Alisa was on the show to help cook a Stove-Top Clambake and promote her 550lb “Made In America” set of US state skillets.

The best part yet? That New York skillet Martha is holding was cast in our parking lot, as well as a whole bunch of other really cool iron work. We’re proud to have played a role in getting something on TV in front of a national celebrity.

Congratulations Alisa – keep up the good work!

Sector67 is happy to offer 2012 summer makerships to area youth (opportunity available to anyone 18 or younger)!  A makership is a 4 month opportunity to use Sector67 with a free membership and $100 for project materials as well as a mentor to help you complete your project.  We’ll be taking applications through June 18th, but early submission is encouraged so we’re able to find sponsors and mentors for projects.

Please submit your idea with contact information or download this helpful application template.  Feel free to use the back for more information!

Specific opportunities:

• One local business has offered to sponsor a project around music or video work

We’re also seeking area businesses interested in supporting these individuals, please contact us directly if you’re interested in learning more about how you or your business can help make this happen!

Fine print:  Your parent or legal guardian will have to sign a liability waiver for you to use Sector67.  Use will have to coincide with Sector67 staff presence, a parent or guardian, or your mentor.  Please contact us with any questions.

And here’s a link to the audio: .wav

I synthesized the audio and created the STL model with software of my own design. The piece is called “Ecology No. 9″ because it is composed of sonic structures growing, evolving, reproducing, and dying in a manner roughly analogous to that of biological organisms (I’m no biologist, though, and don’t claim any special sophistication or realism for my models!). The electronic component consists of an Arduino + Wave Shield and an Arduino + Motor Shield. The two Arduinos communicate via Bill Porter’s excellent EasyTransfer library. The pointer starts moving when the audio playback begins, and when the playback ends, the pointer rewinds to the start. The audio pauses for a few seconds while this happens, and then the playback cycle resumes. The motion of the pointer is controlled by a stepper motor attached to a belt drive and can thus be precisely calibrated in relation to the audio.

The whole setup was shown (and heard) recently at an exhibition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Art Lofts Studio.

Start with a normal (preferably high contrast) image:

Helps to boost the contrast a bit:

The software dithers it to b&w and outputs pattern data, which is loaded into the knitting machine and then knit with chosen colors:

The knitting machine been used to create a number of cool objects around Sector67, including our own argyle pattern:


My face on a pillow (reason #4,592 to start a hackerspace):

Inverted “skull” looking version:

The SETI “wow” signal:


The KH-930 (made in 1986) has only 2 KB of static RAM, which holds about 13600 stitches (200 x 68). Larger pieces can be knit by slicing the image into segments, this is almost the size of the coffee table (magazine at above right for scale). The team plans to automate this in a later version of img2track.

Startup Weekends are weekend-long, hands-on experiences where entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs can find out if startup ideas are viable; nearly 500 Startup Weekends have taken place around the globe, with 200 more currently in the planning phase. Developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, launch startups and compete for prizes in 54 high-energy hours. Anyone looking to test the entrepreneurial waters is welcome, however the experience is especially useful to entrepreneurs interested in receiving feedback on an idea, looking for a co-founder, or who want to learn new skills.

Startup Weekend Madison will take place at the Madison College – West Campus, 302 South Gammon Road, Madison, WI. Registration covers the cost of instruction, mentorship, seven locally prepared meals, and a Startup Weekend Madison T-shirt and water bottle; early bird and student discounts are available, so the cost is $49-$99 for the full weekend. Participants must register by April 13th for the early bird discount: http://madison.startupweekend.org/. Accommodations are not included in the fee but will be available at an additional cost.

Lorin Toepper is the Executive Director of Economic and Workforce Development – Southwest Region at Madison College and chairs the Startup Weekend Madison Committee. “Startup Weekends are risk-free environments where everyone is expected to roll up their sleeves and dive into the exhilarating world of startups,” says Toepper. “This is a fun, high-energy opportunity to create something new with a team of innovative thinkers, and we’re proud to be bringing it to Wisconsin.”

Startup Weekend Madison is one of the signature bookend events of Capital Entrepreneurs Week, which will feature a series of experiential, educational, and social opportunities for entrepreneurs. The events kick off on Wednesday, April 25th with the Capital Entrepreneurs Open Social and finish with ‘3 Day Startup Madison’, a weekend event for pre-registered teams of student entrepreneurs. For a complete event listing with details visit http://www.capitalentrepreneurs.com/week/.

Startup Weekend Madison is sponsored by Google, Earth Information Technologies, Gener8tor, and Neider and Boucher. For more information and the online application visit http://madison.startupweekend.org. Watch a video about Startup Weekends here: http://vimeo.com/28872840.

Some outside contracting has yielded stunning results on the high speed camera, with a custom LEGO weapon utilizing a NERF dart spring loaded clip rattling off a dart every 1/100th of a second:

Lots of necessary dispensing and disposable handling equipment:

We initially had a lot of trouble figuring out an appropriate process to pouring and curing it bubble free as well as an appropriate mold material. Early on we determined that particle board and other woods didn’t work well, the polyurethane reacted vigorously with any moisture in the lumber and was an extremely strong adhesive to wood, even with various release agents and finishes.

