Overview

Our goal is to provide a hands-on space to showcase creative work by our talented makers and communities throughout Portland. The mini-expo offers groups a chance to share their work, collaborations and passions with new people. What kinds of projects submissions are we inviting? Anything that promotes hands on engagement and interaction including but not limited to:

• Video games
• Digital or static immersion displays
• Audio, light and visual interactivity technologies
• DIY hardware hacks, micro-controllers, Arduino, Raspberry PI
• Digital puppetry, robotics, micro-machines and rotorcraft
• Motion and gesture sensory recognition technology
• Origami, paper kits, and 3D printing or modeling
• Hybrid arts that blend the spectrum of digital and non-digital media

How to Submit

Please apply online.Submission Deadline: Midnight PST, Wed March 13th, 2013.

Our thanks for helping create an amazing community collaboration.

Please RSVP

Barcamp Portland 7 takes place Friday March 29th, 6:30-9pm and Saturday March 30th, 9am-9pm at the Eliot Center,1226 SW Salmon St, Portland, OR 97205.

If you haven’t already don’t forget to RSVP to let us know you plan to attend.

I don’t know that I buy in to the idea of a post-scarcity economy. Even if we do somehow achieve unlimited natural (or synthetic) resources along with the corresponding means of production, scarcity will manifest itself in different ways. Maybe we’re headed for a world where scarcity takes on a different form: scarcity of ideas, inspiration, and insight or the scarcity of time required to give form to the abundance of ideas waiting to take shape.

Will Minecraft and Makerbot Usher in the Post-Scarcity Economy? | Idea Channel | PBS – YouTube.

Maker culture was different then: there is more emphasis on patent searches & marketing your invention, less on sharing technique & tools & spreading knowledge. But the underlying impulse to create is clearly there, as well as cutting-edge maker fashion.

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2012/01/04/cleveland-club-helps-new-inventors/

I wonder what he is holding?

2 pairs of LPs, illustrating 2 circles at right angles passing through the other pair's center

We’ve been welding oloid skeletons of steel rod, to produce a negative mold to make many copies of this shape in plaster or cement or something. We’ve filled the interior with foam & will cover that with Bondo.

Here’s one of the skeletons, radius 23.7cm (9.35in). Each teardrop shape is one rod bent on a rod roller into an arc of 240˚, continued on each side with tangent to the arcs, which intersect at the tip of the teardrop, 2r from the circle center.

2 steel rods in the shape of an oloid

We decided to fill the implied surface with foam. We put the wireframe in a plastic bag & used up several old partially used cans of different kinds of foam. It came out like a mutant halloween squash:

Different kinds of foam enclosing the steel rod frame

We needed to shave the foam to the oloid surface, so naturally (!?) we welded a bespoke cutter together out of a ribbon of saw & some angle bar that was lying around. Here’s Tom & Carl shaving the oloid:

Shaving the Oloid

We’ve repeated this step with another smaller application of foam, & now our oloid looks like this:

Dinosaur Egg?

Getting closer. Next we’ll finish the surface with a layer or 2 of Bondo (putty). Then we’ll have a well-formed oloid solid possibly suitable as a negative mold. Stay tuned…

This Fyrite analyser (~$350) isn’t remotely what I’m looking for, but still:

Bacharach 0010-5001 Fyrite Classic Gas Analyzer, CO2 Testing Indicator (0 to 20%)

This sporty model is used to regulate fermentation in industrial applications, & is certified  as EHEDG compliant, which as everyone knows is the European Hygienic Engineering & Design Group.

Mettler Toledo InPro5000 Dissolved C02 Sensor

If you & your friends like to sit together awkwardly on the same couch, & you’re worried about overcrowding & the air supply, nothing beats the TIM10, available in 2 convenient sizes:

Actually I might get that one. It’s on Ebay for like $120. Specs:

The TIM10 continuously shows carbon dioxide, temperature and relative humidity levels so you can monitor the quality of air in your home, office or indoor greenhouse.

