LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

Arduino Halloween from Duxbury Free Library on Vimeo . It wasn't easy but we were able to accomplish our 2 Halloween projects: an LED pumpkin and a talking motion sensor skull.  I'll go over each and things that we learned (aka what they sometimes to forget to tell you in the directions). Special thanks to Kevin Osborn for coming down to provide his expertise for the skull.  Also worth noting, Lynda.com also has great tutorials for beginner Arduino. This subscription is offered free of charge in our library and also if you are a librarian through the MBLC. We started with the hardest one first, THE TALKING SKULL (Advanced) *If you are just starting out I suggest doing the entire SIK CODE GUIDE book (comes with the Sparkfun Inventor's Kit) and if you're not ready to throw it out the window then try the Pumpkin* Items required: PIR Motion Sensor    $9.95 Sparkfun Inventors Kit   $99.95 Sparkfun MP3 Shield   $39.95 microsd card and micro SD ...

Working with the Arduino microprocessor platform is challenging. It teaches many lessons to teens and adults alike that are worth listening to.  Precision matters. Reading the fine print and following directions pays off. Learning how things work and how to diagnose an error takes time and can be boring anf frustrating. It helps to collaborate and ask others what they think. We're learning to take the code and run with it. If the piezo buzzer is playing Monster Mash, what else can it play? How do we change its tune? If the LCD screen says, "Hello world," how can we change that to say a different message? How do we adjust the code to do what we want it to do? Adding sound and sensory shields to our Arduinos is a big step and we are still working out the details and complications of them. But we are not stopping at the introductory stages. We are pushing ourselves to learn more about how things work and why. We are constantly surprised by how patient our teens are and h...

We had a great time in the children's room this week making Halloween decorations for our Tinkering Thursday class for grades 4 & 5 using littleBits.  Besides the littleBits, this program cost $7 in Halloween decorations at the local dollar store.  We are fortunate to have littleBits deluxe kits as well as base kits to mix and match.   The most important thing to have extra is:   *blue power bits and batteries (since a 9V battery can only power so many bits at once and you can't add extra power circuits onto your original).   *orange wire bits (to extend their led lights or buzzers off of the circuit bases). I began the one hour class by opening the kits and having kids experiment with all the bits available, towards the 20 minute mark I showed them all the decorations they had to work with and they began thinking about how they could design circuits that went with it.This is where the orange wire bits came in handy .   One thing I w...

Just in time for the release of the new movie The Boxtrolls , done entirely in claymation stop motion, we finished up a month long after school Lego stop motion program on Tuesdays for students in Gr. 6-8. Ellen thought it would be a good idea to talk about the structure of the program and some tips we have learned along the way. Material Must Haves: iStopMotion ($5.99), iMovie ($9.99), and DropBox (free) app iPads Bins of Legos and figures *Note: This can also be done though the camera in a phone or tablet (regular camera phone app that comes free) and downloaded into iMove for a Mac or Windows Movie Maker for a PC (bearing in mind you have laptops or free computers handy) if you are on a shoestring budget. It's just less streamlined that way.  The key to stopmotion is FRAMES PER SECOND which can be changed in any of these editing programs as long as the students have taken enough photos. Preparation Tip : Make sure to separate out weapons, costumes, and Lego f...

In the YA & Children's department, we are gearing up for Halloween using Arduino and littleBits. How cool would it be to do homemade Halloween interactive props? Every year we say that we want to do a Haunted House and this is our first step in the right direction. littleBits just released some Halloween inspired projects: creepy picture frames , pumpkins, & EL wire wearables using the Deluxe kits. We will be using these as a baseline for ideas in our Tinkering Thursday Halloween projects on October 16th. My hope is that they could be put on display until Halloween (if they aren't too scary). As an advanced project for the middle school DIY Club, we are going to be using the Sparkfun Arduino Inventors Kit to go through the manual for 2 weeks practicing breadboard circuitry and preset Arduino programming. They have a great easy to understand manual with detailed pictures for beginners. From there, we have researched Halloween based projects for further explorati...

This fall we have been lucky to have the benefit of a Simmons School of Library and Information Science intern, Anne Lundregan, working with us on our Digital Media Lab Makerspace. Everyone wins: she gets academic credit for working with us and developing some programming on her own to test out on our patrons, and we get a commited 10 hours/week professional-in-training to help us develop our new initiative. Now we are planning to develop a structured volunteer program centered on our Digital Media Lab (DML). It's always tricky to figure out how to use volunteers and how to give them enough buy-in to make a reliable commitment. Our circulation volunteers are very reliable and seem to know they are much appreciated. They tend to be retired folks who have daytime hours to offer, which is so helpful. With Makerspaces, the expertise we are looking for may come in the form of working people whose availability is much more constrained. Though they may not work on Saturdays, who...