Lee.org

I have just been offered a job with Earthmine as a Field Technician. Among other things, I’ll be travelling the world maintaining super fancy cameras!

Helping to make things like this happen:

Woot! I start July 26th.

Continue reading ‘New Full Time Job!’ »

Here are photos from the last night of the Electronic Controlled Flame Effects class I taught at the Crucible this past Thursday night. (by David Nichols, Tim Alexander and Lee Sonko)

Nice class, eh?

And here’s some videos. The last one is the most flame-tastic!

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImfPKY_7IRk setting up for firing

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8knfJu6PIg Cuckoo flaming

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUyvVokw7wI Cupcake Poofer

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEUd4vZwj1U more pressure poofs

I tried to wind my way through “H&R Block at Home Free Edition” but gave up when it kept asking inappropriate (and unanswerable) questions about my business and hobby. And it kept pissing me off how it would ask questions in a wonky order (IE for the sale of stock, it first asks about the sale on one page, then when I bought the stock, then another detail about about the sale on a third page)

I tried Free Tax USA at random off the IRS website and I liked it a lot. I’ll definitely try it again next year.

Taxes done! And with an hour and a half to spare. No problem.

Sorry I haven’t been blogging, I’ve been doing.

Teaching Kinetics 9-12pm and 1-4pm takes a lot out of you, especially when there are always some challenging kids in the group. Those 2 weeks are done. There will be another round shortly!

Tutoring twice a week to a 3rd grader and 4th grader. Last week we played Flash Card battles, it was cool. I’d hold up multiplication flash cards in my fist and throw punches at him from across the room. When he answered them, I’d throw myself back across the room. Then we’d switch sides. Yes kids, math can be fun ;-)

Doing a fabrication project for a company team building project. They got 80% through designing and building it with my help. Now I’m doing the other 80% to finish up.

Doing another fabrication project for a person at the Crucible: making a 2 stage foot pedal for his glass working torch

I haven’t told many about this but I’m STILL trying to get the SWARM robots back from Techkriti in Kanpur India after 7 freaking weeks. The local shipper, Airlift Global has been dragging their feet the whole time. I’ve been calling several times per week for most of these 7 weeks. On Friday I escalated it by writing to the Dean of Student Affairs and the Techkriti Festival Chairman. That seems to have gotten them going but the next step is to call my local federal official, Nancy Pelosi.

I’m still working with a local machine shop, helping to get their computers working well, hunting down viruses, wrangling giant Hurco CNC mills, fixing internets and intranets, and VoIPing.

Been hunting down a few more people to teach at the Crucible. I got some very impressive people responding to my call!

I’m making the lesson plan for a computer controlled flame effects class that’s starting in 2 weeks!

I’m still trying to source products and get a web site for the T. Pen.

While Charlotte and I are very good friends, we’re not dating any more. I’ve been looking for a relationship. I’ve been using OKCupid and enjoying it.

Been recovering from a hard drive crash. I don’t -think- I lost any data. But seriously, how do you tell? I’ve got hundreds of gigs to protect. Considering RAID 5 in software on Win XP Pro.

Been working on Vivoliths with Marnia. There’s an art show in June that we’re going to have them set up for! They’ll chirp kinda like crickets, light up as if they’re bioluminescent and react to people’s presence.

Been working on a mechanical heart art project with Schuyler. It’s going to beat in response to your body heat when you hold it in your hands or against your chest.

Phew!

Last week I taught a week long session of both “Youth Extreme Gizmos” and “Youth Radical Robots” at the Crucible. They’re for 9-11 year olds and 12-16 year olds. Next week I’m doing another session. The Kinetics department is filling up with my name as a teacher :-)

Worked a day last week at the Crucible for a corporate training event building part of a large crazy control panel. We didn’t finish it at the event so I’m being paid to finish building it. Cool.

I hooked up with an acquaintance on Monday night to modify a mechanism to work for an online video ad for a big client. The acquaintance was happy with my work. Cool.

I just took on a third tutoring student. 3rd grade reading. Pretty cool.

