The theme last month for me has been workshops, more precisely arduino workshops. Firstly I ran two Arduino workshops for a new Dublin Skillshare thingy Beth Kocher is trying to set up. Beth rocks, here is some chat about Dublin Skillshare and what happened at the first workshop and some photos from the second workshop. All the new skills learnt were put to use in building an arduino based breathalyzer. The workshop raised 190 euro for the Irish Society for Autism in the process, happy days! I then flew over to St Andrews University for the SACHI summer school on Multimodal systems for Digitial Toursim to give a 6 hour arduino workshop there. Great fun again and I enjoyed spending time with a good bunch of clever people. To finish off this season of beginners electronics classes, II hope to do another one in the Science Gallery sometime in August.
Just before all that I was involved in a project with John Beattie an artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. It was a fun and hectic project to work on. We created a robot arm out of one of the gallery's lamps and with a pen attached to the end John performed a drawing by controlling the arm remotely. Which might have of been easy if he didn't want to control it from his workshop about 100m outside the gallery. So all sorts video links and wireless communications later (some of which happened to jam my brother's car central locking when testing, sorry!) we where able to pull it off. It was on show from in the process room in IMMA from the 25th of may to the 5th of June. There's a video of it here.
