Concepts

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Concepts

e-ink display

Get our hands on as many October '08 Esquire e-ink magazine covers as possible and rewire them into tiles of one big low-power display. (PY's idea originally. -elgreengeeto ). Or, alternatively, just try to get some e-ink bulk from China and make an even cooler low-power display.


Transit status information

I've written something that uses [1] together with Festival to give announcements about BART trains approaching 16th Street. I intend on setting this up with a cron job to run around the time of the scheduled last trains every night (and maybe the first train in the morning if we think people may frequently stay until around 4:00 a.m.!), using the music server once it's stable. To avoid annoying people this should probably not be configured to make regular announcements at other times. Two extensions to make this more useful: (1) if we can get or make a USB-to-buttons/switches or parallel-port-to-buttons/switches adapter, we can have a big button somewhere that causes an announcement to occur (for use when people are thinking of catching BART and want to know when it's coming). (2) If we can get a big scrolling LED sign with computer control, we can have it constantly display train status -- as well as Muni bus announcements with data from NextBus, perhaps using a library to get it. Schoen 23:30, 9 October 2008 (PDT)


T-shirt printer

I'm still looking into the best way to do it, but some sort of t-shirt printer would be fun and useful. Seems that direct to cloth ink-jet techniques don't look as good as silk screening, but old-fashioned silk-screen is hella old-fashioned. Maybe some way to achieve silk screening results but with only limited human-interference? I'm thinking that proceeds from über-fashionable Noisebridge t-shirt sales would eventually off-set costs of this project. elgreengeeto 16:32, 10 October 2008 (PDT)


RepRap

RepRaps are a kind of homemade 3D printers capable of self-replicating, as well as being used for rapid prototyping and manufacturing. There is interest in constructing a RepRap at NoiseBridge. See RepRap.


Ambient Activity Mutating Space

Place properly signed microphones in part of the space. Pick up conversations, feed them to voice recognition software. Extract nouns and phrases from the results. Render the top results from searching these phrases on displays in the space, twitter them on the Noisebridge twitter stream, and do other fun things. Maybe also do gesture recognition, too. See Ambient Activity Mutating Space.


Pancakes

there's a saying to the effect that the first batch is always ruined. a similar saying says don't buy any software with a rev of 1.0. is there such a saying about wikis? should there be? what about refactoring this wiki so's to make it easier to navigate (e.g. don't have two separate "infrastructure" sections)? --Jstockford 16:38, 19 October 2008 (PDT)

This falls very much into the category of Just Do It. That said, it's a fairly big job that I personally have not found time to take on. If anyone wants to collaborate on wiki reorganization I'm up for that (I like Organized). Rachel 16:49, 19 October 2008 (PDT)


Electronics Essentials

seems likely that people working on electronic projects would find a variable power supply and a function generator handy along with some other basic test gear (e.g. pink noise generator, resistance bridge, LC measuring device...). many such things are available as kits. i've got one or two myself and would like to build them down there and leave them for people to use. what cautions wrt other peoples' careful use? signs or brief instruction sheets helpful? --Jstockford 16:38, 19 October 2008 (PDT)

anyone want to collaborate on building kits and devices? --Jstockford 16:38, 19 October 2008 (PDT)