Here’s a time lapse video of our installation in September at the Volkspark Friedrichshain in Berlin:

Ridiculous Love from Nicole on Vimeo.

Read about our process below the jump:

Nicole and I use a chat program that allows us to leave each other voicemails. Since we are both a) silly b) in love, some of these messages are definitely ridiculous. Nicole started a collection of these a few years ago which has just grown. We thought it would be fun to invite people to celebrate the ridiculousness that love can sometimes produce, thus Ridiculous Love was born.

The project allows up to four people to sit together on a bench, listen to some inspirational ridiculous music with ridiculous love, then provide their own notes about their experience with ridiculous love which are then pinned to the box:

The electronics:

We purchased

• two simple mp3 players
• two y splitters for 1/8″ audio cables
• 4 sets of headphones
• 2 usb power banks
• some coloured paracord to attach the headphones to the structure

We put our sound files on the mp3 players, then put each mp3 player plugged into a power bank in each side of the structure, with 2 sets of headphones attached to each. To make sure there wasn’t too much stress put on the headphone cables, we tied the headphones to the structure with paracord. This worked pretty well! We have had no headphone casualties so far.

One note: you get what you pay for with mp3 players. We bought these crazy cheap players for less than 3$ each, with cheap micro SD cards. One of them has a non-functioning battery, and when putting the SD card in the other, we managed to shove it between the case and the SD card slot. After some surgery on the player we managed to get the card in the right place, but… lesson learned.

The structure:

In developing the structure, we knew we wanted somewhere people could sit and lounge, but we also wanted to minimize the amount of storage space needed in our apartments for the project. Inspired by the seating choice of many hipster bars in the city, we chose to use beer boxes as the base for our installation. This means we just pay a deposit for the boxes when we need them, then return them to the store when we’re done!

Originally, our design required over 20 boxes though, which would have been a challenge to transport given that we don’t have a car. So we got creative and used some wooden posts to extend the tent structure into the air. This meant we needed a total of 14 boxes – which is still a lot, but much more manageable than twice that many.

To make the boxes comfortable to sit on, we put a camping mattress on top. We tied the whole thing together with ratcheting straps.

The fabric:

The best part of the project is the amazing colour of the structure. Originally we wanted to use pink fun-fur to cover the whole structure. We even ordered 10 m of pink fur from an online retailer! Unfortunately it arrived dirty and not at all the right colour:

With sadness in our hearts, we headed to modulor to see if we could find something better. And we did! We spoke with a wonderful employee in the fabric department who knew exactly what we needed: hot pink stretchy lycra. Its stretchiness makes it super forgiving, and the colour is amazing.

To make the first installation, we just safety pinned the material together, but ideally we’ll sew it all together for our 2018 installations.

The decorations:

To make the Ridiculous Love project really stand out, we added some ridiculous decorations.

• On top of the box we made some “neon lights” by attaching battery powered electroluminescent wire (from dealextreme) to some stiffer wire that we shaped into the letters LOVE.
• We made a sign that said ART. LOVE! on one side, and KUNST. LIEBE! on the other with the letters made of glitter tape on a black foamcore background.
• We pinned tiny red hearts to the structure.

The interactive part:

We asked folks to experience the sound installation, and then pick a piece of paper and crayon in a colour of their choice to write a note about their experience of ridiculous love. These notes were then pinned on to the structure for others to read and be inspired by.

The installation:

We managed to find one Späti that gave us all 14 of our beer cases at once! We thought we would need a cab, but we managed to attach all the boxes to a skateboard which worked as a hand cart to get them all to the park.

The rest of the equipment fit in my camping backpack. You can see us assembling the project in the video above!

• Selected for the 33rd Hamburg International Short Film Festival(June 2017)
• Selected for the 31st Braunschweig International Short FilmFestival (October 2017)

Read more for information about how we made the film.

Nicole and I had been talking about making a short film and submitting to a festival for a while, so when I spotted the Hamburg International Short Film Festival’s deadline coming up we decided to go for it!

Our film idea was to make a stop motion film using resistors. We built a light box by taking a cardboard box and cutting out large panels from all four sides. We then taped translucent white paper to the large sides to make the light entering the box more diffuse, and left the smaller sides open to allow us to move the resistors around. Here’s a photo showing the open side of the box with the translucent paper overlapping a bit. The lamp shown was an early test model, not one we used in the end.

We then bought four led lamps from the hardware store, and set them up so that they were shining onto the paper.

We used Nicole’s iPhone to film, with an app called OSnap. The app takes time lapse photos and turns them into videos. This worked out pretty well because we could set the camera to automatically take photos with enough time in between to move the resistors.

We’re pretty proud of the result, and had so much fun at the film festivals!

I used the Geofabrik package of OpenStreetMap data for Berlin as a basis for several layers in my map. Once I unpackaged the file to a simple .osm, it’s over 700 MB. I did try to open this in QGIS, but… that didn’t work so well.

Fortunately, you can filter the file before bringing it into your mapping software using osmfilter. The OSM wiki and/or the query feature on openstreetmaps.org will help you figure out how to filter for what you’re interested in.

For example: I wanted to grab all the museums that OpenStreetMap knows about. I looked on the OSM wiki for museums. This page shows that museums will be labelled with the tag “tourism=museum”. Then I ran this command:

./osmfilter berlin-latest.osm --keep="tourism=museum" -o=museums.osm

This runs the osmfilter script (located in the folder in which I’m executing the command) on the berlin-latest.osm. It exports a file museums.osm that includes only those objects with the tag “tourism=museum”.

