Upright Egg and TCMaker Partner to Generate Energy on VENUS

Welcome to the first in a series of interviews leading up to Upright Egg’s next production VENUS (a play about energy). This week, we’re talking with Mike Hord of TCMaker, a local Twin Cities DIY group.

Good Morning Mike, let’s get started -
1. What is TCMaker, and how did you come to be involved with the group? and what is the Hack Factory?

TCMaker is a collaborative group that aims to provide a venue for makers to create new things, share ideas and tools, show off their creations and get feedback. The Hack Factory is the shop we work in. The reason for the
name difference is rooted in the Hack Factory and TCMaker having started as two separate groups that converged.

I became aware of the group when I saw a post on the Make magazine blog back in January of 2009. The post hit the blog within about 24 hours of the founder of the group, Paul Sobczak, having created the twincitiesmaker.com
website. Within a couple of weeks, we started having meetings, and in July we voted to organize and I volunteered to be president.

2. What are some of your favorite projects at the Hack Factory, either in process or already completed?

I’m really inspired by the life-size Operation game- that’s my model for a project that wouldn’t have happened without the group. The guy who did the art didn’t know how to make the buzzer buzz, and the guy who made the buzzer system had insufficient art skills to make it happen. Neither of the guys knew each other when they started at TCMaker.

3. That kind of collaboration is exactly the kind of thing that drew Upright Egg to contact TCMaker. What is the current project with TCMaker and Upright Egg ?

Upright Egg proposed a bicycle that would generate electricity to power a bank of low wattage LED lights for their next show. TCMaker is providing the technical skill to design and build an open-source and open-hardware device that will generate roughly 300 watts or more at its peak performance.

Several of the parts that may be going into our device

4. How does this Energy Generating Bike work ?

The bike wheel is connected to a permanent magnet DC motor salvaged from a cordless drill. The output of that motor is regulated and fed into the battery, which then powers the UPS. (editor’s note: “UPS” is short for uninterruptible power supply A switch flips from “charge” mode to “running” mode.

5. If anyone reading this has a project they’d like to work on with TCMaker- what is the best way to get started?

Best bet: come to the Wednesday night open meeting and chat about it. Second best is to post to the web forum or the Google group (or both) and see what shakes loose. Unfortunately, there are people who only check one or another of those at any given time.

Thanks again for your time, Mike.
You can learn more about TCMaker on their Website , and keep up with all things VENUS and Upright Egg on our home at http://www.uprightegg.com

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