LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

Here's one of our Arduino interactive mural installation elements. The challenge for us is to find the balance between getting our Maker-in-Residence to install a few elements to give us a sense of what is possible and "jump-start" the installation but not doing the whole thing for us. We want our young patrons to build and explore the artistic and technological possibilities and learn the building blocks of 3D printing and programming for microprocessors. We have our work cut out for us and there may be some post-session mopping up to do, but that's okay.

I'm in love..... Digital Caliper Tool We tried to print an iPhone case twice and still did not get the exact measurements right because we were using a regular ruler. With the Digital Caliper, we can now get an exact reading which will help with persnickety items like a phone case. It's available through Amazon for only $30.  This is also a quick and easy way to show kids what the actual size of their object is before printing.

We are starting to paint our garden, designed and facilitated by Duxbury artist, Sally Dean, on the plastic blue partition wall. The garden elements are being 3D printed by the kids and teens and today we will begin learning from Kevin Osborn, how to write Arduino code to make the servos that power the interactivity work! This is a big, on-going project, which is just the kind of thing we feel sparks creativity and BIG thinking in a Makerspace. Tools and equipment: Portable Partition from Minnesota company Acrylic paints , brushes, drop clothes, etc. Gridding out the garden design with a wax pencil Arduino kits from Sparkfun Lots of extra sensors and stuff from Adafruit Riley thought to glue gun details on that she had 3Doodled.

The next step in engaging girls into coding could be jewelbots. Jewelbots are friendship bracelets that will allow girls to communicate with each other while Bluetooth syncing with their iPhone and friend's bracelets. They remind me of a girl's hair elastic they are so thin (which might be a design flaw). The bracelets are not available just yet but you can get on the email list.  These bracelets will allow girls to send messages between synced bracelets or get message updates about social media or texts from their phone. So how do girls learn code? The program is Arduino open source based and the website alludes to being able to program a multitude of different commands into the bracelet. Boston.com reports girls will be able to send messages through Morse code in the bracelets. Another merging of old technology and new!

Last week, when we demoed our 3D printers, one mother asked me, "Why is this at the library?" I think projects like our summer interactive wall will be the answer to her question. Thanks to the help of local artist Sally Dean Mello ,"maker in residence" Kevin Osborn and students from our Tuesday Tinkering Lab, we've begun working on an interactive wall that can be wheeled around the library. Our goal was to have a painted mural wall that patrons can touch with 3D moving aspects. We started by buying a plastic screened wall which Sally designed and outlined a garden scene. We decided upon this wall because we could move it around the library, or maybe even take it on the road, rather than using one of our permanent walls. For the past 2 weeks, students have been coloring it in with acrylic paint during our Tinkering Lab. We invited art students from the high school to come over and now we have a few newcomers to the Lab.  While this has been going on, we ha...

Many of you might be struggling with patrons or staff saying, "Ok what are you REALLY going to use a 3D printer for? I don't want to print out toys."  Here's a story: A staff member's mother had broke the knob off her air conditioner. They tried gluing the knob back together to no avail so she would just have to use pliers to turn the piece of metal left that attached the knob right? Wrong! We can just design something in tinkercad to fix the error. All I needed was the broken knob in question which I measured out in mm and replicated in the design software using the round roof and cylinder shape.  My main concern was that the hole would fit securely so I made sure to measure the height and width of the hole as accurately as I could. I love that the metric system is in 10s. 10cm=1mm where cm is conveniently on most rulers opposite side of the inches.  It fit like a glove! I recommend using the strong setting in the cube software so the piece is strong enoug...

Here are some go to tools to have when 3D printing: box cutter, needle nose pliers, wire snips The wire snips are handy when you build any kind of supports or rafts onto your project and you need to carefully cut them off. The needle nose pliers I usually use to remove gunk from the tip of the extruder and the boxcutter was for getting off those 3D printed jobs that have stuck themselves to the non heated plate. My newest tool: painter's tape. Sometimes the simplest things can make life easier. As I was struggling with my box cutter to pry a 3D creation from our Cube 2 non heated plate, a man went by our table at the Cape Cod Mini Maker Faire and said, "Oh just cover the plate with painter's tape". EUREKA! I still have to cover the masking tape with our special glue before printing but now when I try to pull off the creation I just pull at a tape strip and it comes off easily. No more soaking the plate for 10 minutes in hot water or prying it off with a knife (o...