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All the tips for joining MakeICT

If you’re a creative person visiting MakeICT you might immediately want to know how to get in and start making. We share your enthusiasm! We have fantastic tools and an amazing community of teachers and experts to help teach you. Showing up is the first step, but getting trained and familiar with our resources can’t happen in an hour. Sometimes new visitors get overwhelmed. We have the shortest explanation on our how to join page, but here is the long form: all of our recommendations for getting on board and making use of MakeICT.

Our key applications

Members can apply for keys that grant them 24×7 access to the space. There is no “half time” key or “you can’t be here by yourself” key – there’s only the 100% key, so we don’t issue it first time you walk in the door. You can get a key within your first month or even first week if you visit a few times. You need to fill out an application and have six other members sign it. We’re a co-op, so it’s important for us to all be able to talk to each other: your key application proves it. It’s a great opportunity for you to meet some people in the space! Printing out a key form and bringing it around with you when you visit the space is a smart first step if you’ve just become interested in MakeICT, even if you haven’t officially joined yet. For more information about our key policy, visit http://makeict.org/wiki/Standing_rules#Key_Policy

Orientation

Attending Maker Monday orientation is a requirement for a key as well. You’ll get a tour of the space and meet our leaders to ask questions. Orientation is exciting; in our 7,000 square feet there’s a woodshop, metal shop, fabrication lab with 3D printers, a laser cutter, artist studios, textiles area, ceramics room, print shop… a lot to see! Hopefully you’ll leave with a good feeling and a starting point for what to jump into first.

Safety classes

Safety classes are required for use of the metal shop, wood shop and laser cutter. If you know you’re interested in these items, watch the calendar for classes. You can take a safety class even if you haven’t joined or attended orientation, getting one of these under your belt is a great way to know that you can use the space. There is a discount on safety classes if you are a member.

Public events

MakeICT has other public events besides orientation that are great to jump into. Maybe it’s area-related, like our monthly textiles tribe or Tuesday ceramic nights. We have casual social meetups like game night and parties. And of course there are always chances to volunteer for our kids or community events. Pay attention to the calendar and forums to see where to join in.

Paying dues

At any time in this process, you can pay dues! You have to pay dues for us to accept your key application, but you can do everything else – gather application signatures, take safety classes, attend orientation and public events – before you officially join. Dues are $25 a month and can be paid monthly, every six months, or every 12 months. Paying members receive class discounts and the money paid in helps with our mission to unite Wichita’s technology and art communities.

Ready to make!

When you’ve gotten to know us, attended safety classes, paid your dues and have your key, you’re as “in” as anybody. The road to being a MakeICT expert is a pretty short one, but there’s always more to learn with new tools coming in and classes on the calendar. You’ll know some of your fellow members by this time so you’ve got the go-to names down for just about any question.

But the real thing to know is this: your onboarding process is whatever you make it. You can change the order up – take some classes before you even go to orientation. Gather key signatures before you pay dues. Get to know us before you take classes. The order is up to you. We’d be happy to help you figure out the right process if you’re stumped, just let us know more about your schedule and we’ll be happy to help.

The Art of Painting Rocks

Have you been painting rocks? Wichita has embraced this trend in full force and MakeICT has held several events this summer to encourage this accessible, popular, artistic past time. The idea is simple: paint a rock with colorful pictures or words of encouragement, then hide it out in the world so it can bring joy to someone random who happens to find it.

In June we invited members of the ICT Area Rocks group to our space for a public art night, and they came out in force. We had rock painters in every room of the space! It was a little hectic, but we were happy to show so many people through our open doors.

After the success of this event we decided to scale back for future workshops with a return to our normal registration required/class size limited format.

Rock painting has literally been around for centuries, with rocks and caves service as canvas for early humans 40,000 years ago. For some reason in 2017, a few popular movements started catching on. One of these is the kindness rocks project, a blog that started in 2015. Google trends shows the keywords hitting big this summer:

If you want to paint rocks, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

1) Our favorite places to get a lot of rocks are landscaping companies. The Sod Shop at 3601 N Hillside has been very nice to rock painters, donating rocks for our events and kindly letting all kinds of shoppers fill buckets of rocks for less than $10. Bring your own 5 gallon bucket. South side Wichitans report that Andrla’s at 1501 W 55th St S is another great source. And of course, if you’re just a casual painter getting started you can find rocks on your own property or a friend’s to try out. Just don’t steal rocks from landscaping of local businesses without asking permission.

2) Our favorite places to get paint are hardware or big box stores. Craft stores have a great selection too but are more expensive, even with those tempting 40% off coupons. Acrylic spray paint is an easy way to start a basecoat but it takes a while to dry. You can also use craft paints for your background. Some people smooth out cavities in the surface with wood filler or clear spray before painting.

3) Don’t worry if you’re not an artist – anyone can paint rocks! Faces, animals, symbols of our city, foods, cartoons, or inspirational messages make for fantastic rock art. Sharpies or paint pens are nice for finishing touches. If you use pens be sure to coat over your design with modge podge so any sealing sprays you use don’t run your colors. A clear acrylic sealer spray to finish it off makes your design permanent.