Specifications:

• Measuring Range:
• CO2: 0~9999ppm
• Air Temp.: -10°C~60°C (14°F~140°F)
• Air RH%: 0.1%RH~99.9%RH
• Resolution:
• CO2:1ppm
• Air Temp.:0.1°C / 0.1°F
• Air RH%:0.1%RH
• Accuracy:
• CO2:50ppm ±5% of reading
• Air Temp.:±0.6°C, ±0.9°F
• Air RH%: ±5%RH (at 25°C, 10~90% RH)
  *******±7%RH (at 25°C, <10% & >90% RH)
• Response:
• CO2:<2 mins (90% step change)
• Air Temp.: <2 mins (90% step change)
• Air RH%: <10 mins (90% step change)
• Air Quality Level (CO2 Concentration):
• Good: <700ppm (programmable by user)
• Normal: 700 ~ 1000ppm (programmable by user)
• Poor: >”Normal”
• Max/Min function
• Alarm: >1000ppm (programmable by user)
• Operating Condition: -10~50°C, 5~80%RH (Be sure to avoid condense)
• Storage Condition: -20~60°C, 5~90%RH (Be sure to avoid condense)
• LCD & Green LED Display
• Power Supply: Power adaptor (5V/0.5A output)

OmniCorpDetroit, better known by its all-too-appropriate acronym OCD, is a makerspace in a warehouse in Eastern Market. It’s a big space.

OCD

A couple of weeks back they held a workshop to show how to make boomboxes using old suitcases. Before that there was workshop on lockpicking, using strips of metal scavenged from windshield wipers. Scavenging & repurposing materials is a big part of the maker ethos.

Making BoomCases at OCD

There are a few such spaces in the area; another, the Mt. Elliot makerspace, was founded & is supported by some of the same folks (esp. Jeff Sturges & Ted Sliwinski) & is more oriented towards teaching kids electronics, photography, video, computers, etc.

I wandered into OCD one night & started asking questions about making certain geometrical shapes, esp. oloids & sphericons. I quickly teamed up with Tom Marshick , an OCD member who shares some of the same interests & who knows a lot about woodworking, welding, kite-making, electronics & probably alchemy, though we haven’t gone there yet.

We’ve been prototyping some oloid frames out of PEX tubing, & Carl Niel came up with some made out of vinyl LPs & emergency lights (!), & more recently we’ve formed one of steel rods, about which more later…

The grasshopper said to the ant, why do you worry so?

The ant, not understanding the meaning of the word “worry,” asked, what do you mean? I’m just ensuring that our people have plenty through the winter when it comes, that we have abundance then, as now.

The grasshopper replied, “Winter? What is winter?”

This is perhaps the tale now unfolding in America, and not in the way you would expect. We’re now hearing stories in the media about the pending default on US debt, and yes, it is indeed pending. It may not happen on August 2, maybe an emergency deal will be struck, maybe again and again until 2012 or 2015 or even 2040 but it is coming, and through no fault of our own.

It is not a matter of our stupidity, or policies favoring labor or management, or our overspending or our failure to “create jobs.” In fact it is an old story, one that some people might have seen as stupidly and painfully obvious sometime around 1600 AD, when Europeans started coming in droves to the so called new world.

So what is winter then? Do we mean here the inevitable collapse of civilization? Not exactly. There are seasons to all things; many cultures honor and acknowledge this. If you look at a human life, or the emergence of an idea, or the growth of a tree, you could say that there are seasons, periods of progression, each with its own rules, its own appropriate behaviors.

Life on our planet has evolved to work with the seasons, and more than merely to survive them. The evolutionary impulse driving each and every one of us is infinitely opportunistic. It goes beyond “surviving” and makes opportunity of seasons, uses them to maximize the effect of its own energies. The bear hibernates in winter so he can be virile in the spring and strong in the summer. Life uses the seasons as springboards, the way a surfer uses a wave.

