Stuart Childs

Howduino is a meetup group organised by Adrian McEwen and Tom Shannon – along with lots of help from other lovely people. It’s all based around Arduino boards – little (usually USB equipped) circuit boards with inputs and outputs allowing you to either connect your PC to the outside world, or program the onboard microprocessor chip to function as a standalone ‘computer’.

There is an already brilliant community based around the Arduino boards, as well as many offshoots and board clones. Many people share their Arduino code and help others out with their projects – one of the amazing aspects of the internet. Howduino’s strength however is the physical meeting up and spending time in a room with people playing with, programming and hacking about with the Arduinos. The Howduino events that I have attended have always had a good mix of beginners right through to hardened computer scientists and programmers, Arduino nuts and artists with craft skills. There was even a physics teacher at the Newcastle event!

By remaining open to all who wish to attend the atmosphere is brilliant. A real hot pot of – stuff happening.

Howduino Newcastle was hosted at the Newcastle Centre for Life – home to lots of other events, including Maker Faire UK. I had never been to Newcastle before Maker Faire UK 2009 and now I’ve got a bit of an addiction to going back as the Centre for Life always seems to have cool stuff going on.

[ Short and fairly quiet AudioBoo of the introduction from Adrian and Thom ]

Held on the 24th and 25th of July, we had two days to crack on with projects, working alone or with others if desired. A nice relaxed atmosphere and sense of community built very quickly – if you had a problem or needed something, you could just shout across the room and most of the time someone would be able to help out or pass you what you needed. Bags and toolboxes full of computers, electronic components and hackable bits were definitely the order of the weekend.

There is a Howduino community online but the site(s) don’t quite portray the full experience of attending one of the events. It is all too easy to show up, do some soldering and go home and not get your results up online. There were some amazing projects made over the 2 days – I just hope that they all get documented or put up eventually as the code and skill sharing is one of the most valuable parts of the whole thing.

spot the techies

I worked alongside Oli @coldclimate of The Approachable Geek [amongst other things] and we both built ping pong ball LED matrix screens. He had brought along his first (old and messy) prototype and a load of ping pong balls and I had wanted to make an LED matrix screen for a while so, with sort of inspiration from each other we decided to work together. With a little help from @oomlout we managed to get a screen working each, well proud. We got the screens (super high def at 6×9 ‘ping pong pixels’) to display different patterns and even ‘howduino’ in individual text characters.

Oli and Alistair showing their joy at reasonably priced LEDs

Worth a mention is local ish electronics shop ESR – a wonderfully old school shop with a wall of drawers filled with different electronic components. Oli and I both needed 54 LEDs of the same colour. ESR price – around 13 – 19p compared to Maplins’ 70-80p. Nothing like a good electronics shop, sadly not a common sight any more.

Fingers crossed the team can get another one going, there have already been Howduinos in Liverpool, Poole, Birmingham and Newcastle. Where next? The event relies upon super minimal funding and lots of for-the-love-of-it people so costs can be kept down.

Check out the Howduino Flickr Group for more photos from the Howduino events.

-

Do you like Latin and Cuban music?

Havana Club Rum have teamed up with Gilles Peterson and Cuban pianist Harold Lopez-Nussa on a new album project called ‘Havana Cultura‘ consisting of new contemporary Cuban music. I’ve had a chance to listen to the album and can say it’s packed full of lovely fresh music capturing the essence of the Cuban culture.

- It’s grand!

To celebrate the album launch there is a party going on at The Wardrobe in Leeds this Friday (13th Nov). I’ve got a pair of tickets up for grabs for this event – Gilles Peterson himself will be spinning discs and there will be a full Cuban band to match. Don’t miss this! Live music and DJing in the centre of Leeds for free on a Friday night!

To win, all you need to do is answer the following question as a comment on this post:

What is the name of the music studios that Gilles Peterson and the Cuban artists have been working in for this album? [You could visit the Havana Cultura website for clues...]

Good luck and happy listening

You can also find the Havana Cultura album on Amazon and iTunes

Never Dive Alone conference - Manchester - photo by Full Circle Arts

Does charging for your conference affect who attends and ultimately the quality of your event?

I went along to the Breakfast with AudioBoo event at Marshall’s Mill in Leeds – part of Digital Week 09 [Twitter: #DW09] recently and was very impressed by the material presented and the discussion that followed. A thought has since occurred to me that I thought was worth discussing with others – readers and people that stumble across my site.