4) Labeling your rock is a fun way to let others know what’s going on. Use just a hashtag like #ICTAreaRocks, or a whole message… “A kindness rock has found you! Keep it for today then hide it again, find us on facebook at ICT Area Rocks.” Some families use their own hashtags so they can easily search facebook, twitter or pinterest to see who has found their rocks. There’s a printable PDF with lots of label sizes in the rock painting group.

4) Finally, go hide your rock. Our favorite places to hide rocks in Wichita are:
– Keeper of the plains
– Douglas Street
– Riverside park
– Sedgwick County Park

But you can hide your rock anywhere where rocks are found. If you hide your rock in a more out of the way park, it’s more likely to be found by a random person than someone out on a rock hunting mission – so it’s totally up to you. Just don’t hide rocks in grass that gets mowed. Mowers and rocks do not get along and we’d hate for either to get damaged.

You might see your rock re-posted on social media, or you might not. To be a rock painter is to learn the art of letting go. It’s totally altruistic – something you’re doing, knowing that you might not get anything back in return. Along the way you might get better at drawing your favorite objects, and you might come up with some quotes that inspire you. Maybe your rock gets to live in someone’s house and bring them inspiration, maybe it travels around the world, since it has no expiration date there’s no way to know what its next journey will be.

We hope this trend continues, since we support anything that gets new people into creating art. Check on our calendar or events page for more painting opportunities at MakeICT.

2017 Solar Eclipse Recap

This year Wichitans were within traveling distance of a total solar eclipse. A coordinated road trip of MakeICT members went up to the Crane Trust Nature Center near Grand Island, Nebraska. The weather was beautiful and traffic was light. Special thanks to James Lancaster for organizing the road trip and putting together an informative class on safe solar eclipse viewing and photography. James is involved in the Lake Afton Public Observatory in addition to MakeICT and we’re looking forward to growing our partnership with them.

 

Here are some photos by our vice president James Lancaster.

 

The next total solar eclipse within easy traveling distance of us will be April 8, 2024.

We also learned some lessons worth passing along about solar eclipse glasses. In late July we noticed solar viewing glasses were hard to find in Wichita, so we ordered 500 pairs from NASA-recommended manufacturers. We mentioned on facebook that we had the glasses on August 1, and about 50 were picked up at that first maker Monday. By August 10 or so we still had hundreds of glasses, so when a local business asked us for 200 pairs for their employees we jumped at the opportunity and our fundraiser was complete. That’s the week that everybody in Wichita seemed to realize they needed eclipse glasses and we were inundated with phone calls! So less for everybody next time: get your eclipse glasses a couple months in advance. They last a long time – more than the three years that the older ISO standard recommended. We are currently collecting glasses for Astronomers Without Borders. If you don’t want to save your glasses, drop them in the box on the front glass cabinet.

New CNC Plasma Cutter

Our newest tool at MakeICT is a CNC plasma cutter, built from scratch by Curt Gridley our CNC lead and Jeremiah Burian our metal shop lead. We’re using it to cut precision designs through thick sheets of metal (3-20mm) that our laser cutter could not get through.

We’d been talking about a plasma CNC and its capabilities it was soon decided that we would ask members if it was something they would rally behind. We held a meeting for anyone interested and put a call out for ideas, concerns, and requirements. We knew we wanted to seek donations to purchase the actual plasma cutter. Multiple members stepped forward and raised $3,050 for the purchase. The components for the CNC Table were donated by Curt. We had multiple members step up to help run new electrical, work on individual parts of the table, and help move things around to get ready. Thomas Bloom worked on the LinuxCNC programming and interface.

None of us had ever built a plasma cnc before and we had little to no experience running one, so we ran into some hurdles, but now it is set up and working out wonderfully. Our advice for other maker spaces is just to do your homework if you decide to take on a project like this. Decide size, drive line, what programs you plan to use and plasma cutter specifications before anything. Our build process was over a 3 month period. If you need to get something up and running as soon as possible there are manufactured tables and kits on the market.

For members of MakeICT – Don’t be intimidated, you can learn to use this machine over time. First you’ll need designs made up in svg or dxf format. Inkscape is our favorite free open source tool to create designs, but there are lots of programs that can make DXF files. This machine only cuts in 2D, like the laser cutter. The ShopBot CNC router in the woodshop is known as “2 and a half D” because the router bit moves up and down at different depths in the material.

Using the plasma cutter requires metalshop safety authorization and then a special tool-specific authorization. Look for the CNC Plasma Class on our calendar.

Game night is the third Friday of every month

If you’re ready to relax on a Friday with your fellow makers check out our monthly game night. Game night can break out any time of course, but we’ve got it on the public calendar on the third Friday of every month. Bring a game, a snack, some friends, you can even bring a kid if they can cope with both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Some of the recent games we’ve enjoyed:

• Epic spell wars of the battle wizards
• Oregon Trail
• Checkers
• Fluxx
• Catan
• Codenames
• Pandemic

The game “Risk” is not allowed.

