Maker Night Liverpool

Tonight is the 4th Monday of the month so it must be time for Maker Night.

As usual we will be running Maker Night tonight in DoES Liverpool on the 4th floor of Gostins Building, Hanover Street. So come along to work on your own projects, or just to see what is going on in general be it playing with digital fabrication, hacking electronics, constructing art exhibits and just general creative geekery.

Tonight we’ll be introducing our new laser cutter which we’re hoping will enable members of the community to better understand the potential of rapid prototyping using digital fabrication. We’ll be running some demo sessions on that and also allow you to cut out some of your own designs. We’ll also have the 3D printer in action and the usual Arduino kits if you want to try your hands with those (please bring a laptop if you can).

We will be there from 6:30pm for a 7:00pm start, finishing around 9:00pm before we move onto a local pub to wrap up the night.

Hope to see everyone there!

DoES Liverpool CIC have now got the new space open on the 4th floor of the Gostins Building on Hanover Street. To celebrate the opening of the space we’re having an Open Day tomorrow, Friday 22nd July. As part of the day all services will be free of charge, so come along to take a look. Bring a laptop and find some space to work for a few hours or bring your latest project to hack on in the workshop. The space will be open from 9am to 9pm so there’s plenty of time to pop in and have a chat and get some work done!

Our main space is the large workshop, we’ve got a few hot desks for those who want to be in the main room and a few work benches for people hacking on projects. A couple of the co-working desks are located in here too so there will usually be someone around to ask questions to.

View on Photosynth.net

If you need a quieter environment you can use our office space, further from the windows you can get your head down and concentrate on the difficult problems of life.

If you want to meet with clients, or perhaps you’ve started working on a great start-up idea with other members of DoES Liverpool, you can use our meeting room. Sit around the table thrashing ideas out or use the flipboard to work on new designs.

Don’t forget, if you can’t make it to the open day (or even if you do) you get your first day’s hot desking for free if you bring cake!

We’ve been so busy we almost forgot to announce it but now we have a home for DoES Liverpool in addition to continuing our regular Maker Nights at the Art and Design Academy we’ll be holding an in house Maker Night at our own DoES Liverpool Co-Working and Workshop space on the Forth Floor of the Gostins building, Hanover Street on Wednesday 27th of July.

Watch this space for more information, or follow @DoESLiverpool on Twitter.

Maker Night at the Art and Design Academy (ADA) has been really successful since we started holding it there back in January. The Maker Night event was actually born out of an existing gathering of people with interest in technology who had been meeting every month in various pubs and were really hoping to find a more permanent home. When the great people at LJMU and  the ADA offered us their workshop space we jumped at the chance of having a more permanent space and the group has grown hugely and the events have been really popular. With the success of the Maker Nights we have wanted to find a way to extend this and create somewhere that people can visit any time to work, to learn and to build successful businesses.

To enable this we have registered DoES Liverpool as a Community Interest Company and are happy to announce that we’ve found our first home. We introduced DoES Liverpool CIC last night at GeekUp Liverpool and discussed the space that we’re setting up. The slides from that presentation can be found here:

Or download the PDF here: Introducing DoES Liverpool

The aim of the space is to further grow and support the community of people interested and involved in technology that has been building over the past few years in Liverpool and the surrounding areas. We also aim to help small businesses and start-ups by creating a space within which they can work, network and build up a business. Perhaps a loftier aim of DoES is to make Liverpool great again.

In just over a week we aim to be moving into our new home in the Gostins Building on Hanover Street in central Liverpool. The facilities that we can offer in our space will grow as the community grows, and will be directed by the community, but from the beginning we will be offering three main services: co-working desks available on a monthly basis, access to a workshop and flexible hot desks. For our monthly desks we’ll be offering a desk plus drawers and should be offering some privacy by having the option of taking the desk in a smaller lockable office. In our workshop we will have work surfaces, electricity and internet. We’ll also have a variety of tools and equipment provided by us, the organisers, which will hopefully grow as more people join the community.

We’re also intending to allow community groups to use the workshop space for meetings. We’re still figuring out how that will work but if you need a space then get in touch and we’ll work things out, and we do aim to have free options available for that.

Here’s the prices that we’re going to be charging:

DoES Liverpool CIC is not VAT registered.

So if you think you might be interested then please get in touch with us, either by emailing hello <AT> doesliverpool.com or contacting us on twitter. We’d really like to have you join us and make this a great space and a fun community to be part of. To finish off and whet your appetite here’s a photo of the space we’re looking to get.

As a bonus for May Maker Night will be hosting it’s second event of the week as part of Liverpool Light Night on Friday the 13th.

This is in addition to the normal Maker Night date on the Wednesday.

Sorry about the short notice, and even if you don’t want to make use of the facilities for the full amount of time, do drop in and see what’s going on if you’re passing.

