I’d been coming to the hackspace about once every six months, I would probably have been a member earlier if it had been closer to my work/home/school, but I found the motivation through my wedding.
My girlfriend/wife luckily is more rational than me, and took care of the more important stuff, while I spent a while daydreaming of the cool techy stuff I was going to do for the wedding. The thing with weddings is, there’s a ton of things to do, specially if you’re on a tight budget and do everything yourself. Luckily before the shit really hit the fan I had managed to both join the space and get certified for the laser cutter, and I managed to get some time to do coasters to give to the guests. Our wedding was in Pemberton, and we had Mount Currie in the background, which we used for the coaster. This explanation is necessary as it’s apparently not very clear what we drew on the coaster.
Special thanks to @Adam_Barlev for teaching me the basics, and @funvill for giving my inkscape pointer, and @TyIsI for general advice, troubleshooting, and showing me the ropes.
We also needed to add a couple of signs with instructions and schedules, we went to Michael’s and got a pair of pseudo-blackboards for super cheap, and to pretify them I cut some frames from scraps I had left from the coasters (I found the svg files at http://www.clker.com).
The project where I spent the most time (and probably the most useless) was on making a videobooth. We had a polaroid camera and a bunch of wigs and stuff to play around with, and I wanted to add a webcam and a missile launch button that people could smash to turn on the webcam for 10 seconds to record whatever crazy thing they wanted to do or say. I promptly bought a cheap usb button but of course it turned out to be Windows only and not well documented. A few people had used similar things to do cool stuff, and with the help of Robin, and especially my friend Jaznim I managed to reverse enginner a driver for the button. I borrowed a cheap webcam from VHS, and after toying with several options I ended following the advice of @Logan_Buchy and writing a simple python script with the opencv library. At this point I was about 3 days away from the wedding and didn’t have time to figure out voice, so it ended up being only image (I have a few videos of friends pasionately saying probably awesome things that’ll need to wait for the lip reading opencv library extension). I felt like the wedding needed a bit more thundercats in it, and my brother quickly cooked me an .svg image of Liono’s sword where I crudely glued the webcam.
The script worked really well and sustained lots of abuse of little children and drunk adults. The webcam was pretty crappy and didn’t do well in low light, but I got a lot of great stuff, and as with many things I think it would have been way more awesome with more time to tinker with it. For an entrepreneurial hacker looking for some cash, weddings could be an easy target. I even toyed with an idea suggested a few years ago by @iMakeRobots of basically doing a drawbot setup with one or two extra stepper motors and a camera mounted on the roof of, say, the dancefloor, and do sweeps over the crowd. Just make a few of these, show up at a wedding convention and make sure it doesn’t kill anybody.
Anyway, thanks a lot for all the help. Besides the wedding stuff I met a lot of really cool people and found the motivation to become a regular member and now come more or less regularly to the space. If anyone is interested in the button or the code, let me know (not sure if I can attach python scripts here, and my github page is a mess).