Visit our calendar or facebook events to confirm game night dates and times. For more information or if you’re concerned about who’s going to be there, contact info@makeict.org.

Spring 2017 Gallery Shows

Thank you to our gallery team for curating this year’s gallery shows so far. Here are some of the items we’ve featured. The MakeICT gallery is open for Wichita Final Fridays and also during our standard open hours from 7-9PM Mondays and Thursdays.

2015 Halloween Challenge winners + Mythbusters!

Announcing the winners of this year’s Halloween Challenge who were decided at the last Maker Monday!  We had 12 submissions in 3 categories this year.  The first place in each category gets $25 in prize money and the overall judge’s choice winner gets two free tickets to Mythbusters!

Costume 1st Place – Satyr by JonathanBuild log here

Decoration 1st Place – Motion Activated Skull by Tim Video here

Prop 1st Place – Contoured Mask Spacer by Gordon

Overall Judge’s Choice – Trick or Treat Rube Goldberg Style by the Hansens Video here

Congrats to all the winners and thanks to all the participants!  You can see all the submissions here.  As a bonus to all our members, Mythbusters has offered a 20% discount to all MakeICT members for the show in Wichita on Dec 1.  Use code MAKEICT  when ordering tickets online at WichitaTIX.com or  by phone at 316-303-8100.

See you again next year for another Halloween Challenge!

Exploring the possibilities at our new location

Moving day is coming up fast (April 4th), and we still have plenty of work to do. Perhaps one of the most important, immediate tasks is determining where to put everything. We started that conversation during our first tour. After finalizing the lease, we started working on some drafts. We withheld any formal discussion until all of us were ready to share, and we learned a lot from each other. Now we’re all back to the drawing board working on revisions before our next meeting.

The preliminary drafts are shared below. We’re making revisions to all of these ideas based on what we learned from sharing with each other, but we’re also reaching out to members for their input. There are so many things that we want to do, and so many things that we want to provide, but like all things in life, we’ll have to make some compromises.  There are a lot of little challenges to work with as well, like “you can’t run plumbing into there”, “you can’t put a window on that wall, there’s a building on the other side of it”, and “we don’t need a water slide”.

Anyway, we just wanted to share some of our (very early) thoughts. If you’d like to be part of the conversation, you can share your thoughts on our forum!

MakeICT is moving!

That’s right, we’re finally moving! After months of shopping, touring, discussing, and negotiating, we’ve finally signed the lease on a new location in the Douglas Design District at 1500 E Douglas.

This new location offers nearly 3 times the space of our current spot in Delano, and we’ll be filling this with new tools, equipment, workspace, social/collaboration space, space to share, and everything else we can possibly fit! It has an awesome windowed storefront, and being located right on Douglas will give us great visibility.  There’s a large workshop/garage in the back with an overhead door, so we’ll actually be able to work on the Electric Microbus at the makerspace! And of course, being located in the Douglas Design District puts us in some really cool company!

We’re super-duper excited about it, but there is a lot of work to do, and we’ll definitely need some help with cleaning, moving, and arranging everything. Our big objective is to have everything moved over and presentable by April 24th, so that we can host an open house for the Wichita Community Foundation’s ArtDOG event and Final Friday. We’ll open the doors in the late afternoon and host a variety of workshops starting at 6pm. Be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and our website for more details to follow!

Now, if I were you, I know I’d be dying to see what this place is like, so I have a couple of teasers for you.

Wanna see more? Well you can! Join us this weekend (March 21/22) while we clean up the building, and again on April 4/5 when we will be moving everything over.

[official press release]

Seeking volunteers: please automate this job!

Are you good with automating software? OR, are you looking for an excuse to practice try it out? Maybe you’re a Selenium wizard or maybe you just want to learn…

Well I have just the project for you!

Whenever we host MakeICT event, we end up cross-posting it to a bunch of places. It’s a bit cumbersome, it’s error-prone, and there’s definitely a better way.

Here’s what happens today:

1. The event is created in WildApricot (our member management system), which generates a unique URL for attendee registration
2. The same event details are posted to our Google Calendar, with the WildApricot registration URL at the top of the description
3. Same goes for Meetup.com
4. and Facebook
5. and maybe Google+… did you know we have a Google+? We totally have a Google+.
6. And of course we follow that up with a tweet and facebook invitations

Can you automate this? Maybe we can find one person to do each part of the automation, and then glue it all together at the end? Does something like this already exist? I don’t know!

But I do know these things:

• You cannot create events the WildApricot API, but you can read them.
• You cannot create events using the Facebook Graph API v2, but you can using v1 (will be deprecated 30 April 2015)
• You cannot create events using the G+ API. In fact, the whole thing is read-only.
• You can create events using the meetup API

So it seems like API’s are not the way to go. Do you have any ideas on how to tackle this? Would you be willing to help solve at least part of the problem? Join in the discussion on the MakeICT forum or shoot me an email at dom@makeict.org!