Category: Community

All things to do with the greater makerspace hacker space community as well as our local community

Hoover Garden Project Kick-off Meeting

Highlights from the December 6th Kick-off meeting

  • Meeting attendees included Wanda Stewart, Miguel Elliot, and Crafty Rachel as well as 3 engineering students from Cal.
  • We discussed the structures for the garden including a bulletin board, outdoor kitchen, coops, primary signage and more. It really helped to get a handle on the project
  • We discussed goals as relates to signage and communication structures. A focus on communication that helps folks know “how to be” in the garden came up… and refined as 3 buckets: Self/Others/World
  • Some logistics worked out including agreeing on a shared google calendar, a slack channel on the AMT Platform (#hoover-garden).
  • Two milestones where identified: January 15th workday and January 24th for the class workshops to begin.

Next Design meeting December 20th • Noon to 1:30 • via Google Hang Outs

Learn More about the project and join us as a contributor

AMT Badges

Show folks who step up a little love with a button badge!

Have you spotted these badges in our space yet? We’re excited to introduce a new badge program in which members can acknowledge and celebrate community engagement. AMT Badges are little tokens of appreciation that member can give each other. We do so much for each other and the community… give a badge to a member when you see them stepping up!

Guidelines

To get badges: You must be gifted the badge by somebody else.

To give badges: When you see something worthy, choose your badge give it to the person and ping an officer so we can post a digital badge to the recipients AMT profile. Also if you want give a badge anonymously an officer can be your messenger.

Badges are located on the media table upstairs.

Don’t see the badge you need?

Have a great idea for a badge? You can email officers to get a new badge created OR make your own custom badges on any of the Thursday Night General Meetings when we crack out the button maker.

Badges may sometime in the future make you eligible for special classes (sash making!!)

Hoover Elementary School Edible Garden Project

AMT is thrilled to be partnering with Hoover Elementary School in Oakland for a community benefit project. With the help of a team of engineering students from UC Berkeley, AMT will provide the community, space, tools, minor funding and mentorship to help create a truly edible community garden at the school. Our partnership will focus on signage, other usability aspects and will include developing classroom content to engage students in the design and build process.

We will be starting to meet weekly for design co-working in the space during the last week of November. We are part of a larger team doing a complete garden build out lead by the Hoover Elementary garden steward Wanda Stewart. We are actively seeking mentors, educators, and makers who are excited to get involved and contribute to this project.

All kinds of support are welcomed: whether you are interested in documenting, building, developing classroom content or designing builds in the garden.

Contact @crafty on Slack to get involved! Or email [email protected]

TechShop may be closed but your community isn’t

On November 15th TechShop folded… and folks have a ton of questions. This post attempts to answer them as well as offer folks some new options we added to take care of things. Ace Monster Toys makerspace is committed to being a community resources especially in these wacky time. If we don’t have what the TS orphans need we will do our best to connect you with folks that do.

Tours, Meet-ups and Classes

We have added a some things to address the needs of the community. We will add more as the situation develops.

Tour – Thursday, November 16th – 7pm

General meeting and round table discussion with special guests from other spaces – Thursday, November 16th – 7:30pm (food and drink served)

Laser 101 – Saturday, November 18th – 11am – 12:30pm (required for using our laser)

Tour – Saturday, November 18th – 12:45 – 1:15pm

Update: AMT is an all volunteer-run member supported community. Unless we have posted a specific event or you have made personal arrangements with a member please don’t just drop in. We are not open to the public outside of events posted on meetup.com but you can join our Slack team on our contact page to possibly make special arrangements outside of events by emailing [email protected] .

 

Tools and Equipment at AMT

Tools and what we have are covered on this overview page.

Laser! Yes we have one. It is very affordable. You have to take the $5 Laser 101 Class and pass an online test to use it. The soonest that can happen is Saturday afternoon.

Any of the tools that can hurt you easily or are easy to break require certification.

 

How AMT is different than TechShop

We are volunteer run… so set your response time expectations and service expectations accordingly. Also when asking for somebody’s time and energy remember you are asking for personal effort.

We are a community not a rental facility. You can read more here about the differences.

AMT Members are expected to do more that just pay dues. All members are expected to do one small task a month and participate in one large task or build per year.

We don’t use booking systems for tool use… members talk to each other instead. Mostly on slack.

 

How to Write a Blog Post for AMT

1. Go to acemonstertoys.org and login to your member account.

2. Create a new post by clicking “Post” in the “New” dropdown menu.

3. Create your blog post using images and text! Write a snappy title, write your content and insert images using the “add media” button. You can select a category for your post in the appropriate menu in the side bar, as well as preview your post with the “preview” button and publish when you are ready.

4. Set your featured image. Scroll all the way down to “featured image” in the sidebar, and select or upload an image. The image will automatically be resized to a square thumbnail for the home page, but also shows up full size above your title in the blog. Landscape orientation works best. See the wiki for recommendations on featured image size: http://wiki.acemonstertoys.org/AMT_Blog_Image_Tips

More on uploading images:

  1. Clicking “add media” allows you to select from images in our media library, or you can upload your files using the “upload files” tab.

2. Once uploaded to the media library, you can select or deselect photos, and chose their alignment and size in the dropdown menus under “attachment display settings”.

3. Click “insert into post” once you are happy with your settings.

4. Once an image is inserted into your post, you can change the alignment or size settings by clicking the image once and then clicking the “edit” button on the tool bar that appears. It looks like a little pencil.

5. In the image editor panel that will open, you can make changes to your image, such as choosing to center align it, changing the size, or adding a caption. You can also click “edit original” for more options.

