Last Tuesday we had an enjoyable meeting with the Draw group. There was a good Dorkbot turnout. The session started with a number of experimental drawing exercises to do with mark making. Everyone had fun having a go. We drew the person opposite without looking at our piece of paper, drew the features of our own face with our eyes closed and tracked a pattern of movement from a piece of video. From the these exercises and the encouragement of the Draw group, Dorkbotters got a richer sense of what mark making can be about.

The next part of the session moved on to showing the work so far created by Dorkbot for the Shop project, both low tech and high tech. Both Lucy’s had a go at Richard’s cooperative drawing device made of string and a soft drinks bottle: John told us about his line detecting, sound output device, we demonstrated Rowan’s ideas for adaptive Drawbots and Richard and Anton gave us a demonstration of their servo driven drawing robot. We didn’t feature Russell’s Britlebot enough in this session but look forward to it’s return!

Following the discussions from what we saw, a positive decision was made to move the date of the shop event from October to November, this would allow more time for Draw to consider and contribute to the venture. The meeting provided a good opportunity to develop our understanding of each others viewpoint. Look out for further posts announcing our next meeting.

For more info, please see below, but meanwhile these are 2 “in-progress” videos from the past weeks, as we breadboarded our adapted circuit, and then adapted it so it can run using real bike power by strapping in a dynamo. It’s not working in the video but it has done other times (as usual, things stop working when they are videoed, and then start magically again).

Look out on this blog for future posts. We hope to soon show the whole thing on a bike pedalling around a street. And here is the workshop info! Please send this information on if you know people who might be interested.

(£3 extra for the portable amp)

We will be building bike powered oscillators! For you non-geeks: that means we will be making your bike into a pedal powered synthesizer. The spacey electronic sounds will be controlled from the handlebars while we ride.

This workshops will walk you through putting the simple circuits together and mounting them on to your bike. All parts will be provided for but do bring cases (medium sized tupperware or tins– anything that will keep the circuits dry) and dynamos if you can.  You will get to take home your bike/battery powered creations:the oscillator and, if you are willing to pay £3 for the extra parts, your own portable amp that can be used with your mp3 player.

Registration: http://noisybikes.eventwax.com/noisy-bike-oscillator-workshop

[You must register a place in order to attend. All ages allowed but children must be accompanied by adults and all attendees must be accompanied by bikes.To chat to the workshop leaders, contact Alejandro on 07905 418 809 or Kaspar on 07913 210 232]  

We will have an opportunity to show progress so far with ideas for the ‘Draw’ Shop collaboration project to be held in October. If you’d like to see what Dorkbotters have been up to, join in or bring along new ideas, all are welcome. We have the opportunity of doing some drawing exercises to continue the collaboration.We’ll be starting from 7.00pm at the Pervasive Media Studio on Tuesday 10th August if you’d like to join us.

A fun and productive day for all. Richard and Anton made remarkably quick progress with their robotic drawing machine. From a pile of bits they had a working prototype to prove the principle by the end of the day. Once made lots of ideas came out about how big the machine could be, how it would be made and most importantly how it would draw: The marks it could make and how it could be instructed by hand. 

We were treated by Russell to an amusing demonstration of his industrial scale BristleBot. Instead of a toothbrush, a phone pager motor and a button cell battery, Russell’s BristleBot is made of a scrubbing brush, a large motor and an old battery from a laptop, all tied together with a couple of nice jubilee clips and a classic cable tie!

We will be having another weekend hack session for the ‘Draw’ project on Sunday. We’ll have a chance to have some more fun and build on progress so far. If you prefer to join in and work on the Bicycle the time is a free for all for what you want to do.

We’ll start at 11.30am on Sunday as last time. Unfortunately we don’t have a film at the Cube lined up afterwards but if you’d like to make suggestions then we can see if a performance can be arranged another time.

Thanks to all for coming along to Hamilton House on Sunday. We all had fun taking forward some of the ideas that have been generated for the Drawing Shop project.Particular highlights were the collaborative drawing rig which shows lots of promise and the disposable camera imaging hack. More details soon.

Following the success of the brainstorming session with the Draw group we’ll be having a Sunday workshop to experiment with some ideas that came out of the discussions.For the Dorkbot/Draw Shop event in October we can  have a combination of both day workshops and installations that can be seen and enjoyed for shorter lengths of time, from half an hour to a couple of minutes. As well as autonomous machines we’ll be exploring how to create drawing tools where technology influences peoples drawing technique.

Come along and join in with your imagination!

We’ll probably take a summer break in July.