Squishy Conductive Circuits
It's been a while and I apologise to all out there about not getting this up sooner, but finally the Squishy circuit Instructions are here. These are a great way of teaching kids simple electronics and can be done very cheaply with some bits and pieces picked up in hardware stores and some electronics stores. Any questions please email us and i will endevoure to sort you out on places to buy and any queries you may have.
Conductive Dough (Last's about a month in sealable airtight container) - Can be frozen for longer periods
237 mL Water
355 mL Flour
(A gluten free version of this dough can be made by replacing the flour with gluten-free flour.)
59 mL Salt
44 mL Cream of Tartar*
15 mL Vegetable Oil
Food Coloring (optional) - Takes a little bit of guessing to get this right
*133 mL of Lemon Juice may be Substituted
Procedure:
1. Mix water, 237 mL of flour, salt, cream of tartar, vegetable oil, and food coloring in a medium sized pot.
2. Cook over medium heat and stir continuously.
3. The mixture will begin to boil and start to get chunky.
4. Keep stirring the mixture until it forms a ball in the center of the pot.
5. Once a ball forms, place the ball on a lightly floured surface.
WARNING: The ball will be very hot. Flatten it out and let it cool for afew minutes.
6. Slowly knead the remaining flour into the ball until you’ve reached a desired consistency.
7. Store in an airtight container or plastic bag. While in the bag, water from the dough will create condensation. This is normal. Just knead the dough after removing it from the bag, and it will be as good as new. If stored properly, the dough should keep for several weeks.
Non Conductive dough
Materials:
355 mL Flour
118 mL Sugar
44 mL Vegetable Oil
118 mL Deionized water (Regular tap water can be used, but the resistance of the dough will be lower.)
Procedure:
1. Mix solid ingredients and oil in a pot or large bowl, setting aside 118 mL flour to be used later.
2. Mix with this mixture a small amount of deionized water (about 15 mL) and stir.
3. Repeat this step until a majority water is absorbed by the mixture.
4. Once your mixture is at this consistency, knead the mixture into one “lump”.
5. Knead more water into the dough until it has a sticky, dough-like texture.
6. Now, knead in flour to the dough, until a desired texture is reached.
7. Store in an airtight container or plastic bag. While in the bag, water from the dough will create condensation.
This is normal. Just knead the dough after removing it from the bag, and it will be as good as new. If stored properly, the dough should keep for several weeks in an air tight container or plastic bag.
Please see the links below for some videos and Instructions from the kings of Squishies from the University of St Thomas in Minnesota.
http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/apthomas/SquishyCircuits/videos2.htm
http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/apthomas/SquishyCircuits/buildingCircuits.htm
James (Nerd Herd - @jamesojnr )
Happy Halloween from Lightboxlab
Pumkin fueled by a Raspberry Pi and Piglow led board
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DojoCon 2013
Saturday 13th April members from Drogheda’s Lightbox Lab and Dublin’s TOG (http://www.tog.ie/) hackerspaces took along some of our projects and ideas to the DojoCon conference held in Slane Castle. It was Jester aka Martin Mitchell from TOG who initially suggested that it would be a great idea to have some representation from the irish hackerspace community at the event. So a after a few emails to Graham at CoderDojo Drogheda who also thought it would be a great idea, we put the wheels in motion to get a stand arranged.
TOG are well used to public events but this was to be Lightbox Lab’s first venture outside of our workshop in Millmount and we all were quite new to planning the logistics, so we naturally wanted it be as successful as possible. A week beforehand we got some of our projects organised and ready for the Saturday. And thanks to Paul Doyle and family we were also well set with flyers, posters, and our new banner.
On the Saturday we picked up Jeffrey and Jester from TOG at Drogheda bus station, got ourselves some breakfast and then made our way to Slane Castle.
We knew there might be issues with getting an internet connection in the exhibition area but we had made sure we had a backup plan to get ourselves a reasonable connection so we set this up first. After that we were pretty much set and we set up a bunch of projects and hands on tutorials for people to play with, this included Jester’s lockpicking tutorial, Paddy’s Arduino projects, Paul’s games emulators running on Raspberry Pi, Cians 3D printer, my own playdough and banana powered makey makey sip phone :-) and of course Jeffrey Roe’s soldering tutorial.
The morning was reasonably quiet but there was a steady stream of CoderDojo delegates, organisers and volunteers visiting the stands and getting stuck into the lockpicking and soldering tutorials. Jeffrey later said that about forty people learned to solder on the day!
However come lunchtime we were pretty much swamped for about an hour and a half, there was a lot of interest in hacker and maker spaces and I was surprised to learn how many people had not heard of the community in Ireland. However I think we all did a good job of explaining that it is a community open to anyone interested in exploring technology and that its not just for people who are well skilled in the area.
It also looks like we could have done with another body on the soldering stand, Jeffrey was flat out especially at lunchtime.
Shortly after lunch it was time to bring things to a close, pack up and then head back to Drogheda for some celebratory drinks.
This was of course the time to relax and go over what went well and what we could do better next time round. It was also great to catch up in the pub with the lads from TOG where we discussed ideas around running hackerspaces and some upcoming irish hacker events, most notably Gaelhack which will be a community run event in Waterford in June. details here ( http://gaelhack.hackerspaces.ie/ )
So a fun first day out for Lightbox Lab overall with thanks to CoderDojo for hosting us and of course to TOG for coming up from down south. And of course we hope to do a lot more over the next year or so.
Jonathan