I have been to plenty of techy/digital/web/art/etc. conferences in the past year – many of them free events – and often find a number of things:

- lots of name badges never collected from the main desk

- large numbers of attendees with varying degrees of interest in the topics being discussed or presented

- jam packed venues with very short Q+A / discussion time after talks

From past experience I have found this leads to relatively poor questions and discussion in the conference space, meaning you have to go and seek out the speaker at the end of their talk if you have a particular point or question to ask them. Not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes quite difficult when a) several other people have the same idea and b) everyone else is battling for the coffee and cakes in the short break time before the conference continues.

In contrast, the DW09 event I attended (Listed ticket price £10) seemed to have a slightly different feel to it:

- small amount of people (perhaps 10-15)

- relatively intimate presentation space with opportunity for audience to ask speaker questions throughout without disrupting the flow of the presentation

- relevant and interesting Q+A session that answered many of my questions as well as providing food for thought for those present.

Now, it is hasty to come to a conlclusion after one such event but it did get me thinking – does introducing a relatively small registration fee to conferences make a difference, and if so, how and why? Another priced event I attended was the Never Dive Alone conference organised by Full Circle Arts in Manchester – £50 per ticket, a bigger crowd of attendees this time, perhaps 100 or so – but still great discussions and degree of interest and knowledge shown by all.

There are plenty of free conferences that I have really enjoyed – including the ‘Art of Digital‘ series and I have gleaned plenty of valuable information from these as well as making a whole host of contacts to work with or whom I have kept in touch since. I will definitely be attending more free conferences next year but will also make the effort to go to more paid events to see how they compare.

What are your thoughts and experiences?

From 20th-24th July Full Circle Arts, a Manchester-based arts organisation is hosting Remix – a project providing a week of creative activities for young disabled people. I recently met the Full Circle Arts staff and will be at the Remix festival with our FriiSpray virtual painting interface and also covering the event on Twitter.

I am looking forward to providing FriiSpray as a creative tool for the people that come along to this event. In the past we have seen encouraging results – from club environments to school workshops and each time we take the setup to an event we gain useful feedback and feature requests. By sharing our project as open source and free to download we have seen people using the software in ways we had not considered – something that has fascinated me. It seems that being open and engaging with peers both in the online and real world has paid off for us, and many others before us.

I went down to the Holy Trinity Church, Leeds last night to see what was happening at the first Transend / Transmit meeting: a discussion about setting up the project.

Introduced by Louise Marchal and Jo Tyler, Transend / Transmit are two interlinked art schemes / projects that explore the idea of broadcasting and the relaying of information.

Transend/Transmit aim to link Leeds’ Holy Trinity Church to Sunderland’s Holy Trinity Church, both designed by the same architect, William Etty of York in the 18th century.

Streams of data transfer – physical mail, FM transmissions, digital streaming, telephone feedback loops and DIY electronics were all mentioned as potential disciplines that could be explored.

Other topics included:

The nature of radio content, and it’s evolution through the introduction of the digital radio platform.
How does podcasting affect the idea of ‘broadcasting’ in a traditional sense: if you listen to a ‘breakfast show’ in the evening; is it still a breakfast show?
Using DIY technology to transmit information – homebrew electronics?
Possible collaboration with local broadcasters / organisations
Using FaceBook as a promotional / info network
Running a series of ‘workshops’, or ‘media labs’ to encourage participation from other artists / creators

All in all, a very interesting discussion that shows the beginnings of a potentially very interesting long term project for both Leeds and Sunderland.

Thanks to Bruce Davies + the Arts@Trinity group for hosting the evening, I look forward to more of these! If you are interested in taking part in these upcoming projects get in touch.

Last night I attended the private view launch party of Samenhang – an international exhibition of contemporary art from artists that are alumni of the EEA – the European Exchange Academy – that has been running since 2003.

Once I found the gallery [it is a tad out of the way, tucked away on the outskirts of Leeds city centre] I entered into a crazy atmosphere of inflatable sculptures hanging from the ceiling and numerous video screens showing a host of different visual pieces.

Of particular interest to me was Marguerite Leudet’s sonic art piece, ‘Speakers‘ consisting of batteries + small piezo speakers. I liked the simplicity of the physical elements that contrasted with a mysteriously undulating rhythm of the sound produced.

Another notable piece was two photographs by Stefan Ruitenbeek – it took me a little while to adjust to these and stomach them, well worth seeing!

The evening proved to be a great success and kick started a very interesting exhibition. Samenhang will be running until Friday the 13th – I advise that you check it out before then. See http://www.novgorod.co.uk/ for more information.

MAP Gallery: Hope House, 65 Mabgate, Leeds LS9 7DR.