Countdown To Maker Faire!

Posted on May 20th, 2011 by theron • Filed under Events • 1 Comment

Maker Faire is this weekend (May 21-22) and CRASHspace is going to be there!

Tod is selling ThingM goodies in the Maker Shed (Redwood Hall).  James will be showing his Interactive Wii Whiteboard in Fiesta Hall.

And CRASHspace has it’s own booth in the Fiesta Hall Hackerspace Area, along with Noisebridge, Spacebridge, HeatSync Labs, Hacker Dojo, and Ace Monster Toys.  We will be doing a bunch of cool stuff:

If you’re attending Maker Faire, come see us!  Build a domino!  Play a musical instrument by walking in front of a table!  Use more exclamation points!

Neuroscience Group: Thursday May 18th at 8pm

Posted on May 18th, 2011 by outlawpoet • Filed under Events • No Comments

A quick reminder, the Neuroscience Group is meeting for the first time tomorrow at 8pm. Everybody, (member or not) is welcome.

I’ll open the meeting with some news, some information about the brain, and DIY neuroscience projects I know about, but we’re really interested in hearing from you, the crasher or visitor with an idea, a plot, a dream, or a question.

These meetings will be held at least once a month, but activities may stretch beyond that as needed.

CRASHirt CRAFTernoon CRAZYness

Posted on May 16th, 2011 by matt • Filed under Events • No Comments

Thanks to all who showed up and made CRASHirt CRAFTernoon a huge success. We are definitely going to Makerfaire in style.

We employed a heroic variety of techniques:

 

Huge thanks to Clive, Carlyn, and everyone at crash for powering through a cleanup effort yesterday. Having the extra space in Shop One made it a joy to work inside and out. Crafternoon all available space with colorful dreams and left it cleaner than before.

We had 10 people working on shirts at the peak and everyone had a blast. More than 25 shirts were made, each one hugely unique. I’m still blow away by creativity and varied styles.

The flickr set has most shirt represented:

Tell us if you want to host a crafternoon…

From RTOS to Rockets: Paul Breed to speak at Crashspace

Posted on May 12th, 2011 by Clivefx • Filed under Events • No Comments

I am pleased to announce the continuance of the Crashspace Innovators in Art and Science lectures with a fantastic guest, Paul Breed.

Paul is a man of many talents and no lack of ambition, with a plain spoken manner that comes from years of tackling hard problems on his own terms. With that being said, I will defer to his own words as a way of introduction:

“I had never built a rocket prior to building my first liquid engine,
but I had built houses, cars, planes, RC planes, solar powered planes,
and record setting race boats, at one point in time the top five F1 boats in the world ALL ran my electronics.
All of this was done in my spare/free time as a hobby. Professionally I’ve spent the last 25 years delivering
electronics and embedded computer systems in every realm from full NASA qual hardware/software on the Deep space network to
disposable consumer parts.”

That’s right. He builds race boats as a hobby. Now he has a rather more extreme one: Rockets. He and his son (Paul Allen) together are Unreasonable Rocket, named after the famous quote that many of us hold dear. Unreasonable rocket was one of three teams in the final running for the million dollar Grumman lunar lander X-prize. He and his son built in their garage in Solana Beach a machine that could fly, hover, and land all on rocket power.

Here is a video in which we interview him while he is testing his rocket engine:

(about 10 minutes in)

But that is only his hobby. His day job is running Netburner, an embedded system company. He will be bringing goodies for Crashers and Nullspace folks to play with. http://www.netburner.com/
Netburners are low cost high power arduino-like devices that run a full real time operating system and built in ethernet programming. It is actually easier to use than Arduino in some senses.

In addition to that, he has adapted a unique method for construction of rocket engines: Laser sintering. His engines are literally printed by a laser in a bath of powdered metal.

When he isn’t revolutionizing propulsion, he is working on an open source GPS receiver that will get around many of the limitations imposed on commercial units.

