A Different Kind of Festival

Swapping Wellies for Robot Dinosaurs, Mass Spectrometers and Laser Light Synths at Wuthering Bytes 2016.

This year is the fifth Wuthering Bytes I’ve attended and I have been looking forward to it more than ever. Over two days were so many fantastic talks, I find it difficult to narrow it down to a few which I would call my favourites. Between the two days I would have to say that these included: Making the Laser Light Synths, Openly Educating the Next Generation of Engineers and What Does Mass Spectrometry Have to Do With Me, closely followed by Hacking Robot Dinosaurs and Project Nimbus.

Hacking Robot Dinosaurs – Dr Lucy Rogers

To kick off the Festival Day the first talk was from Dr Lucy Rogers with ‘What I did in my Summer Holidays’ AKA ‘Hacking Robot Dinosaurs’. Around May time last year Dr Rogers gave a similar talk at the May 2015 OSHUG, more details of this talk were included in my post Learning about the IoT and Node RED.

Dr Rogers is well known not only as an author, a maker and an inspiration to many engineers, but also as a judge on the new series of the BBC’s Robot Wars. Dr Rogers spoke of how back in 1980 at the age of ten years old she visited Blackgang Chine on the Isle of Wight and how many years later met one of the descendants from the founder Alexander Dabell. After meeting the descendent of the founder whom is also named Alexander Dabell, in 2010 Dr Rogers decided to visit once again 30 years since her first visit as a child.

Unfortunately 30 years of exposure to the elements hadn’t done the dinosaurs any favours and at this point they were now more faded than ferocious. In the main T-Rex of the park the electronics had been fried, since the electronics were from the 1980’s replacement parts couldn’t be sourced. It was going to take a minimum of 6 weeks for brand new electronics to arrive from China – with only two weeks until the parks busiest time of the year, the 6 week holidays, waiting this long wasn’t an option. It was at this point where the Raspberry Pi came to the rescue!

The staff at Blackgang Chine are generally multidisciplinary and have various roles across the park, so what was really important was that the staff could understand how to program the dinosaurs if needed. This was where Node RED came in with the Raspberry Pi. Dr Rogers explained the basic principles of Node RED – which is a visual drag and drop programming language – and how it was implemented into the design. This was then followed by a demonstration of how easy it is to use Node RED, and how she began teaching the staff at Blackgang Chine to program it to turn an LED off and on again.

Although I’ve heard a variation of this talk once before it still remains one of my favourites, allowing the audience to interact with the demonstration dinosaur using #WakeDino on twitter.

Project Nimbus – Dave Lynch

I particularly enjoyed this talk in which Dave Lynch told us how he turned a pipe dream to the clouds. Project Nimbus was a concept originally dreamt up by Dave which he didn’t think could actually happen, after discovering that it could he showed us how he moved through prototypes to his final working design. After eight years in the making in 2015 Dave finally achieved a working design where he projected the image, Horse in Motion (Muybridge 1878), onto the clouds.

Project Nimbus had plenty of obstacles to overcome before they managed to get a working design, some of which included; the difficulties of finding the right kind of cloud to project on in the right place at the right time and correct height. Finding an airfield and a plane, developing the Laser Zoopraxiscope and the difficulties of capturing the moving image due to frame rate.

What Does Mass Spectrometry Have to do with me - Giles Edwards

Giles Edwards is an Analytical Chemist who hopes others will share his enthusiasm for Mass Spectrometry. After a crash course in GCSE Chemistry as an audience we got thrown in at the deep end, considering it’s been years for most of the attendees since having to think about the valency of elements. This brisk run through of the fundamentals gave us more of a chance of understanding how mass spectrometry works.

Giles ran over the basic construction of a mass spectrometer and how one works, for anyone who is unsure:

“A mass spectrometer works by first turning molecules into ions, or electrically charged versions of themselves, which can be more easily manipulated, detected and analysed based on their mass.”

- Giles Edwards, What Does Mass Spectrometry Have to do with me presentation, Wuthering Bytes Festival Day 2016.

So how does it involve me? Giles went on to explain not only how a mass spectrometer works but also how they involve us in day-to-day life. Mass spectrometers are used in neonatal, drug, security and food screening as well as for carbon dating! Carbon dating is something which I have always been curious about, learning more about how a mass spectrometer is used to determine the reminder of Carbon-14 isotope knowing that this has a half life of 5730 year

This was actually my favourite talk of the Festival Day; I had forgot how much I enjoyed chemistry at school. The fact that this talk not only taught me new things but revised what I hadn’t looked at in years. Listening to Giles makes the electronics engineer in me want to know more about the electronics and control side of a mass spectrometer – maybe some research is in order!

Openly Educating the Next Generation of Engineers – Ken Boak

One of the first talks to kick off OSHCamp was Ken Boak speaking about past and present techniques and principles which are used in the education system and how this can benefit from open hardware.

One thing which I’m personally quite passionate about is finding new ways to educate the next generation of engineers, especially considering that I haven’t taken the most conventional route into engineering. Having more options seems to be more appealing to encourage more young people to pursue engineering – especially women and girls. As I have an interest in the education system when it comes to engineering I found Ken’s talk really compelling.

Making the Laser Light Synths – Seb Lee-Delisle

Seb Lee-Delisle is an artist who enjoys making interesting things which code that encourage the participation of the public to interact and be playful, and I feel the Laser Light Synths project captures this perfectly.

From building the very first prototype to the finished design, Seb Lee-Delisle walked us through his journey of Making the Laser Light Synths. A Laser Light Synth is an LED emblazoned musical instrument that anyone can play, and in Seb’s case using these in large outdoor installations (along with high power lasers) allow the audience to perform.

The first versions of the synths used large copper pads on long pieces of MDF. The finished synths consisted of 100’s SMT RGB LEDs on a custom board in a specially designed case. Seb explained how these were programmed so that when an area was touched the LEDs would flash then fade out, similar to how the human eye would react to a bright flash. I really like how he programmed the LEDs to behave in such a way, which meant an incredibly artificial light could be visualised how the brain reacts to a natural bright flash when seen by the naked eye.

What I really enjoyed about this project which made it stand out from the rest was the fact that in every aspect there’s audience interaction, not only in his performances but also in his presentation.

Laser Light Synths unedited footage from Seb Lee-Delisle on Vimeo.

Running a Soldering Workshop

It’s the third year I’ve run a soldering workshop as park of Wuthering Bytes now and I find each year it gets more and more popular. This years kit for OSHCamp was a random number generator which uses noise to generate a true random number. You can find out more about the OSHCamp 2016 kit including assembling this on DesignSpark.

This year we’ve had more parents from the festival bringing along their children to learn how to solder, also others from a wide range backgrounds and capabilities coming along to either learn to solder or just for a hand assembling this years kit. I really enjoy being able to teach people a new skill which hopefully they will want to carry on in the future. Ideally if I could I would run soldering workshops more often, maybe this is something I could look at incorporating into any activities I do as a STEM Ambassador.