So then, perhaps winter is not a thing to be afraid of, though it is a thing to be prepared for. And just like the waves, if we learn to use them, we can capture their energy and catapult ourselves to shore. If we’re impatient with them, they crush us and at the end of being crushed we still have to figure out how to get to shore.

If we try to force a tree to grow out of season we kill it. If we force a child to fill bubbles in a form to make him economically competitive before he can read, we stunt him. If we try to force a truly transformative innovation into a money machine for ourselves or our investors before the next quarterly report, we kill its spirit and lose the true opportunity.

In fact it could be said that the great innovations of our civilization have happened not because of our monetary system but despite it, but that is another story for another day, for now just google the internet and after that, google “Google.”

For now, imagine the street where you live. Imagine it, get into the feel of it. Listen to the sounds, smell the smells, imagine the time of day.

Now imagine there’s just one thing different. Imagine that within a five-minute walk of where you’re standing, in any direction, there is a completely organic forest of food. There are towering trees dripping with fruit. Apples, pears, avocadoes. Maybe there are greenhouses filled with tropical plenty. Beneath the trees are shrubs full of berries and vines growing up around the trees. In the shadows and clearings there are vegetables growing up in plentiful beds.

There are vertical walls and towers bursting with fruiting vines. Perhaps there are pathways and running streams and fish filed ponds stoked with waters captured in the recent rains.

Perhaps there are chickens or goats roaming about in open pens; the chickens are pecking the worms out of the ground before they can become flies. The goats are clearing the brush and dead grass before they can choke the veggies or burn. There are however no fences for keeping people out.

And somebody in the neighborhood has figured out how to make cheese of the goat milk. On the way across their land every once in awhile, you stop by the artful little stand they’ve set up, where the cheese is offered in exchange for a friendly “hello.” They probably demand you eat their cheese. Saying no, well, it just isn’t polite.

The forests near your street have been worked into the available land. Maybe it’s a narrow strip running across the front of every front yard. Or maybe it is a big central park or squeezed between apartment blocks, rising vertically. Maybe it was organized through long, arduous meetings at City Hall, or maybe it was just a bunch of neighbors jumping in on a good idea.

Or maybe it was started some years back when the local hippies just kept insisting on painting up the intersection and seed-bombing the vacant lot the next block over. Maybe it was legislated at the state or even the national level. Maybe you volunteered, maybe you figured out how you could get paid to help, and getting all the exercise you needed you realized you could quit the gym and save the $50 a month. Maybe it was some combination of all the above.

Maybe it doesn’t really matter how it was started.

Now, this is what it looks like. For the most part the food forest now takes care of itself with just a bit of tending, nudging and guiding here and there. The bees pollinate the citrus, and maybe kids from the local school tend some aspects of it, learning invaluable lessons about ecology and natural law and the usefulness of seasons they could never learn in a flurry of classrooms, building forts in the trees after hours and so getting a bit of algebra, geometry, phys-ed and leadership for free before their time, and on and on it goes.

The fruit of the trees and the vegetables and all the bounty is free.

In fact you have to enjoy it. If you don’t there just aren’t enough birds to eat all the fruit, they can only saturate the food forests on other blocks and in other towns with so many seeds, and rotting piles of fruit attract rodents. Of course rodents aren’t so much of a problem since they keep the cats and hawks coming around and the cats and hawks bring more nutrients to the soils, and with the humans offering so much plenty, they’re actually beginning to respond to our training, or maybe guidance is the better word.

Shit here, not here.

So this is what your street looks like. Now expand your view; the whole town looks like this. Zoom out in the Google Map of your mind, and notice that it looks like this for fifty miles in every direction. In fact the whole state looks like this!

The big cities jammed with trellises and wild structures for increasing growable surface areas (some of the designs were pioneered by Vertecology Yee-haw!) The small towns too and the vast rural areas, each in their own way, are bursting appropriate to how they use the land.