He will talk about whatever we want to hear about, but expect to hear about embedded system design, rocket engines, speed boats, helicopters, solar planes and innovation. This lecture offers a unique opportunity to speak with one of the most innovative people I have ever met. I hope to see you there!

Thursday May 26th, at 7:30 pm
Crashspace
10526 Venice Blvd
Culver City, CA

GENERAL INFORMATION:
The Crashspace Innovators in Art and Science lectures are a way to get up close and personal with the people who are shaping our tomorrows. Previous speakers have included Mark Frauenfelder, author and champion of the Maker movement and Anouk Wipprecht, electronic fashion designer and artist. The lectures are open to the public, free of charge, but a donation is HIGHLY ENCOURAGED as the space is entirely member-funded and operated.

Tours of the facility will be available after the event.

Bottle-Cap Contact Mic Workshop

Posted on May 10th, 2011 by theron • Filed under Events • No Comments

CMKT4 is coming to Maker Faire and they’re visiting hackerspaces along the way, showing how to build their awesome bottle-cap contact microphones.

They’ll be at CRASHspace on Saturday, 14 May 2011, from 6-9 PM. Build a contact mic and learn to use it. $15 gets you one mic. Another $10 gets you a second.

While everything is drying, they’ll play some of their crazy music.

CRASHirt CRAFTnoon

Posted on May 6th, 2011 by matt • Filed under Events • 1 Comment

we have crash shirts… Just add shirts and YOU.

crash shirt
tshirt

Sunday May 15th at 2p we’ll start making shirts out back. By dark we should be all cleaned up. Bring a shirt. Bring art, stencils, material, your bedazzler, paint, glitter, anyone and anything else you might want to share.

IMG_3387.JPGLong Beach Boys & Girls Club

Sparkle Kits will be available for purchase from our store for those wanting to blink, twinkle, and shine: http://bit.ly/sparklekit

Sprakle Kit

Calendar link

Donations are welcomed, helpful, and necessary as CRASHSpace is entirely membership/donation funded and relies on your support to keep the doors open.

Class: Crafty latex-based Magstripe imprinting process

Posted on April 28th, 2011 by Jenny Leary • Filed under Events • No Comments

 

 

The Xray Coin Purse incorporates an imprint of a credit card, in which sensitive ingredients have captured an image of the magstripe. In this class, you’ll learn the unique printing technique behind the Xray. We’ll peer into a language designed to communicate solely with machines and defy human insight.

Come along, and bring your appetite for reading binary code, your willingness to do a little messy arts & crafts, and a data card with a magstripe! Credit cards work best, because we have the ANSI/ISO specs for the data layout (and also because they will make you feel a tad bit devious). Driver’s licenses and hotel keys work too.

Stick around at the end for tips on how to work with liquid latex, including how to make and sew thin sheets for use in clothing and accessory design.

When: Thursday, May 5 2011 (Cinco de Mayo. Chips and salsa gratis.) 8pm – 10pm @ Crashspace

RSVP: Class size is limited by space, so please email jenny@ferrofabric.com to reserve a spot.

Suggested donation to crashspace: $12

About Ferrofabric: What is the shape of a magnetic field? They may be invisible, but they cause visible effects. Ferrofabric aims to use magnetic fields as an element in surface design. So far, the most interesting shapes have come from scripted magnetic stripes. This and other techniques have been demonstrated at the London Anti-Design Festival, the Science Museum Festival of Innovation, the MIT Media Lab, and will be at the Subtle Technologies Festival in June.

pd-LAunch Workshops

Posted on April 10th, 2011 by theron • Filed under Events • No Comments

We’ve got a couple of cool Pure Data (Pd) related workshops coming up as part of the pd-LAunch event running from April 25-May 1.

Pure Data is a real-time visual programming language, used by musicians, artists, and others.  It is the open source cousin to Max/MSP, and has been ported to many platforms, including Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, etc.