You can read more about Light Night at www.lightnight.co.uk/liverpool.php

As this is part of a bigger event, if you have any cool examples of projects you’ve worked on that you’d like to show off we’d like to encourage you to bring them along.

April’s Maker Night at the Art and Design Academy was another huge turn out, with still more faces joining the crowd which is always great to see.

Two announcements from the night, firstly the Art and Design Academy needs to introduce a small charge for the use of the laser cutting facilities of 60 pence per minute which covers the cost of the consumable elements within the cutters mechanics. – If you haven’t done any laser cutting before and wondering how that adds  up, unless you’re doing something really complicated most cuts I’ve seen complete in a minute or two.

From May, Maker Night moves to the 2nd Wednesday of the month which means that the May event will be on the Wednesday 11th of May.

In the show and tell section of the night Mycroft Milverton gave a demonstration of this Radio Arduino, which converts an old radio into a digital device making use of a Wave Shield. There is a video of the finished device over on YouTube and it will be part of an upcoming exhibit at Edge Hill’s Metal Art’s Center.

More progress was made constructing the MakerBot CupCake which now looks the part with all the large sections pretty much in place, there is a rumour it might be completed at the May Maker Night (Though I might have just started this rumour now) with Ross Jones and Andy Freeney among those aiding in the construction.

Adrian McEwen ran his introduction to Arduino and The Internet of Things once again for a handful of newcomers and people were let loose on the ARDX starter kits to try their hand at the projects there. (Remember if you’d like to have a go with our Arduino kits you’ll need to bring along your own laptop but we’ll supply all the parts to let you explore the Arduino at your own pace)

Other projects people worked on at the night include Andy Goodwin building his own 3D scanner, Nicola planning to build her own Arduino powered hamster food feeder, and Dan wanting to combine motion control with a time-lapse camera to produce time-lapse sequences that shift perspective over time.

We also had some old circuits donated by Sam Freeman, which a few of us had a go at de-soldering components from and a couple of pieces were given new homes.

And that’s just the stuff I can remember! If I missed anything, or you’d like to have links to more information about your projects included let me know, if you’d like to write a post or two about your project to share it with the world we can give you space here too.

This months event at the Liverpool Art and Design Academy was another success, with some new faces to add to the mix and people making progress with their individual and group projects.

The Makerbot Cupcake 3D Printer that some of the group have been building in particular has made significant progress and it’s hoped that it could reach completion at the next session (April 20th) Neil Winterburn and Ross Dalziel  had a blimp floating around the room as they explored options for their Flunstellars project. Andy Freeney assembled and soldered together a Wave Shield for his Arduino, which will allow him to play .wav files from it’s memory card and Chris Nolan from FACT showed off some of the work he mentioned at the last event retrofitting obsolete technology with Arduino driven technology to give new life housed in the iconic shells, in this case an old rotary phone. Once again people who have never done any electronics before we able to build and program their first circuit boards using the ARDX kits on hand for experimenting with.

We also had our youngest visitor so far, Finley who is 9.

And I no doubt missed off some activities, so feel free to add a comment to point out anything else that deserves a mention.

If you’d like to keep up to date with announcements about future Maker Nights and related creative/tech events in Liverpool you should join the DoES Liverpool Google Group.

It appears that Maker Night is once again almost upon us, and so thought it best to remind everyone following the blog/feed so that they can make arrangements.  This Wednesday will be the 16th of March, and as per usual it is 6.30 at the Liverpool Art and Design Academy on Duckinfield St.

Carrying on from last time will be the Cupcake build (instructions here) as well as other projects that were started at the February meeting – blimp, beehive etc, but we’ll also be holding the one minute pitches at the start of the meeting should anybody want to try and elicit help/interest from those present.

Anybody coming for the first time might want to find Adrian (@amcewen) who will happily give you an intro to using an Arduino, or if you are more interested in digital fabrication he can point you in the right direction.

See you Wednesday!

Update: It looks like the laser cutter will be unavailable this month, hopefully back up and running next month – but there will still be plenty going on so do come along.

With the second Maker Night held at Liverpool Art and Design Academy following the hugely successful FabCamp and Social Media in Liverpool Week a lot of interest had brewed up ahead of this months gathering and a number of new faces joined the more regular crowed, filling the space we have nicely – Though still with room for more!

Kicking off with a round of lightning pitches people got a chance to seek help, interest, or just show off what they were looking at working on and projects mentioned included automated blimps, smart beehives, geo-physics equipment, a GPS based bus management system, taking a part a CD player, a multi-handed clock for displaying Liverpool ferry locations and getting a set of LEDs to illuminate a picture frame. Special mention needs to go to the highly anticipated Makerbot Cupcake provided by Blue Fountain, which has arrived and got it’s first showing last night.