So, we've just taken down the bunting, it's actually rather emotional to take it down. Thank you all for making it a fun weekend, organisers, volunteers, workshop leaders and visitors! Have you taken some photos for the day? Share with us, add it to the album.
Want it again next year? Show us some love on this tweet (we'll count the love and rehash the plans):
We're big on giving credits when credit's due - here goes our hi-five's (you get a glimpse of the festival too):
Nick, Create Space London resident, thank you for doing the hardwork of the screen printing our t-shirts for all volunteers, good luck with your t-shirt business!
Viv Schwarz, you are just amazing for turning everyone into space cats (and well impressed with the maker spirit of all your DIY pens, especially the one that's made out of beer can), and still amazing even when you are taking a nap like a cat. More illustration and children's books of cats please!
Nicola and Jairo for your super professional otherworldly screenprinting workshop and the OT after doors closed. Your dedication is just admirable! Beauty, as we observed, has a never ending demand, regardless of where you are in your life journey.
Minna Orvokki Nygren and Catherine Kontz for being so amazingly organised at supporting us so elegantly whilst having to be all over the place physically. You are so much appreciated that, Mike from Create Space London has made some badges for you, out of your score!
Mike and Adam (co-founder) of Create Space London, who I never catch the full name of... You know you are so well loved by the kids, that they even made an enterprise out of your badge press to buy your laser cut space badges. Give yourself a very good pat on the back for inspiring the next generation entrepreneurs! Because of you, they've developed an appetite for new businesses.
Of course, to our engineering headlines: Ray Brainbrige from Tranquility Aerospace for being our first and ongoing co-mastery tutor and leading us to learn, hands on, about the controls of spacecraft orientation thrusters using Arduinos - this time, with the added rocket model. Chris Brunskill from Satellite Applications Catapult for the demo on a Pocketqube implementation of nano-satellite - a palm sized satellite.
To Wil Selwood, our on site astronomer for being so cool about driving the telescope 50 something miles to the festival and set that up for star party at all sessions, even though the only predictable thing about the weather in the UK is the clouds! The sun, is such a warm fuzzy orange thing when you do get a chance to see it.
And to Julie Fernandes, for our amazing logo:
Last but not least, to all those who bought ticket, donated, brought along friends/family, and/or given us feedback, thank you. We've been counting on you to make or break the event!
We are most grateful to our partner in action, Create Space London, without them, we'd not have t-shirts, venue, workshop equipment, all the helpful people from Create Space London - running or participating in workshops. In fact, it would not be possible to make Galactic Fête happen in 21 days, from concept to close, counting only on ticket sales as the only budget without ALL of you. Thank you.
Please, share the moments you've captured with us at our album - did you make something, take a selfie with that and tweet to us @CitizenInventor #GalacticFête and/or sign up to be the first to hear about, if ever, the next #GalacticFête. Got some suggestions of activities or sponsorship for the next one? Tell us.
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We've moved from East London's Fab Lab London to West London's Create Space London, not only that we are learning about building orientation thruster hands on, we are also showcasing maker spaces while we are at it. We are definitely on a trip of exploration!
Create Space (to be precise, Wembly Point) has quite an entrance, we can easily imagine it being the entrance to some hi-tech organisation with eccentric scientist and engineers in the building. Get the lighting right, we could be in a sci-fi movie! That aside... It turns out, it's not an evil enterprise but the most multidisciplinary maker space we have seen so far. Everything ranging from printmaking, ceremics (with 4 kilns!), woodworking, lazer cutting, electronics to everything else including tenants making Robots, 3D printing lampshades...
We started off with Ray Bainbridge from Tranquility Aerospace giving us an overview of Devon one, a proposed single-stage reusable vertical take-off vertical landing vehicle with a kerosene/HTP engine and a 30-40kg payload and sharing some system diagram. Ray also cover wider topics on how he has started from a non-space background for additional inspiration.
This room might look small but this is one of the 10+ rooms in Create Space and it certainly had everything we need. We had a few Arduino Mega but everyone was great and many has brought along their own kit. There was no lack of Arduino Uno, Yun and Adafruit's Trinket look-alike-s on the table that emerged from their bags and boxes in the electronics workshop in Create Space. As the day went on, there was even a tank of pressurised gas when we needed it for air flow test. Carl has been extremely entrepreneurial and made great use of the lift for testing the pressure sensor code he was writing (we were at the 11th floor, we planned it, oh no we haven't)!