Eventually we used wood-polyurethane to seal the moisture in the wood, and then added our two part polyurethane on top to give a thick coating, but it still wasn’t a solution for a mold, just for coating wood parts.  One of the largest strategies is mixing the polyurethane up, putting it in a temporary container and drawing a strong vacuum until it stops growing from the released air, and then pouring a beautiful bubble free part.  If you don’t vacuum pump the mixed materials, it makes an ugly bubble-filled part.

We quickly settled on two part flexible silicon rubber as a successful mold material, but this silicon is very costly and it doesn’t hold up well to repeated pours as it deteriorates after every part removal.  (silicon mold at left, polyurethane tank tread sections at right)

We were also able to pick up very detailed objects with a silicon mold:

Eventually, we arrived at Mann-Release combined with various plastics as a suitable mold making technique for round objects.  What might we be building out of round slugs of polyurethane you ask?  How about a giant Lite-Brite?

The polyurethane has been used around the shop as a go-to item for anything needing to be stuck down, sealed up, or generally made sticky (oops, too little hardener huh. . .)

Fixing a shattered plastic bicycle rim:

Contributing to a winning 100 Hour challenge entry:

(Absolutely nothing sticks to borosilicate lab glass, except our trusty polyurethane)  The project was eventually appropriately named the “Polymaster” and went on to win the most creative entry in the UW student competition and $300 for the creating team.

Snowboarding slider box first go didn’t work so well:

We’ve also stumbled on a creative strategy for lost foam polyurethane molding, by hot gluing together lots of foam chunks you can create very complex foam molds, pour polyurethane around them, and then dissolve out the foam with a solvent:

The latest experiments have centered around using heavy weight oil as a plasticizer, which prevents the polyurethane from fully hardening:

And toying with adding various materials, it’s pretty common to add fiberglass fill to polyurethane, but adding pet shavings can yield unexpectedly strong, lightweight parts because of the foaming reaction to the wood:

Vacuum pumping the polyurethane and carefully coating pink construction foam yields an extremely strong airplane wing that’s able to be bent well past the breaking point of uncoated foam:

We’ve also been very successful at carefully metering water into the mixed polyurethane to yield high density foam:

A City of Madison BLINK Art Grant was fullfilled by Sector67 member Tim Sprengelmeyer of Midwest Recycled Art, creating a large turtle that’s currently in Orton Park.  Tim didn’t want his turtle to rust while out in the weather, so it was suitably coated with dyed polyurethane:

A little testing was done before deploying the polyurethane on the turtle, yielding very good anti-rust properties (half coated):

Our recently christened vacuum former makes nice negatives to pour into, and when properly coated with Mann Release we’re able to remove the polyurethane from the styrene plastic:

You can see in this mold that it’s not the standard yellow, as we’ve been experimenting with polyester and other solid particle dyes, yielding very interesting wavelength absorption and transmission characteristics.  In this case, a change from aquamarine to red:

There’s always the old stand-by table by submerging interesting things in polyurethane.  In this case, we’ve finally found an off the shelf product that it won’t stick to – freezer paper!  It usually releases cleanly with no residue (without a mold release), and it’s cheap.

Of course when you’re done pouring, but have a little left over and your now very sticky gloves, what more to do than to make an extra hand to lend around the shop:

Yes, this stuff even bonds to nitrile, latex, vinyl, and any other glove materials we’ve tried. . .  It’s really really sticky stuff.

MAGMA is way to make and share art and support the postal service at the same time. For more information on mail art check out the excellent Wikipedia article.

What they do:

Mail art:

You can send mail art to anyone on the MAGMA67 contact list.

Share online:

You can upload pictures of your art or of art that you have received at our group yahoo website. Join the group to look through their online albums at mail that has already been shared for fun and inspiration. Our website also has a calendar, resource sharing file and the contact list. You do not have to live in the Madison area to join but you must be a member to access the site.

Meet monthly:

Once a month they meet to create art that is intended to go through the mail. Typical agenda: 15 minutes to deal with any business. Lots of time to make art together. 15 minutes of show and tell at the end. Photographing of work throughout if someone remembers to bring a camera. This agenda is subject to change if there are specific topics that we want to work on together. Meetings are two hours long. Members help clean up at the end.

Scheduled meetings:

March 20, 12 – 2PM
April 17, 5 – 7PM
May 15, 12 – 2PM
June 19, 5 – 7PM

The remains of the payload were found in Grand Haven, Michigan in early February and mailed back to us today. We were able to recover all of the still images and video from the flight as well as GPS and altitude data from a custom Android application. Amazingly, after a through cleaning of the phone with alcohol it came alive today (despite drifting across and living in a lake for several months) and we were able to fully recover all information from the SD card and onboard memory. The phone was in perfect condition until the screen was cracked in an unfortunate fall during cleaning! The battery still works

Here’s an animation of the altitude and position data:

Prepping for Launch:

Launch Video:

It’s believed that the battery died when it hit peak altitude (17,913 meters or almost 59,000 feet)

You can see a glance at the horizon in this video: