We are big fans of supporting the wider local hacking and making community. To this end whilst in conversation recently I had my attention drawn to some local creative folk who we would like to give a shout out to.
We are gutted, due to the coronavirus restrictions now in force we are no longer permitted to hold our weekly meetings on Thursday evenings at The Railway Hotel. This is set to be the case whilst ever Doncaster is in the top two tiers of the new restrictions.
Rest assured though that as soon as Doncaster is no longer in the top two tiers normal service will resume.
In the mean time we will be continuing meeting virtually (bring your own pub, or workspace) via Zoom. If you want to come along or just drop in to talk, contact us via our contact pages and we will send you the joining details for our zoom session.
Hard at work having fun during last nights meeting musing on dome prototypes for the next EMF Camp.
Initial design ideas that we are iterating upon are based on Fullerenes specifically the Buckminster Fullerenes C60, C70 and maybe C90. The prototype C60 ball above was made using bamboo lolly sticks bolted with M3 bolts at the intersections. So the M3 bolts are in effect pretending to be Carbon atoms. Next job is to prototype a C70 and have a think about where we want to section the ball to form a dome.
Other possibilities are forming a sectioned carbon nanotube type structure with a closing C60/C70 type dome at each end. Sort of like a high tech Viking long house for our EMF Camp village. So many choices and such a short meetup, but at least there is next week, restrictions permitting.
The Railway Hotel in Doncaster has kindly offered us the use of their snug for our weekly Thursday evening meetup. So a big thank you to Jordan and the guys at the Railway Hotel, @Railway_Donc, @railwaydoncaster.
We will be meeting there on Thursday (or is that thirsty) evenings 19:00 til 21:00 every week unless we post otherwise. Needless to say we will be monitoring the pandemic situation in partnership with the landlord and if there is a change to this we will post out an update here, but will continue meeting virtually via zoom until the situation improves and we can return to our watering hole. Bring a mask if you have one as the snug can get erm, snug, if too many arrive all at once. More importantly bring along your projects to show, tell and exchange ideas.
The venue is centrally located in Doncaster a spitting distance from the Railway Station and the travel interchange. There is free on street parking nearby available after 18:00 and also the well lit, CCTV monitored station car park (parking fees apply) just behind the pub.
We have upgraded our Zoom account @zoom_us so that our scheduled sessions and user group meetings are no longer time limited. Many thanks to our members whose subscription has made this possible. Out next task is to sort out a place for physical meetings.
As most of the initial hackspace founding is now complete we had our first official session (virtually) using Zoom on Thursday 23rd July. So we are now, officially open for business and new members.
We have picked Thursday evenings 19:00 till 21:00 as our weekly open sessions for both regular attenders and also for new faces. We are also looking forward to scheduling new regular sessions in support of our members activities and special interest groups.
Once the current pandemic situation allows and potential venues re-open we will be additionally running up a physical location for the weekly open sessions. We would like to continue with virtual presence/attendance along side all our scheduled sessions as well as a physical meetup because this a great way to facilitate inclusivity. I guess it also allows members to take part whist travelling or working away.
To help with getting the message out there and letting visitors to our web site know about upcoming events and scheduled meetings we added a simple events calendar to our web site.
If you would like to join up or check us out, come along to one of our open sessions. For our Zoom session details contact the Secretary who handles all matters to do with our membership.
Doncaster hackspace needed a stylised logo, suggesting speed, going places and local engineering. So we decided to base it on the LNER Mallard and made one.
Easy to say it that way but the method is straightforward enough if you know how. First we needed a picture because were not that great at freehand drawing or arty. It turned out that the Science Museums Doncaster Works Collection had a profile picture of the LNER Mallard that we could use as the basis for our logo.
We used inkscape for the actual task but other drawing packages are equally good especially if you know them already. Which ever you use avoid doing this in a bitmap, paint or photo editor. Use a vector or drawing package. You need the flexibility of being able to rework your lines and drawing many times over and for it to scale smoothly. The procedure went something like this:-
Import the chosen base image into your drawing package. Make sure you put this image on a layer that is at the bottom and you can pile your tracing and drawing layers on top of it.
Create a new layer to draw on and switch to it.
Using the bezier curve and straight line tool, roughly trace out the outline of the object and any features you want to capture to flesh out the stylized item. In this case there were a few curves and the rails.
Create a new layer to draw the lettering on and switch to it.
Search the internet for an open source or creative commons stencil font that suits the feel you want to achieve.
Install/import the font to your OS so that the drawing package can see it and use it
Add the letters for your organisation to the lettering layer.
Create a new layer to draw the wheels on and switch to it.
Create the wheels and size them by trial an error laying them over the image to get the sizing correct. Inkscape as a plug-in that generates gears from a few parameters, But you could equally use some creative commons clip-art to achieve similar results.
Set the stroke colour to one you want and make the lines thick enough to work in a lower resolution take of your logo. There is no rule for this it is a case of fiddle with it till you like it.
Adjust your tracing and other traced features iteratively until you get a final result that you like. This is usual done with the edit paths and nodes tools. Adding nodes and pulling the lines and bezier handles about till all the tracing fits snugly over the drawing. Like the image above.
While you are doing 11, 10, 7 and 3 you can lock the other layers to stop the select tool picking them up and from moving things around.
You will also find it useful to selectively hide the other layers by turning of their visibility in the layer toolbox to see how the end result is coming along. It can often be difficult to get a feel for the state of the progress on the logo when you are distracted by the base image, or lettering, or similar.
Finally when you are happy save your work (you have been doing this often as you went along, right……)
Hide the base image by turning off visibility of the layer it is on. Then export your logo in a range of sizes (resolutions) and bitmap formats.
A word or two about the stencil font mentioned at 7. We wanted to create a logo that could be stencilled onto stuff, laser cut and or maybe plasma cut. Many fonts look great but when you actually try to cut out the letters when cutting a stencil you quickly find that the centre of the “O” drops out or the “A” has a bit that wont stay in and the lovely effect you were looking for was ruined. If you pick a font that is intended to be stencilled these things are already take care of.
Finished Logo
And we are done, this Logo was then added to our web pages, favicon etc.
It has been a fun and eventful weekend setting up our IRC channel #DoncasterHackspace on freenode. Fuchs from freenode was pretty awesome and incredibly helpful even helping us along over the weekend. He even pointed us at their webchat IRC client which its pretty useful.