And here we are firing the solenoid valves, with a modified version of Arduino's blink script:
Just before you think everyone is Arduino pro, and worry that you won't fit into the next class... The point of co-learning is we help each other out, so Steph ran an Arduino 101 at the beginning to help those who have not been exposed to Arduino and Robert has been chipping in too! It's a really friendly atmosphere and everyone tries to contribute and share what they know and help making things work. We've got to thank Faraz, the Create Space Arduino pro for helping us out - you know what, we thought if you need extra Arduino after-class, check their open night out! I'm sure you'll meet Rich there too, he'd make a very good mechanical engineer, and a very helpful one!
Hats off to Lucaz who has been getting up at 4-ish in the morning making his way from Nottingham in a mildly snowy day! In the UK, this translates to a very adventurous travel arrangement for the train can easily fail at times like this... He definitely showed that it is possible to go from attending Arduino 101 to programming the GPS module and has even continued on after everyone has packed up! It has been an amazing effort and the code base has grown significantly in this one day! There's even a new repo on radio comms, thanks Robert. https://github.com/TranquilityAerospace
Finally, we owe Rory a lot for him generously giving us the space when we called out to the community for help. Go, community spirit!
Ah, did we forget to mention the breakfast Steph brought in and the Pizza sponsored by Tranquility Aerospace? Well, we were too focused on taking notes on the Orientation Thruster... well, next time we will try to remember taking photo of the energy sources too. Till then. Did we all spot a wine box there? Oh yes, it does hold something as pleasurable as wine. Electronics! Earlier this month, we had our launch of the co-learning initiative by actually running the first learning "moudule" - learning about orientation thruster, hands on. It was not a high profile launch, unlike the main Space Town Hall (our mothership!) launch, but we felt it was important to let action speak for itself. And so it did: It happens to be the Lord Mayor Show in London and despite it said the show will start at Mansion House, it occurred to be rather close to FabLab London, our venue, at Bank! And so, we began our new learning initiative with test #1, unannounced - participants was challenged to cross the paths of marching horses and carriages in wind and rain, showing dedication, determination and intelligence (to work round traffic and reroute rearrangement) to reach the destination. The tutor/lead of this module is Ray Bainbridge from Tranquility Aerospace. Ray provided an overview of the way Tranquility Aerospace works with communities and universities to develop projects, explained the basics of the orientation thruster and moved on to walk through the system diagram of the design: After Ray explained the basics, we took the Arduino, sensor and electronics out from the box and split into 2 working groups. One of the sensor and one on controlling the actuator (solenoid valves). Afterall we have such strong focus on being hands on, it just natural that much of the day was tinkering with electronics and software (hang in there, non-technical types, we have something for you). It was kind of like a hack day but with minimal theory to supplementing the learning and unlimited scope to go down rabbit holes! The greatest thing is we co-learned (more about co-learning here) - we helped each other to learn about building stuff, right from the beginning of installing the Arduino IDE. Had we have more designer type, no doubt we would also have another working group for designing conceptual interfaces (hint hint, come to our next one, design types). This module will continue as long as the group wants to and we are ear-marking the next one in Jan 2015.
A few words must be said about our venue sponsor which we are very excited about! FabLab London is one of the 400+ Fab Labs around the world, everything you'd expect from a Fab Lab is there - lazer cutter, 3D printer... And we are so lucky, thanks to Jana for the tip, to be hosted at Fab Lab London shortly after it opened its doors to the public. Andy at Fab Lab London has been amazing at helping to make this happen - coffee, soldering iron, you name it, he has it. A big thank you! Not to forget to mention, everything has been run on volunteer's effort, yes, tutor included! Thank you, Ray. What can you do to help? How about start by joining us and co-learn space technology and exploration, come and help teach each other a skill/topic while picking up another. Remember, don't worry about what you don't know or don't think is relevant, come and find a way to join the dots! Check out our "crew wanted" - We are hoping to run more modules in the future, but we rely on you to help. Tip us, do you know a space buff around you? Point them at us! The co-learning model is not about one authoritative all-knowing figure, it's about sharing what you already know and seeing it complimented by someone else in the "lesson" to help each other accelerate and solve problems/bounce ideas. |
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