I separated the transit information I wanted to import into stations and lines. It’s also divided by operator and type (S-Bahn, U-Bahn, tram, etc). To get the U-Bahn stations, for example, I ran

./osmfilter berlin-latest.osm --keep"railway=station AND station=subway" -o=ubahnstations.osm

For the tram lines, I ran commands like this:

./osmfilter berlin-latest.osm --keep"route=tram AND operator=BVG" -o=trams/TramWays.osm

./osmfilter trams/TramWays.osm --keep"ref=M1" -o=trams/M1.osm

I could definitely also have left the tram routes all as one file and done filtering in QGIS to change the colour, but this way seemed easier.

Here’s how it looks after I import some layers this way:

I’ve had the Moleskine City Notebooks before, but they have the persistent habit of walking off. This is a paaaain, especially after I’ve entered all kinds of information into the book by hand. Also, I always make mistakes when writing in the books – apartment on the wrong side of the street, wrong labels on the pages, tram lines going the wrong place – and there’s no eraser for my felt tipped pens.

Modern technology means I shouldn’t have to do this! I will make a little booklet out of A4 folded once to give to guests. This way they can write in it and take it home and I can generate custom maps if I want.

Project plan:

• make maps including index overlay in QGIS
• generate text pages in LaTeX
• use LaTeX or some other plugin to generate a pdf for printing and binding (proper page ordering)

What I’d eventually like to do is:

• write a script so I can have a booklet be generated automatically (query QGIS, export to image, concatenate to pdf)
• have map layers be selectable in the script (some people don’t like coffee, some people are really into transit history, etc)

Some problems I’ve already encountered:

• QGIS isn’t the most stable program. I have some paths and nodes imported from OSM, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable amount? Anyway, being patient and saving often seems to be enough to keep me from losing too much data.
• The OpenLayers plugin acts a little strange when exporting maps. The resolution of the exported maps is usually pretty crap, and sometimes the maps are offset from where they should be. I’d like to solve this one by using a georeferenced image / images at useful resolutions.
• I don’t seem to understand how the scale bars in the exported images work. They seem to be wrong most of the time, which suggests I’m doing something wrong.

Hackerspaces are full of people with beards. Lacking the hormones necessary to grow my own, I figured I’d make the next best thing:a ludicrous, brightly coloured, plastic goatee that hangs out of my nose. I made the first ones at thinkhaus the night before the Toronto mini Makerfaire of 2011.

Nosebeard and mustache ring (from @techknight) at Toronto Mini Makerfaire, 2011.

Neon nosebeard made at raumfahrtagentur in Berlin. Seemed like a good way to test out the laser cutter and toolchain.

Another shot of me wearing one of the nosebeards made at think|haus.

Means we ended up with this:

Laser with fire extinguisher dust.

instead of a burned down building.

For SoOnCon 2011, thingtank in Toronto made maker passports. This resulted in the need for some stamps.
I worked on the think|haus one. Didn’t get any of the final stamp, but here’s some work in progress.

We used natural linoleum sourced from Mixed Media. Important note: don’t use softoleum or other non-linseed oil based “linoleum”! These tend to be made of PVC which will make nasty gases when you laser it.

Ideally you’d get… stamp rubber… made for lasering… as our laser was designed to work with. But I had no luck finding that anywhere in store and didn’t have enough time to wait for it to be delivered.

Note: remember to mirror your image before you make it into a stamp…

You can see here what one of the issues is with using linoleum or possibly my assumed kerf thickness: you don’t really get rid of all the material, you just sort of char it and leave lines there.

That’s why I ended up going for a stamp that didn’t have a lot of negative space. The one cut out above is basically what we used, except with the whole thing mirrored so it would actually work as a stamp.

Also, linoleum is super flammable! So, you know, don’t leave your laser unattended. Not that you were going to do that, right? Right.

Air assist would make this way way easier – in fact, I cut some at site3 and they worked so much better. No charring, just material gone. Magical.

Lasering in progress. (No air assist)

For Alex’s 29th birthday, all of her friends got together to buy her an ipad. I made a case for it which included each friend’s name.

You can see the soot on the wood here. The initial coat or two of finish mean that that can be wiped off easily.

Completed frame.

I unfortunately don’t have a photo of the completed object. I finished it on the bus on the way to Toronto… It was similar to a Dodo case. I used techniques I learned doing bookbinding to make the outer case: bookboard covered with leatherette on the outside and some beautiful handmade paper on the inside. An elastic glued inside the case to hold it shut. Instead of using precision cut rubber to hold the ipad in place (the dodo technique) I used two or four pieces of elastic across the corners.

Things I learned:

• Underlay is a lovely material. That’s what thin plywood meant to go underneath flooring is called in Canada. It’s pretty, uniform, and plays nicely with the laser cutter. You can reliably cut through it and engraving likewise works well.
• My initial tests resulted in the wood getting covered with soot which got worked into the grain when I tried to rub it off. If you’ve got air assist, you likely won’t have this problem. An easy fix is to apply two layers of finish to the wood before cutting it. Then the soot can be easily wiped off.

You can find a draft svg on my github.

All this lasering is fun, but I wanted to practise actual handwork. This sled is based on this pattern.

I can do more than just edit gcode and put plastic into the laser cutter!