Prayas The Tinkerer

Ran into Prayas the tinkerer while in Bangalore. He introduced me to two of his really interesting projects.

CANOPY: temporary roofs for tea-shops

CANOPY is a series of temporary (flexible, mobile, sturdy), multi-purpose roofs for shops on Indian streets.
The first set of canopies are for tea-shops in Chandni-Chowk (New Delhi) and will attempt to have these features:

1. water collection (rain, dew, fog)
2. space for growing vegetables
3. space for sleeping
4. LIVE solar mobile charging
5. storage
6. marking (creating an identity for the tea-shop through art on the canopy)

MausamChowk: a set of local weather stations that help you decide where to go

SMS a query to a local weather station. Receive a reply with the temperature, humidity and noise levels of the space. Decide if you want to go there or someone else. This project uses the arduino

GISS Multimedia Workshop in Sarai , New Delhi

Audio/Video production is no longer done solely by the trained media professionals, even the ordinary folks with a computer and Free Software tools like Open Movie Editor and a cheap camera produce and publish content on wikis, forums, blogs and social networking sites like Friends Reunited, Facebook and eBay

If you are interested to join the new media wave, you should head to this one day Multimedia workshop at Sarai, CSDS New Delhi. The event is organised by G.I.S.S. project , ILUG-D, Freed.in and Sarai,CSDS on 11 Oct 2008

Workshop schedule

We will start at 11am, and continue till about 6-7pm, depending on the level of interest. Food, snakes, and chai will be provided.

Presentations by Yves from the G.I.S.S. collective:

• G.I.S.S. project, and live streaming: 1.5 h See, e.g., the distributed multimedia database
• Pure data, and computer vision: 1.5h See, Pure Data, and openCV

Other potential topics, from Niyam Bhushan's list in the multimedia section here:

• Edit, Produce and Publish Your Personal TV Programs on the Internet, with 100% FOSS.
• How To Forge A Career in Digital Creativity with FOSS: Graphic Design, New Media, Multimedia.
• Digital Photography Techniques using FOSS Software.
• Do-It-Yourself iPod-wannabe [self-assembled hard-disk in a multimedia USB casing].