Hello, Fritzing world. My name is Laura and I’m a creator / programmer and organizer living in Berlin. If I’m not planning a new project or talking with people about a whacky idea, then I’m probably thinking about one. I moved to Berlin about a year ago and got involved in open tech / rails girls / maker things when my friend and I started going to Everything together (yes, Everything). Workshops, meetups, tangentially related conferences, you name it. Johanna and I were there.
Johanna and I at Everything:
https://instagram.com/p/ZdE6QQGr-9/
https://instagram.com/p/ZvJy7omr6I/
This Fall we’re testing the new Fritzing Creator Kit. We’ve worked with Arduinos before, but this is our first foray into the Fritzing world. We’re going to try each project, try our own projects and document the process through this blog.
i.e., make things, break things and drink (lots of) coffee.
Since we’ll blog regularly in the next months, I asked Johanna a few questions to help you get to know us better. Follow the entire series, stay tuned on the Fritzing blog and follow us on Twitter: Laura Wadden and Johanna Santos Bassetti.
You have a degree in art, you're interested in agriculture, you've worked in product strategy at various startups, and you even picked strawberries while living on a Danish island. What got you involved in Fritzing?
Ever since I was a little girl I watched my dad solder things. And I knew that by soldering things he was making other things happen. At that point I didn’t really understand what computers were, but I liked the soldering process. And then when I understood what computers were, I got interested in how to make computers do stuff that serves you as a tool. I thought of them as potential translators of the physical world and imagined ways of using computers to measure how plants grow. But I didn’t know about sensors then.
So you thought about programming machines as a little girl? Awesome!
Exactly.
How did you get involved in Fritzing and Arduinos this time around?
I worked with Arduinos back in 2011 doing wearable Arduino work for a friend’s exhibition during Club Transmediale. He had a Lilypad, sensors and speakers that I sewed into a lab coat with metal string. I had to figure out a way to sew it so that none of the connections touched while the participants moved so it wouldn’t short-circuit.
How has the Berlin maker scene – Fritzing, Open Tech School, the workshops we’ve gone to, Hackidemia, the Kids Hackathon, etc. – influenced your involvement in Arduinos & Fritzing?
The project back in 2011 was really on the outskirts, but Arduinos stayed on my mind. Then all of a sudden it was much more accessible through these meetups. People were willing to share their knowledge and teach - that’s the first time I felt it was possible to work on my own projects.
What about those meetups inspired you?
The Open Tech School meetup was inspiring because there were tons of projects happening at the same time and so many different types of learning in self-organized groups. The diversity of approaches was titillating: There was a table of sound tinkerers! There was a wearables table! And a table of complete newbies!
I think seeing how collaborative, open and fluid the community was made me feel safe to try whatever I wanted and feel supported by other people.
And I inspired you too, right?!
Yes! When I started doing these projects with you – that’s when I noticed how well we work together. Our different learning complement each other. And I realized how much fun it is.
Do you have any goals with our Fritzing project this Fall? What are you trying to get out of it?
I want to test some ideas that I’ve kept locked in my brain vault for the last decade. With Fritzing, they are potentially doable now. I am excited to get to it!
Follow Laura Wadden and Johanna Santos Bassetti on Twitter and keep up with the Fritzing blog to find out what happens next in their learning adventure.
The MaketechXconference at Berlin’s Platoon Kunsthalle will take place from 8 – 9 of November 2013. It invites inspired thinkers, makers and developers to enter an intense, two-day conference of ambitious tinkering, lively discussions and hands-on innovation with smart tech, DIY development and plenty of focused ingenuity.
See the MaketechXlab – a mobile Fablab – to turn tentative ideas into tangible prototypes. Fritzing sponsored the electronic teaching material! «It’s high time to put humanity back in control of technology; so sign up to join our roster of key thinkers and passionate activists and help us realise simple – and simply inspired – solutions that promote positive change on any level!», so far the MakeTechX initiators.
A lot of interesting talks will be held and you can join ours on Friday, 12 o’clock. We will have a small hands on demonstration of the Fritzing Creator Kit on Friday, too. It will take place from 11 o’clock AM to 1 o’clock PM.
Hope to see you there :-)
We waited for this MakerFaire impatiently and finally it is happening!
More than 250 projects are being presented this weekend by makers and inventors from all over the world, and as usual we met many old friends and users and made new friends.
It was great to see how many people came to visit the Faire, families, adults, teenagers, children, educators, hobbyists etc…
The venue was full from the opening hour till the call till sunset. This really shows that the maker movement is a solid and genuine thing. People don’t get excited then go home and forget about it, the projects and products exhibited stimulate the creative and curious part inside us in an irresistible way. Some lives are even shaped by this spark of inspiration forever.
Dale had this observation and tweeted it yesterday, we can only agree to it: There is no place in the world that can claim to be THE hub of the movement. This really belongs to us, tinkerers and explorers, any Makerfaire in the world will be full of old and young people with eyes wide open.
It also was with great pleasure that we discovered PCBs made with our fab service at the BASTL-INSTRUMENTS stand. The guys use Fritzing to layout the boards and our fab service to prototype their products.
They now sell their MIDI-synthesizers as a kit or assembled, and we are sure they will have a huge success because everyone at their booth was having a blast making music.
Our friend and reseller Yuan from EXP-Tech dropped by for a very nice conversation about the german and the chinese maker scenes, and we exchanged a lot of our experiences about managing the bits part of a hardware business.
It was another great event, we had a lot of fun and we are going home with many great new projects and a lot of feedback, but mainly with so much more excitement and enthusiasm for keeping on doing what we do for the community, and start better products and services to empower inventors and makers everywhere.
BONUS: this is a “behind the scenes” photo of us setting up the stand and building the Creator Kit examples. The handsome guy on the right is Tommaso our colleague at IXDS and one of the creators of Dandylight. We do look seriously busy :D
At Fritzing, we are looking for a committed, reliable person to take over the day-to-day management of our online kit shop and production services.
We are selling the Fritzing Creator Kit: the kit helps anyone to learn to work creatively with electronics.
You will be responsible for production of these kits (together with our wonderful team of packers), and fulfilling sales orders through our different sales channels.
We are also offering a simple, high-quality PCB manufacturing service together with our fabrication partners (Fritzing Fab).
You will be responsible for the handling and shipping to our customers.
As we intend to extend these offerings and make Fritzing an even better service for the community, you can also play an instrumental role in crafting the strategy and implementing it.
We are looking for someone who speaks German and English and who has work experience in offline/online retail, small scale production or warehouse management. This is a full time position, though we can talk about other models.
Send your application to [email protected] and join our exciting team in a great location in Berlin-Kreuzberg!
Our friends from the REMAKE Festival in Belgrade are organising it this year in Berlin and we are offering a workshop as part of the program for people who want to get started with electronics: Introduction to Interactive Electronics.
This workshop, aimed at beginners, shows the basics of ‘Physical Computing‘ with the Arduino microcontroller in the Fritzing framework. No prior knowledge is required, but it usually helps to know a little programming. If interested, please send your mini bio and motivational letter to: vedrana.boskovic@ gmail.com
NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 5-15 COST PER PERSON: just daily or four-day Festival Ticket
MATERIAL NEEDED:
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Laptop: ideally with the latest version of Arduino and Fritzing pre-installed. If you don‘t have one, don‘t worry, you can probably share with your workshop neighbor.
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Fritzing Creator Kit which you can buy at the workshop for a discounted price of 89€.
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Good mood and crea- tive ideas. Fritzing is an open-source initiative supporting designers, artists, researchers and hob- byists, aiming to take the step from physical prototyping to actual product.