[Lancaster] Shrimping Laptops

[Cefn Hoile]

I'd like to announce that the first ever Laptop Shrimping workshops are
imminent in the local area, and ask for your help.

We expect these to run at West End Impact in Morecambe within a month or
so. We're just trying to get together enough 'studio' machines and
accessories from community donations and I'll be test-running the workshop
format with other workshoppers and researchers at the end of this week at
http://mendrs.net near Kendal

Our aim is to use salvaged laptops as a resource to get local kids and
adults into media and microcontroller programming through inventive
experimentation. Laptops will come in as undesirable, out-of-date, slow
laptops and leave as bespoked, personally-invested machines, which the
workshoppers have fixed up themselves, and which can be useful for
browsing, homework and programming.

To get a preview of a Shrimped Laptop, here's one I made earlier - an
eleven-year-old Compaq Presario 700 running Lubuntu and bespoke Python
software, connecting Gstreamer FFT through Arduino to an HL1606 RGB
lighting strip...
https://vimeo.com/44535515

I'm converging on a layout for a stripboard-based Shrimpduino - a minimal
Arduino-compatible for £4 (including USB-connectivity) which means we
should be able to have local kids grab a freecycled laptop, slap
lubuntu-core (or similar) on it and then use Arduino and Python to build
their own personalised digital augmentations, then walk out the door with
them. Ideally we'd get enough money together for these core components to
be free (at £4 a time this should be within some minimal development budget
we hope, but is even potentially within reach of pocket money).
http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php?topic=111523.0

I'm keen to get people involved over the coming months as facilitators,
especially those with workshopping or teaching experience, (we can teach
you the programming basics). There may well be other technologies which we
can workshop with, such as Scratch, Processing, Javascript, PHP so if you
have ideas how to make any other tools really comprehensible to newbies
then lets have a chat. In this domain, technical skill isn't so important
as explanation and coaching skills I feel, so don't worry whether you're
enough of a hardcore geek, this could even be a disadvantage!
http://cefn.com/shrimping

We're heavily reliant on donations of laptops and general computing
accessories which people are no longer using. If it boots, and has USB or
ethernet, we can probably use it. Love to hear from you on any of these
fronts.

Cefn
http://cefn.com
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