I was just asked to teach 2 sessions of  a week-long intensive classes at the Crucible starting next week, “Youth Radical Robots”. Cool.

The SWARM robots are still in India after a month of wrangling with locals. For the last 2 weeks I have made it a ritual to call every night and ask “Ok, who is now blaming who for sitting on who’s hands today? And how can we get things moving?” Uncool.

SWARM was just asked by Velocity Circus to do a gig in San Diego on April 21st. That’s good because it’s a gig. That’s bad because I have to guarantee the orbs will be back. It took 9 days to get the orbs from San Francisco to Kanpur. So far it’s taken 32 days and they are still sitting in the same spot we left them. Serious potential for Cool AND Uncool.

In more pleasant news, I’ve been wrangling with the computer system of a local machine shop for the last 10 days, getting paid to remove viruses, diagnose DSL problems, install software and the like. Just yesterday, I believe we had a major victory, defeating the slow DSL service. An AT&T tech was here for 3 hours and he found that our line from the telephone box to the office was poorly balanced so he switched to a different line. Only time will tell if this sporadic problem was really fixed. It’s totally cool hanging out with the machine shop guys and hearing about the totally exciting projects they’re working on… like a motorcycle that doesn’t… darn it, I’m not sure if I can talk about it!

In tutoring news, yesterday I taught a 9 year old how to pay for pizza. You wouldn’t think this would be rough but oh my this was a horror. I’m tutoring this 4th grader and for the second session in a row he was really bad. He grumbled, mumbled, fought, threw papers, swore, drummed on the desk, ran around the room, bitched AND moaned.  So Delphino, the completely awesome staffer at the YMCA helped me convince him to do a little math. In 1.5 hours we successfully did 1 math problem. “You and 3 friends agree to split a pizza. The pizza man is at the door and he wants his $12 dollars. How much should each person chip in?” We had to work in earnest on the answer for 10 minutes, but he got it! Cool.

Along with 3 friends, I am will be presenting SWARM at the Techkriti Annual Technology and Entreprenurship Festival February 11-14th, 2010 in Kanpur India!

Dr Jonathan Foote, Marnia Johnston, Niladri Bora and I will be exhibiting SWARM throughout the entire festival. On February 13th we will present our talk.

We are greatly honored to be in company with the other speakers at the event. The program shows these other speakers:

• Douglas D. Osheroff – Nobel Laureate, Physics
• Oliver Smithies – Nobel Laureate, Medicine
• Paul Shuch – Executive Director Emeritus of The SETI League
• Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer – Director General of CERN
• Bernhard Schölkopf – Director, Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics
• Dr. Ashish Gupta – Managing Director – Investment Advisor at Helion Venture Partners
• Jaya Prakash Narayan – Former IAS and Social Activist
• Dr. John G. Baker – Goddards Space Flight Center, NASA
• Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis – Assistant Professor, UAEU & PHD, MIT Media Lab
• Graham Sparey-Taylor – Head, Nos Gwawr II
• Neeraj Kayal – Gödel Prize and Distinguished Alumnus Award
• Shantanu Srivastava – Managing Director & CEO, Ishan International Pvt. Ltd.
• Ken Lemons – Creator of Musical DNA

From the main “Talks” page

“When a person talks about his work, he is talking about a love affair”.
- Alfred Kazin

Be witness to lectures that are sure to blow your mind away. From Nobel laureates who climbed steep rungs to the very zenith of success to business wizards who have literally accomplished Mission Impossible, these talks have them all. This year we have talks with both a technial and an entreprenuerial flavour. From Turing award winners to “desi-innovators” with a rags-to-riches story, Techkriti ‘10 has it all. The talks form the essence of the festival where the triumph of the human mind is celebrated. So no matter what keeps each one of us ticking, let us all come together to assimilate the distilled essence of the roads to success.

Here is the full text of our biography

OrbSWARM - Semiautonomous Robots
SWARM is a fleet of semiautonomous rolling orbs. They were created to move, sing, dance, illuminate and interact with one another and those around them. SWARM is a large-scale collaborative project featuring members of several San Francisco based art and engineering groups including members of the Flaming Lotus Girls, the Sunflower Robots Project, members of the robotics, kinetic art, and Linux/open source communities. The group is particularly proud of its non-hierarchical collaboration style, allowing those with varied interests and expertise to work together. All SWARM designs and code are open-source and freely available to help and inspire other artists and engineers.