And so the songbirds, nature’s agents of plant biodiversity spread seeds from town to town. A drought or a fire or an invasive species here or there does wreak havoc occasionally, but it looks like this everywhere, and with nature’s vast diversity and reserves and people’s vast resourcefulness, the healing happens quickly.

With your street looking like this, how important is the US default to you? How much does it affect you? You know you will always have food, and will always have neighbors. Can anyone control you now? Can anyone force you into a job you hate, that you know doesn’t make a difference? How much do the battles in Washington effect you now? How much control do they have over your future? How much does your home value in next year’s dollars matter?

If you lost your job, would you starve? And if you knew that starvation was off the table, forever, for you, for your family; if even homelessness meant just ending up in another bountiful neighborhood like yours where the neighbors took you in till you earned your keep, how much would you fear it?

What would you do, that you are now afraid of doing?

And now the logical conclusion of this vision. If it looks like this everywhere, then starvation and homelessness are off the table for everyone. Everywhere. Everywhere where everyone has prepared, like the ant, for winter.

How much longer are the neighbors on your street going to slam their doors to you, staring bug-eyed at the TV because they have to recover from yet another day of life wasted at the office, hoping they can someday sell the house for a cool mil and get the hell out of here?

How demanding is the doctor that you pay up front when you’ve broken your leg, when he knows he will never starve? How much longer is the whistleblower in the oil company going to hold his tongue? How long are the foot-soldiers of that oil company going to keep enforcing the internal memos to crush the guy on your block who’s figured out how to power his car on the rainwater he’s catching on his roof or the lettuce he’s gathering down the street?

That’s right, game over for the conspiracy in the sky.

Free energy and open source medicine are already at hand. And there are people among us who are figuring out how to build powertools in their garages with CNC lathes made of scrap. They too can walk away from the crappy job at the parking violations bureau where they’ve been trained to make you miserable. With easing financial pressures, they can begin to become fathers to their children again and show junior how it’s done.

This is the power of preparing for winter. This is the promise of permaculture.

And to those of you who say this is a wild fantasy, consider this: The kind of food/energy forest imagined here is just an ecosystem like nature builds anyway. This is how the natural world already works, we just haven’t been paying attention. If it didn’t work this way there would have been no human beings. We’ve just been too worried about the stock market and welfare-state socialism to notice, and while we’ve been distracted, some of those “kooks” out there have been proving food forestry is possible.

When we find complex alien life on other worlds, we will find in every case that it was born and now participates in some kind of ecosystem, in every case anywhere in the universe, period. And even with human beings in the mix, there is evidence it really looked this way on some parts of the planet for very long periods of time before the arrival of armed colonists who brought plagues from their unsanitary cities and told the locals to forget their languages.

There is a reason why the English named so many places something-“field” in the lands the Haudenosaunee left behind. Deerfield, Bloomfield, Fairfield, Oakfield, Redfield. There is evidence that the Amazon was, shall we say, enhanced by human hands over tens of thousands of years.

It starts, quite literally, with planting a seed and giving it good environment for growing. In a field, in a windowbox, in a planter in a treehouse, on a rooftop. If this vision speaks to you, do it now. Start saving seeds, start the food forest wherever you can, however you know how. If you’re the social kind, involve the neighbors.

If you’re the reading kind, pick up Gaia’s Garden or One-Straw Revolution, or one of the other countless books starting to hit the shelves. Look up Bill Mollison, check out videos on Youtube. Don’t stop because others don’t start. If you’re the political kind, go to City Hall.

And for God’s own sake lets not make a dogma of it; it’s more like science even when it gets spiritual. Experiment, test, see what works and what doesn’t and share the results. This is our world, not the Illuminati’s and it’s ours because we were born here. Of course that means it’s everyone else’s too – well, okay, even those pesky Illuminati – but they have to get along with the rest of us, and like Bucky Fuller said, we’re the crew of this spaceship so sooner or later we’re going to have to learn to fly it straight.

