A couple of weeks ago, we assembled an AZ Labs crew to attend the first Artropocode Meeting, an open gathering for everyone interested in working with Free (as in Freedom) creative coding tools, organized by our friends from Olho Livre and Baleiro Lab in Galicia.

So me, Filipe and Mónica headed off to Santiago de Compostela on Friday an in less than a couple of hours were already looking for a parking spot near the center of the old city.

We met the organizers Beca, Daniel and Marta, and the rest of the gang at Factoria Compostela, an awesome venue right next to the Cathedral, where Filipe gave a talk about the Spacebits project and hosted an Arduino hacking session that lasted well into the night in a room called the GastroLab, a hybrid between a kitchen and a hacklab.

The second day started of with a bang at Baleiro Lab, with Xavi’s auDIYolab node, where we learned the ins and outs of his Pure Data synth toys and some of the tricks behind his super original GUIs

Over lunch and the the first hours of the afternoon I had the pleasure of meeting Horacio and Juan Gil from Escoitar where we talked about their awesome new noTours projects, Free Software, possible colaborations and general audio geekery

During the afternoon, Mónica assembled and showcased an improvised version of Hug@ree just for the event, and I followed up with a node on how to do audio reactive visuals using OpenFrameworks.

The day’s activities finished with an audiovisual jam session at Gentalha do Pichel, that continued into the night at Baleiro Lab, filled with generative techno, wicked face painting, audio reactive 3D animated Blender visuals and mad youtube mashups.

Mónica has put up some more photos of the event in her Flickr set, check it out.

On Sunday we had to get back to Porto so we sadly couldn’t stay for Pablo de Soto’s node on importing animated 3D Blender models into Pure Data.

Thanks to everyone that was involved, this first Artropocode Meeting was really good fun. It was fantastic to see so many people using Linux and Free Software, doing creative things with code and sharing their knowledge. This Artropode spirit lives on after the meeting as a mailing-list for the Portuguese-Galician community of Free Software creative hackers, that you are most welcome to join.

See you all next year!

The AZ Labs network is a family of sorts, and as the good family we are we commemorate our members birthdays, hacker style

First our friends at Altlab made a hard(ware) cake last week to celebrate XDA’s Tiago Serra’s birthday and took the chance to test their spiffy new Altlab TV ustream channel

This week, we decided to celebrate our friend Catarina’s birthday by making the Makerbot we named after her sing Happy Birthday:

The hack was really easy to do, we just pulled a MIDI file with the song from the web, edited it to only have one track and passed through michthom’s MIDI-to-CNC script to generate the G-Code for the bot.

Whose birthday is next and what will we do to celebrate it?

3 de Abril de 2011 | April 3rd 2011 @ Pavilhão do Conhecimento

[PT]
É com grande satisfação que a Rede de Laboratórios da AZ (Associação Audiência Zero) anuncia o primeiro evento da FabriCulture: o FabriCamp Lx1!

É verdade, será um dia inteiro ao estilo barcamp , dedicado à fabricação digital. Vários membros e amigos dos hackerspaces da AZ (LCD, altLab e xDA) irão demonstrar as suas máquinas de prototipagem rápida, impressoras 3D e CNC Mills.
Caso tenha uma máquina para fabricação digital, seja de que tipo for, acabada, por acabar, avariada, etc., traga-a consigo. Ou então traga os amigos e a família (é um evento também para crianças).

Como em qualquer outro evento ao estilo barcamp, os participantes são também oradores; portanto estão todos convidados a fazer apresentações, lançar debates, demonstrar os seus projectos, o que lhes apetecer.

A participação é gratuita. Inscreva-se aqui.

A FabriCulture é um projecto da AZ Labs Network dedicado à promoção do fabrico digital open source e da cultura maker em geral. Saiba mais sobre a FabriCulture aqui.

Se a revolução do fabrico digital é para si novidade , vale a pena dar uma vista de olhos à bela animação da NueveOjos Full Printed e à apresentação Schuyler St. Ledger’s Ignite Phoenix .

[EN]
The AZ Labs Network is extremely happy to announce FabriCulture‘s first event: FabriCamp Lx1! That’s right, it’ll be a barcamp style unconference dedicated to digital fabrication. Several members and friends of AZ’s hackerspaces (LCD, altLab and xDA) will be demoing their 3D printers and CNC mills. If you have any kind of digital fabricator—finished, unfinished, broken or so and so—bring it along. Or just bring yourself, your friends, your family (this is a children-friendly event). As in any other barcamp-style event, the attendees are also the speakers, so everyone is encouraged to give talks, start debates, demo their projects, lead workshops, whatever suits their fancy.

Participation is free. Please register here.

Fabriculture is an AZ Labs Network project dedicated to promoting open source digital fabrication and maker culture in general. Learn more about FabriCulture here.

For those new to the digital fabrication revolution make sure to also check out the beautiful Nueve Ojos Full Printed animation and Schuyler St. Ledger’s Ignite Phoenix presentation for a quick overview.