Niladri Bora joined Swarm in May 2007. He wrote code for the aggregator and the SPU and also did part of the custom machining for SWARM. Before SWARM he apprenticed at the Omnicircus. He was born and raised in Assam in north-eastern India but has been living in the Bay Area since 1999. He finds it ironic that he moved across the globe from one of the most earthquake-prone areas in India to the most earthquake-prone area in the Unites States. He is a graduate in Mechanical Engineering from Gauhati University but has worked in the software industry for most of his professional life. He is interested in electronics, programming and all aspects of robot fabrication.

Jonathan T. Foote received a BS (Electrical Engineering) degree in 1985 and a ME (Electrical) degree in 1986, both from Cornell University. From 1986 to 1988 he worked as a development engineer for Teradyne, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1993 he received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Brown University, where he also received a Brown Presidential Teaching Award and an Outstanding Research Award from Sigma Xi. He did postdoctoral research at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom from 1993 to 1996, and was a 1997 Fulbright Fellow at the Institute of Systems Science in Singapore. From 1997 to 2005 he was a Senior Research Scientist at FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc. Currently he is a freelance consultant. Dr. Foote has published more than 60 technical papers in the areas of signal processing and remote interaction, as well as 34 US patents. Dr. Foote was responsible for much of the electronic design on SWARM as well as microcontroller programming.

Marnia Johnston is a sculptor living in San Mateo, CA. She is an interdisciplinary instigator collaborating with engineers, synthetic biologists, programmers and tinkerers, In her most recent collaboration she conducted a workshop with graduate students, artists, biologists, programmers and roboticists. She recently co-curated the show Multispecies Salon II with Dr. Eben Kirksey at the California College of the Arts, in conjunction with the American Anthropological Association, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Johnston’s sculptures and drawings have been exhibited widely in California, most recently in the Consilience of Art & Science exhibition at the Pence Gallery in Davis, California, and at San Jose’s ZeroOne Biennial event, SubZero. She has also had work shown in New York, Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, North Carolina and abroad. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Icheon World Ceramic Center and has been recognized by the World Ceramic Biennial, South Korea with a diploma of honor and a medal of honor. She has also been recognized by the Marin Society of Artists with an award of merit.

Born in California, Johnston holds a BFA from San Jose State University and MFA from the California College of the Arts (CCA). She continues to sculpt out of her studio in San Francisco, CA.

Lee Sonko is a machine artist, entrepreneur and one of the founding members of SWARM. He is a faculty member in the Kinetics and Electronics Department at The Crucible in Oakland California and a member of the the San Francisco based Flaming Lotus Girls art group. Lee has partipated in SWARM from inception, proposal, design, fabrication, re-fabrication (as is always the case), administration, organization. Some other projects that Lee has made significant contributions to include The Serpent Mother, a 170′ long fire breathing skeletal serpent built with the Flaming Lotus Girls and Colossus, an impossibly agile 25 ton kinetic sculpture built with Zachary Coffin. He has also designed various microelectronics projects for professional and recreational use.

Lee has presented on art and technology before numerous audiences including Google IO, Robogames, The Coachella Music Festival, Hacker Dojo, Maker Faire, Burning Man, The Head-Royce School, Yuri’s Night, and Noisebridge.

I’ll be teaching a breadmaking class at the Institute of Urban Homesteading Open House on May 16th. Hopefully that will lead to many more bread making classes :-)

My biography is now on the Faculty page of the IUH website (was here)  :-)

Lee Sonko http://lee.org
Lee Sonko is an entrepreneur, educator, machine artist, organizer, hacker, geek and baker. Those attributes often team up in his life to help explore the world. He is a founding member of SWARM, a San Francisco based mechatronic art robot group. He is also a member of the Flaming Lotus Girls and teaching faculty at The Crucible in Oakland. Lee’s love affair with good bread goes back as long as he can remember. Making and eating bread is his daily reminder of the simplicity and purity of the experience of creation.