We’re even finding that organic agriculture can diffuse the population bomb.

Perhaps winter in this case, in the evolution of human culture, is that season brought about by a particular money-fearing culture going against the natural order of things and getting away with it for awhile, sort of like the grasshopper in summer. Going against a natural order that does not bind us, as we have imagined in our tortured nightmares, but one that is designed to offer and seize endless opportunity, and after winter, there is always spring.

And this vision by the way, is the reason for Vertecology. I am more of an architect and hammer-swinging builder than a farmer or horticulturist myself, but I am learning that there’s power in the crossover, what permies like to call the “edge condition,” and there is endless opportunity for radical innovation in design and architecture as those vocations take their rightful, meaningful and essential place in a permaculture economy.

I hope to spend many days of the coming years creating such innovations, to share many of them with you on these pages here, and to use a business model that helps lead us from constraint and secrecy to a world that says to you DIYers out there in big capital letters, “GOD DAMN IT, RUN WITH IT AND DON’T WORRY IF YOU LOSE YOUR PANTS ON THE WAY!” In the meantime, maybe some of you will become clients, and no matter what, thank you again for taking the time to read what’s here.

Let’s do our best to make this the world of our dreams, and we don’t have to blow up the Earth to get Heaven too. Nature really is on our side, even if sometimes, she’s a brutal coach indeed.

An oloid (“oh-loh-weed”) is a peculiar solid. Check out how it rolls. It’s awesome:

Notice that as it rolls, every point on the surface touches the ground.  The surface can be flattened without distortion onto the S shaped path it traces. That’s called a developable surface, meaning a surface that can be unrolled onto a plane.

Very few solids have this property. Spheres don’t – that why mapmakers have to compromise with cartographic voodoo to represent the surface of the earth on a flat paper map, distorting the shape, size or distance. If the earth had the shape of an oloid, a world map could be perfect.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, How would I make an oloid? Let us count the ways:

1. 3d printer. I made my first oloid by writing some Ruby code that created a 3d model of the solid (seen at top) in Google SketchUp, exporting the model into an STL file, uploading this to Shapeways, a 3d printer service, paying like $35 for a 40mm radius (length ~2.5 inches) white nylon oloid that showed up in the mail a week later, which I love more than life itself.

2. Carve it from wood. Arie Brederode has detailed instructions for precisely carving an oloid.

3. Fold the surface from the path. Since the oloid’s developable surface can be unrolled onto a plane, we can do the opposite: draw the path on paper & roll it up into the solid.

Here’s a great site produced by Gijs Korthals Altes with printable patterns for several hundred papercraft polyhedra. Print it up, cut it out, tape it together, & you have a paper oloid. Fill it up with foam or plaster of paris or a polymer & you have a solid.

4. Wireframe. Connect the 2 circles with struts or spokes or something. This fellow at some sort of oloid conference (!?) seems to be having a good time. The other is from the artist Uwe Prolingheurer.

* More precisely, taking the convex hull of the 2 circles. A convex hull is the least surface enclosing a set of points.  & as long as we’re being nerdy…

Here’s a fun fact you can bring up the next time you’re having trouble making small talk, like on a first date or at a funeral (or both!): The surface area of an oloid is equal to that of a sphere with the same radius: A = 4πr ²

That’s surprising. That means that if you take one of those circles we started with & make a sphere, or take both of them & make an oloid, you’d need exactly as much paint to cover either solid. Is that cool, or what?

But wait, there’s more!  Archimedes worked out upper & lower bounds for √3:

Remember how he admired the vesica piscis for the √3 it displays? Well, guess who was the first person to work out the surface area of a sphere? Yup. Archimedes. I swear, what a guy! If he could only have seen an oloid, he would have had a eureka moment, for sure.