hopefully end up with something closely resembling your target object:

As you can see, I missed a lot of the edges of my scans, so I got a fantastic-looking glue gun that’s been run through the microwave. At this point I could save this abomination as a OBJ (for further mangling) or a STL file (for 3D printing) so I could waste expensive plastic filament reproducing my horrific, melty representation of a glue gun, however the trial doesn’t allow you to save any completed object. Which means you’re essentially stuck with making basic scans with D.A.V.I.D until you register it, while simultaneously weeping at all the aligning and fusing you just did that you can’t save.
 

Final Thoughts

Now that we’ve broken into the weird world of 3D scanning, I’ll be exploring some of the other (open source) software available, as well as working with the esteemed Karl Williams in automating much of the manual process (moving the laser, rotating the object). This should significantly increase the accuracy of 3D scans, as well as prevent my shaky hands from dropping the laser and blinding everyone within eyesight.

Things I learned from my first foray into 3D scanning:

• You may lose the will to live setting up the perfect distance, lighting and webcam settings, but it’s totally worth it. Nothing is more awesome than scanning a bananaphone and actually seeing a 3D bananaphone… other than a 3D baconphone, that is.
• An 89 degree line laser is LUDICROUSLY WIDE, even from only 2 feet away. I could scan in my object and still critically harm a Kwartzlabber on the other side of the room. I’ll need to build an enclosure for the scanning area, or come up with the coin to outfit everybody with green laser protective glasses.
• Read the instructions on your crippleware. Especially the part where it says you CAN’T SAVE ANYTHING.

Cheers!
Ben

Ron Daniels, R/C aircraft designer, MBA, and chemist, gives a talk on his experience with continuous design improvement, outsourcing manufacturing, licensing designs, customer relations, and dealing with the competition.

Come join us. Free-no-pay. Doors open at 7pm, talk begins at 7:30, runs until 8:30pm. For location and parking info, click here. For more details on the event, check here: http://bit.ly/rdkwartzlab

You can find the event flyer here: http://is.gd/Z1yUik

Hope to see you there!

This is our first public Synchronous Hackathon, where anyone in the area can come in and work on projects. There will be snacks (we’ll likely be chipping in for pizza and what not as well) and of course our fully-stocked drink fridge (with plenty of caffeinated options!). We’ll be open to the public from 12pm on Saturday straight through to 6pm on Sunday.

There is also an optional monthly challenge, and for February it’s the 555 Contest, where you can compete at building useful and cool 555-series timer projects for nifty prizes. Categories are Art, Complex/Extreme, Minimalist, Utility and Best in Show.

Event information (including hackerspace participant list) can be found here:
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Synchronous_Hackathon/2011-02-19

More information (rules, categories, prizes) on the 555 Timer Challenge is here:
http://www.555contest.com/

We’ll be having a soldering party at the lab this week to assemble all 100 of these bad boys for the festivities starting Friday evening. Here’s a sneak peak at the badge’s PCB:

Provided we don’t all expire from this soldering work, hope to see you at SoOnCon, there’s still tickets available: http://sooncon.eventbrite.com