Thursday April 28, 7:30-10:00 pm – Hans-Christoph Steiner – “Starting With Realtime Audio/Video Interaction”

Pd provides a wide range of tools for tracking and extracting information from audio in realtime. Once in Pd, we can use the audio to control sound generation, effect, video, camera processing, etc. The combination of audio processing and digital media provide myriad opportunities for creating interactions. This workshop will introduce how to create real-time interaction in the physical world with sound and light. Pd (aka Pure Data) will be introduced as a simple programming environment for real-time interaction. This workshop will be a combination of short lectures, hands-on instruction, and unstructured time to work on learning and exploring with support of the instructor. While Pd is fairly easy to learn and designed for artists, familiarity with basic computer programming will be very beneficial. You will be able to apply the concepts learned in this course to a wide range of programming environments that can receive data via OSC messages or a network socket, such as Arduino, Flash, Processing, etc.

$60, sign up here.

Friday April 29, 7:00-11:00 pm – Chris McCormick – “Pd As Your Embedded Audio Engine”

“Pd as your embedded audio engine” will teach all about embedding libpd as the sound engine for your app, whether its iPhone, Android, Java, OpenFrameworks, Processing, etc. This workshop provides a broad spectrum of different ways of connecting Pd to other things. Having hardware isn’t a requirement either. The workshop will cover ways of interfacing with Pd from computer to computer. Bring your laptop and devices that you want to install libpd on (Android, iPhone, etc.)

$100, sign up here.

Full information is in the store or on the pd-la site.

 

CRASH <3 GOOD

Posted on April 9th, 2011 by rknLA • Filed under Events • No Comments

This weekend is GOOD‘s LA Launch party, and we’re CRASHing it!

We’ll be at their Pop-Up Community Center at Atwater Crossing hosting a Pop-Up Sunday Saturday Crafternoon, complete with felting, soldering, and fun!

So come on out and feel felt a fail whale or solder a PicoPaso!

From GOOD’s page:

Atwater Crossing (ATX)
3229 Casitas Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90039

Parking is in two free lots, or street parking is available
We highly encourage everyone to bike or take public transit; plan your trip at Metro.net

All events are free but you must RSVP!

 

P.S. – Don’t party too hard, CicLAvia is on Sunday morning.  Bring your water guns and put the fun between your legs!

Exploration of Processing

Posted on April 4th, 2011 by matt • Filed under Events • No Comments

We’re please to hosted what I hope is the first of many Processing related classes this Thursday April 7th at 8p.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions.

Jonathan Bobrow is an artist, designer, mathematician and graduate of UCLA’s Design | Media Arts department. We’re lucky to have him for this intro course before he leaves LA for NY to join Potion Design (working on interactive experiences). Processing has been Jonathan’s gateway into creative coding, language of choice for sketching ideas, and a great tool for installation art pieces. As a freelance artist, Jonathan displayed an interactive piece at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, helped other media artists through making tools for their artwork, and recreated OkGo’s WTF music video effect for everyone to use. I look forward to viewing firsthand his work, and more importantly the simplicity of Processing!

This introductory course has been designed for anyone with little or no software background. You need only bring:
-A curious mind
-A laptop w any OS (ideally, since this is a totally hands on workshop. Come w/o a laptop and we’ll try to stir one up.)
-A download of the free Processing at this link: http://processing.org/download/ (saves time)

If you have ideas of visual art you want to create with code, feel free to bring them and we’ll happily to discuss ways to approach them if they don’t become apparent during the workshop. If you don’t have any idea of what you would do with Processing, Awesome! You will have fun and I am sure have something in mind when you leave. Specifically we’ll learn everything in the context of a simple mirror application with some very cool effects. You’ll learn how to read in a video images, analyze the frames and redraw them anyway you please :)

Donations are welcomed, helpful, and necessary as CRASHSpace is entirely membership/donation funded and relies on your support to keep the doors open.

[Updated : 2011-04-04] Calendar/Event links:

Add it to your calendar: ical
Or add it to your fb events: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=162793937110416

« Older Entries    Newer Entries »

Categories

Latest Tweet