Small Business owner – T. Pen

Teaching Faculty at the Crucible – teaching 2 classes starting in February
- Introduction to Mechanical Sculpture
- Electromechanics for Everything

Tutoring School Students – right now I have a 2nd grader and 4th grader

Teaching Bread Making at the Institute for Urban Homesteading

Presentation Manager for SWARM’s trip to Kanpur India

I am excited to say that starting in February I will be regular faculty at the Crucible. I had taught some classes in June. Now Michael Shiloh, head of the department, has asked me to take on 2 of his regular classes: “Electromechanics for Everything” and “Introduction to Mechanical Sculpture”.

The classes start in February. Of course, I’ll be in India for part of February so another Crucible faculty member and all-around-good-guy Sudhu and I will be co-teaching some of the classes and he’ll be subbing for some :-)

Feb 4-16 or so I’m going to India with SWARM!
We’re showing the orbs for 4 days and giving a presentation at Techkriti in Kanpur, India.

Do you want me to bring anything back with me?

It’s low and away.

The count’s oh and two.

I Taught 2 classes at The Crucible, Extreme Gizmos (8-12 yrs old) and Radical Robots (12-14yrs old). Phew, it was a lot of work to get ready for the classes! And a lot of work and mental energy to run them. But it turned out great.

Each class was 3 hrs/day for 5 days, June 15-19. Gizmos: 9-noon, Robots: 1-4pm.

We did way more than I have photographed. One note: NEVER let your students take their projects home before they are done! I let several kids bring their almost-finished (excellent) projects home on Thursday. All but one kid forgot to bring them back to finish and present.

It was a bit of a nervous thrill when I saw the cover of one of the Crucible’s catalogs

Extreme Gizmos class

Radical Robots class

Extreme Gizmos posing for a photo with our gizmos

A Radical Robot, an Arduino, servo and photoresistor open the box when you pass your hand in front of the box

Lee and kids

Another Radical Robot, a tripod holds an Arduino and 2 servos to point a mirror or camera in an arbitrary direction

Here’s the full class listing:

Youth Extreme Gizmos KIN14-Y

Class size: 8
Monday – Friday 9-12pm
June Camps: Jun 15-Jun 19
5 sessions
8-12 year olds
Cost: $235.00 (Tuition: $180.00, Materials: $55.00), Members: $217.00

Learn kinetic techniques to design, engineer, and construct a mechanical sculpture, contraption, or gadget with lights and moving parts. Using new and salvaged components, you will learn how motors, lights, and switches work, how to create mechanical structures, how to create different types of motion, and how to incorporate switches to operate your very own fantastical contraption!

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Youth Radical Robots KIN15-Y
Class size: 8
Monday – Friday 1-4pm
June Camps: Jun 15-Jun 19
5 sessions
12-14 year olds
Cost: $295.00 (Tuition: $220.00, Materials: $75.00), Members: $273.00

Build a simple remote-controlled robot . From the wheels up, you’ll create your robot’s shape and personality from salvaged components, mechanisms, and electrical components. You’ll also learn soldering, mechanical construction techniques, and how to remove and repurpose these items. Each student will receive a kit of motors, wheels, and a remote control toy.

Oop, I haven’t updated my adoring public in a while. Here’s what’s been up recently, in no apparent order. Some of these items took up seconds of my time, some of them hundreds of hours.

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I was on the curatorial committee for the Robogames Art Competition with Marnia, Niladri and Corey. Marnia and I each made the most lovable Tweenbots as a cute marketing ploy for the Art Competition. We set a sign on him that read “Help me get to the Gallery!” and let him loose at the front entrance of Robogames. The tweenbots were a great success! As I left on Sunday with him under my wing, several people stopped me and said how great they were!

