<div>I'd like to announce that the first ever Laptop Shrimping workshops are imminent in the local area, and ask for your help. </div><div><br></div><div>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 <a href="http://mendrs.net">http://mendrs.net</a> near Kendal</div>
<div><br></div><div>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 Laptops will come in as undesirable, out-of-date, slow laptops and leave as bespoked, personally-invested machines, which the workshoppers have fixed up themselves, and which can be useful for browsing,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.</div>
<div><br></div><div><div>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...</div>
</div><div><a href="https://vimeo.com/44535515">https://vimeo.com/44535515</a></div><div><br></div><div>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).</div>
<div><a href="http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php?topic=111523.0">http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php?topic=111523.0</a></div><div><br></div>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!<div>
<a href="http://cefn.com/shrimping">http://cefn.com/shrimping</a><br> <div>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.<div>
<br></div><div><div>Cefn</div><div><a href="http://cefn.com">http://cefn.com</a></div></div></div></div>