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.
Firstly there is prolific Podcaster Dave Lee.
Dave then mentioned Doncaster Maker Group.
So we will give a local shout out for both.
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:-
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.
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.
Wow we found this awesome collection of old black and white photos of the Doncaster Locomotive works dating from the age of steam. @sciencemuseum