6. In this panel, you can rotate, flip, scale or crop your image. Make sure you click the blue save button when you make changes.

For more help with images and layout, wordpress has tons of documentation: https://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts

 

REWARD: Team members for the AMT FATT Project

About the project

Fob All The Things! (FATT) is an AMT project to add fob integration so members can use their accounts to charge laser time, buy vending machine items, use sensitive equipment and get access to the space.

While doors and the laser are currently fob accessible those system are starting to show their age. So we began looking for a solution that was :

  1. maintainable — documentation + language / platform that isn’t too specialized)
  2. repeatable — The results of the project should be able to be repeated down the line should a new thing need to be fobbed.
  3. scalable — simple = doors > complex = vending machine) .
  4. affordable — While it is true that you get what you pay for we need affordable solutions
  5. sustainable — As in modular enough to repair easily and with work arounds/redundancies built in when possible

FATT Products

FATT Products are centered around AMT initiatives that solve problems or allow for access to tools and system for making. This project is under development with a great team of folks but we need more help Here are the current initiative including the New Laser Fob box:

Laser Fob Box

We have a glorious new laser being worked on a few blocks away. 120watts of infrared glory with a more user friendly and safe interface/controller set up. In order to get this project into a ready to use state we need to build a fob box that:

  • Talks to the controller and tracks firing time
  • Allows a use to fob in, validate authorization and track that laser firing time
  • Send various bits of use data back so that it can be used to bill and manage the queue for use

Our current laser as a similar fob box that was developed over time. So we know this can be done.

We have a nice crew of folks on the laser team but we urgently need somebody to take the lead on building the laser fob box if we are going to have a working laser in the space in the next 2-3 weeks.

Vending Machine

The vending machine is a true hackerspace project along the lines of what Nottingham Hackspace, NYC Resistor and ATX Hackerspace. We acquired an old vending machine we are hacking to hold things that facilitate making. The crew of folks working on this has made great progress with the machine hardware and the back end interface but now we need to join the two with FATT “product”.

This project is slightly more complex than the laser fob box but not by much.

Doors

The doors were the first fobbed project at AMT way back in the day (6+ years ago). Yeah… and also it is time to replace them as sensor are failing and technology has advanced.

Honor Bar

The honor bar is what you think it is. And assortment of snack products and coffee upstairs. The idea with this project is to be able to fob in, select your products and have it go to your account to be billed once a a month with the other billable things like laser time.

Keggerator

This is what you think it is. This will allow users with ID on file to get beer during meetings and work parties using there fob. We will not be selling beer though.

Wide Format Printer

We got a lovely donation of a wide format printer. It was awesome and now we need to be able to gate-keep it similarly to the laser and charge folks for their consumables.

How to sign up and join the team

Team players should have some or all of the following to offer:

  • Leave a legacy (document)
  • Sees project as product (not prototype)
  • Experience microprocessors (Arduino, Rpi)
  • Solid electronics knowledge including PCBs (custom and off the shelf)
  • Python + Experience working with APIs
  • Can start now and see the project through to at least the Laser Fob Box and the vending machine

Contact [email protected] or chime in on the #fob-all-the-things channel on the AMT Slack team.

The Reward of 25k minuets of laser time

AMT originally got the laser and had it up in running because a dedicated group of volunteers invested their time and money in the laser and were paid back in laser time as well as money. We are following in the footprints of that successful model to offer a reward to those that want to contribute to the next stage at AMT when it comes to not just laser use but automation in general.

The reward of team will be split amongst the core team members for this project.

 

How AMT is different from a service bureau or contract facility

AMT has a variety of different types of members. We have hobbyists, artists, students, entrepreneurs and small business people. We have members who are a little bit of all of these things at once. We have conversations every so often about what kind of org are we when we are weighted more one way than another. So we are going to take a stab at describing how we are different from service bureau’s and contract facilities in a Q&A format.

Base definitions

Service bureau provide services for a fee (PSPrint, Ponoko, etc).

One can rent space/equipment in an contract facility for a contracted fee (example: commercial kitchens).

AMT is neither of those things. AMT is a member based non-profit organization dedicated to education and make culture. AMT can also be described as furthering those goals by having a shared workspace and tools.

Q&A

Q:Do we want to foster and support business incubation in our community?

A: Yes. We don’t police the motivations behind folks joining AMT as long as it is to make, teach, or learn. If you are doing those three things as a hobbyist great. If you are doing any of those three things as a entrepreneur that is great too.

 

Q: Is fostering and incubating businesses our primary reason for being here or how we are structurally set up?

A: No. We are here to help people make things, help people help each other to make things and to learn.

 

Q: Can you work on your small business or incubate your start up here?

A: Yes, as an individual member with all the rights and responsibilities of a member. AMT’s relationships are with individuals who make, teach or learn. AMT as an entity does not offer memberships to businesses. That would be contrary to our mission and reason for existing. We don’t offer membership or create contract relationships with business entity’s because that would endanger our 501(c) status*.

*At some time in the future we may be able to engage in a fiduciary relationship with other organizations that have a mission to make, teach or learn such as the public library or other non-profits, but that would require research and lawyering.

 

Q: Does working on your small business or incubating your start-up change your membership?

A: Nope. Membership is offered to individuals. Those individuals get the same privileges (guests, tool use). They also have the same obligations as individuals… pay your dues, follow the rules, mind your guests, keep things clean, be responsible for what you use, etc, participate. Expectations should also not change just because you are in individual who happens to be working on a business. Expect this to be a community space built by the good will of the folks who volunteer their time and expertise.