At the Crucible class, the kids changed changed the sign to read “Hi! My name is Ron. I am trying to get to the Kinetics Lab. Help if Stuck!” It’s interesting and telling that the kids insisted that the robot have a name. :-)

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Went to Robogames. The awesome new Exploratorium permanent outdoor exhibits at Fort Mason are awesome. Firefighting robots are awesome. Robogames is awesome. The Robogames art was awesome. Awesome!

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A firefighting robot at Robogames 2009
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Hung out with Magnus Wurzer of Roboexotica fame. I drove him to Robogames from the East Bay and caught up with him at Dorkbot.
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Went to the Dorkbot 7th Anniversary Party. Saw 2 tesla coils and 1 Tesla Roadster. The coils lit some fireworks… after much consternation; more than one person asked if we couldn’t use a lighter instead of a giant tesla coil to light them. Twas funny, using a hammer to kill a fly sometimes doesn’t work so well :-)

Saw the fantastic Snail Art car. The metal work on it is Fantastic! I haven’t yet found a photo that really captures it perfectly. I chatted with some of the crew and marvelled at it.

Met up with Shameless Heather… we met 5 years ago at Burning Man. 5 years. 5 years! Phew. Five years.
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I’ve learned a bit about Rotoscoping from Slim at Noisebridge (sat in on 2 or 3 classes)

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Got an f*ing awesome tour of the Advanced Light Source from Marcus

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I taught 2 week-long classes at the Crucible. Read about it.

Saw Deborah Violin playing in Berkeley with her friends. Most of it was really cool. They played these really really short, dense quartet pieces that were cool. And the Bach was nice. A guy played his Doctoral Thesis violin piece or something… yes, he’s now a doctor of music… and it sounded like 40 minutes of “Yeyt! Yeyt! Yeyt! Yeyt! Yeyt! Yeyt! Yeyt! Yeyt! Yeyt!” Oh my god it was awful, I prayed for death’s sweet release, but his professors apparently liked it. So what do I know?

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Dinner with Charlotte’s friend Kevin in Brocceley

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Went to sensitivity training at The Crucible so I could be Faculty. I now believe that straight, white European males are responsible for all evil in the world. I would kill myself but that would just be another demonstration of their subjugation of us all.

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Went to Memoir Spool at Climate Theater, June 25th. Great Storytelling!

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I’m now learning SolidWorks so I can design my T. Pen.

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SWARM went to SubZero1 in San Jose. I just went to look at the art. It was cool. There was this piece with a woman on 4 TV screens eating hot dogs until she was near puking, it was as if she was having an eating contest with herself. It was really really cool. It reminded me of how I sometimes eat to excess to push away bad feelings.

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I went with SWARM to the Google IO Developer Conference. The conference topics were pretty much lost on me. I tried but no. But we had lots of fun!

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I’ve been sitting for a friend’s children. They have an artichoke tree growing in their front yard (yes, yes, I know that artichokes don’t grow as trees but the artichoke at the top of this plant is a full 9 feet off the ground. So there. And they are delicious!

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PS. Though I’ve barely mentioned Charlotte in this post yet. She rocks.

I’ve been doing all manner of odd jobs recently.

• Due to the idiotic Swine Flu idiotic panic, Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley was closed for a few days. I babysat for Erin for a couple days.
• I’m still working on the T. Pen idea. After a week, the first beta customer is very happy with it. :-)
• I submitted a proposal to the San Francisco Unified School District with Noisebridge to teach an after school program. That might manifest in the fall.
• I’ve been making a little money on my Mozy referrals and Google adwords.
• I’ll be teaching a mechanical sculpture class at the Crucible in June.
• I’ve been working part-time for  Charlotte’s company, fixing computers and such. I logged many hours saving her computer this week
• I’m going to be working a trade show on commission with Charlotte soon.

I need a real job….

In other news…

• A problem and solution I had with Sporatic bad LCD initilization in 4-bit mode of an Arduino and LCD is going to be turned into a code change in the main Arduino library.
• SWARM performed at the Google IO Developer Conference and we’ll be at Maker Faire, SubZER01 and Robogames. :-)

I recently finished listening to an excellent audio version of Sun Tsu’s The Art of War. Wow, extremely worthwhile but watch out or you’ll start seeing the world in very extreme terms.

