Category: Projects

Help Us Create a Community Art Project

Update:  Still planning to do this but it is delayed due to COVID situation.

Framingham MakerSpace, with the support of the mayor’s office, is organizing an art project created by members of the community at large. We will be installing a field of crochet flowers in the Arlington Street Park on May 2.

Everyone is invited to participate. Make large flowers crocheted or knitted out of yarn, any colors or design. Ideally, we will use up odd lots and yarn left over from other projects. No need to buy yarn.

This is a great way to keep productive while we stay home (kids too!) and gives us all something to look forward to.

Flowers may be left at the Callahan Center, the Framingham Public Library and the McAuliffe branch as well as the MakerSpace once they are reopened.

For more information contact Maria at mdefelice@rcn.com

Yarn Flower Community Art Project

Yarn Flower Community Art Project

Update:Still planning to do this but delayed due to COVID.

Framingham MakerSpace, with the support of the mayor’s office, is organizing an art project created by members of the community at large. We will be installing a field of crochet flowers in the Arlington Street Park in May.

Everyone is invited to participate. Make large flowers crocheted or knitted out of yarn, any colors or design. Ideally, we will use up odd lots and yarn left over from other projects. No need to buy yarn.

This is a great way to keep productive while we stay home (kids too!) and gives us all something to look forward to.

Flowers may be left at the Calahan Center, the Framingham Public Library and the McAuliffe branch as well as the MakerSpace once they are reopened.

We are happy to announce that Sudbury Valley Trustees is also partnering with us to highlight the crisis facing pollinators.  https://www.svtweb.org/make-your-own-native-flowers

For more information contact Maria at mdefelice@rcn.com

 

Guatemala School Project

Recently, Framingham MakerSpace members provided tools and labor to establish a woodworking shop and taught Scratch computer programming at Bendición de Dios, a non-profit private school in Alotenango, Guatemala.  While there, we visited some homes and were appalled at the living conditions.  Rusted corrugated steel walls and roof, dirt floors, chickens and dogs roaming throughout, a single 6′ x 8′ bedroom for the entire family, an outdoor “kitchen” with a wood fired stove creating smoke that made breathing extraordinarily difficult. 

Asociación Bendición de Dios has upgraded more than a hundred of these hovels with a concrete bedroom and bathroom over the years, but the process has been necessarily piecemeal.  The founder/director, Julio Garcia Gonzalez, explained to us that land ownership was necessary in order to build a house, and few of their families have access to the required money.  We asked what it would take to buy a piece of land for many houses to be built from scratch.  He said he could get land for 15-20 homes for about $30,000, and if he could get the land, he has donors and other means to build the houses.  An anonymous donor committed to providing the initial payment of $10,000 to establish the fund.  We still need to raise $20,000 within six months.

Guatemala school project

Guatemala school project

Recently, Framingham MakerSpace members provided tools and labor to establish a woodworking shop and taught Scratch computer programming at Bendición de Dios, a non-profit private school in Alotenango, Guatemala.  While there, we visited some homes and were appalled at the living conditions.  Rusted corrugated steel walls and roof, dirt floors, chickens and dogs roaming throughout, a single 6′ x 8′ bedroom for the entire family, an outdoor “kitchen” with a wood fired stove creating smoke that made breathing extraordinarily difficult. 

Asociación Bendición de Dios has upgraded more than a hundred of these hovels with a concrete bedroom and bathroom over the years, but the process has been necessarily piecemeal.  The founder/director, Julio Garcia Gonzalez, explained to us that land ownership was necessary in order to build a house, and few of their families have access to the required money.  We asked what it would take to buy a piece of land for many houses to be built from scratch.  He said he could get land for 15-20 homes for about $30,000, and if he could get the land, he has donors and other means to build the houses.  An anonymous donor committed to providing the initial payment of $10,000 to establish the fund.  We still need to raise $20,000 within six months.

You can donate to this project here

 

Pill Bottle LED POI

This project is a beginner LED POI that can be built for under $25 for a pair (if you scrounge a few parts).

It uses an RGB LED with ping pong ball for diffuser, 9 volt battery, Arduino pro-mini (or nano) and 3-axis accelerometer board.  It teaches the basics of connecting things to the Arduino, programming the Arduino, both input from the accelerometer and PWM to control the RGB LED.

Pill bottle POI 1 LED Poi spinning 1

Pill bottle poi 2

LED POI with 9-axis IMU and wireless link

More advanced LED POI we are working on include 9-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU) (3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyro, 3-axis magnetometer).  We coupled this with a wireless transciever to send data back to a computer while we’re spinning. 

The goal is to use this feedback to show us how the sensors are responding to various motion conditions so we can program better effects.  This project is still in an early phase, we’re still working on understanding the quaternion output of the IMU’s on board data fusion engine and how best to use that data.

Total cost for this POI is still very cheap, Arduino Nano, 9V battery, RGB LED, IMU (about $8), radio ($1).

Here is a video showing wireless data streaming back to a computer http://youtu.be/me-uFxpgRTk

 

POI wireless demo 1

Raku Pottery

This past fall we built a propane fired Raku kiln, made clay tiles and fired them. It was an ambitious project since we had never done Raku pottery before. Researching this project taught us a lot and brought some great people into our maker community.

 

The burner is a high-heat model which has been added to a kiln which was formerly an electric kiln. The group modified the kiln so it could be propane fired.

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