Jul 28th, 2009
The Hacktory and The Drawdio
The Hacktory is a group of citizens who have created a sort of brain trust solely for the purpose of promoting the use of technology in the arts. It seems to be relatively new and, honestly, not incredibly organized or focused, but that may be changing as they have just received a $10,000 grant for long-term planning. In a way the come-as-you-are laissez-faire attitude is part of what makes it work. Check out the Drawdio video below and a pic of my very own Drawdio…
They’re located at 1524 Brandywine Street, just a block above Fairmount at 15th. My buddy, an electrical engineer by trade, was visiting Philly and we drove there right after a long morning spent hunting down disc golf discs on the course in Fairmount Park. We were tired and hungry and covered in dirt but nobody seemed to notice. We were handed our kits and we forgot about food for the next hour as we started soddering away.
So what is the Drawdio? I think I first found out about the class from this citypaper link. Then I found
It’s a musical pencil! Long story short, we came, we saw, we soddered. It was a lot of fun. Check out my Drawdio below:
Ours didn’t work as well as it does in the video above, but that was probably due to the new circuitboards/speakers they were using untested for this 2nd workshop. We still had a lot of fun and are looking forward to more classes as they come up. I think the next one is going to be electro-jewelry; I hope Karen likes blinky-necklaces…
Make Philly
The Hacktory
1524 Brandywine Street, Philadelphia PA 19130
hey glad you liked soldering drawdios. some tips for getting it to work better. first of all, the default speaker is a little small so can only sound good up to a certain point. maybe a speaker that’s just a little bigger will sound better. then try these tips
http://web.media.mit.edu/~silver/drawdio/start_drawdio-ing.jpg
hope that helps. if you have other questions or ideas let me know. nice writeup
jay
thanks jay! you got a google alert set up or what?
i just added a link to lady ada’s kit. it wasn’t so much that it sounded good or bad, it just went quickly up to a really high frequency. this happened for pretty much everybody at the workshop. that’s why i was thinking it was maybe the board. i think i’m going to get another kit to try out at home.