Just before that, I finished listening to Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Bokonon is a bastard. I like him, I think.

A few nights ago I went to a Pecha Kucha event with Charlotte and Barry Cogbill. I think I would have liked it better without the loud, incessent backbeat the DJ added to everything. Though I suppose we sat too close to the speakers. I like the idea though.

I’ve been babysitting a bit. Tuesday and Wednesday. Tommy and I practiced spinning bamboo sticks, started a crystal growing kit growing, tried working out a way that he wouldn’t automatically win at his favorite game Heroscape, found out where the hidden laundry chute door is, re-worked some of his Mission to Mars Lego sets into cooler configurations (skeleton-footed rocket-pack aside), learned some karate, got really good at ReMovem on the iPod (knocking his sister’s scores off the high-scores), and all around had a good time. Phew and that was in just 2 days.

I applied for a job with Michael’s company, Earthmine. Taking apart and rewiring fancy SLR cameras. It might have worked out but unfortunately (for me) a guy with an EE degree and a willingness to do the work presented himself well :-(

Rich Humphrey had hired me 1 or so days per week to help with computer stuff. It really had the potential to go someplace but just two days ago his largest client didn’t get the funding it needed so they are likely folding / massively contracting soon… and Rich’s company is going into hibernation. :-(

Last night Rich came to the SWARM meeting and I think really pointed the group in a good direction, toward very accessible robotics for the masses. :-)

With all this laid-off-edness, I still never get enough time to work on the T. Pen!

I tried selling residential solar for 5 months last year. It didn’t go well. I didn’t sell any. :-(

Before that, I sold yellow pages to try getting my feet wet with direct sales… eh.

Over the last few weeks, I found myself babysitting a bit… for Binka’s 11 month-old and Jessica’s 6 and 9 year olds.

SWARM brought me to Scottsdale Arizona and we got paid real money but that money goes to SWARM. Maker Media brought SWARM to the Head Royce school but they pretty much paid gas money.

I’ve been working on making this t. pen invention… but not enough.

I started working part-time with Rich Humphrey. Something could develop there to make it more than a couple days a month but it’ll take a good while first.

I’ve been working a couple days a month for Charlotte sporatically for Kern…

Feh.

Last Friday Marnia and Jessie and I presented SWARM to 3 assemblies at the Head Royce school in Oakland. It was a lot of fun! It’s amazing how the 3 different crowds, 6-8 grade, 9-12 grade, and 4th grade needed COMPLETELY different presentations. And over the course of the 3, we all became better presenters :-)

Also presenting was Ken Murphy of Blinky Bug fame and Dan Goldwater with is POV and acrylic bike :-)

Great Thanks to Michelle Hlubinka AKA Binka from Maker Media for inviting us! 

We got a followup comment from a teacher:

When I picked him up, [the student] said that today was the “best day of the entire school year.” He was enthralled with the “Make” guys and knows that he “wants to be those guys.” Owen, [the student] plans to talk to you to find out how he can connect with them with the goal of working with them in the summer or the future.

Thanks for getting one teenager very very excited about the future.

Sitting in the kitchen while VNCing into the bedroom on the snazzy-fast new UltraVNC 1.5.3. The smell of very successful home-made bread (NOT bread machine, the real deal) wafting over my shoulder… and [nom nom nom] the taste proves it :-) Listening to SomaFM “Space Station Soma” station on my (very pretty!) new iPhone (thanks Mom & Dad!). Finally finding a good display to use for my T. Pen invention. Tapping away on my super-great-deal laptop. 

This afternoon Charlotte and I celebrated Christmas… I found the perfect tree last night on my way home from the FLG “What Are We Gonna Propose to Burning Man?” meeting. We decorated it with candy canes, little disco balls my family got me for xmas, and “ordaments” my niece made for me. We had wrapped and put presents under it yesterday. Today we exchanged gifts to both our delight.

Things feel pretty good at this moment.

Introducing a new recipe page. Ida’s Kitchen. 

This website has recipes that I have been collecting, mostly from my grandmother Ida. It’s a family work-in-progress. Take a look.