At Hackaday, we are nothing without our community. We meet up at conferences, shows, and camps, but one of our favourite way to congregate is with the Unconference format. It’s an event where you can stand up and give an eight-minute talk about what is important to you, and what you are working on.
Thank you to the Cambridge Makespace for hosting our most recent a Mini Unconference. Let’s take a look at the excellent talks and demos that highlighted the day!
Live Demos That Actually Worked!
First up once we’d had the introduction was Marquis de Geek who brought us news of his Alexa skill for identifying resistor colour codes as well as logic ICs. You might expect this to be a simple task, but take a moment to consider how many ways you can describe a 100 kOhm resistor. He explained how much of a language problem there can be in creating an Alexa skill that does more than a simple task, before taking the brave step of attempting a live demo before the audience. His daring paid off, and the skill worked.
Successful demos were the order of the day. Xan O’Shea presented a delta robot he built that performed faultlessly for the masses. His approach was to use off-the-shelf parts, with model servos and rubber bands to help it return to shape. Control came from a Raspberry Pi running code developed in MATLAB, and for the purposes of portability in the demonstration he took his power from a 6V lantern battery.
Steve Harrison, showed off Makespace’s own climate controlled 3D printing filament containers. Steve is behind the tinamous.com IoT platform, which he used with a Particle Photon to monitor a humidity sensor and control a fan in a plastic crate containing the filament. It’s a constant struggle for a hackerspace to maintain their filament in optimum condition, it seems that’s one the folks at Makespace have cracked.
Marcel Van Kervinck is the originator of the Gigatron TTL RISC computer that we’ve featured here in the past, and he had brought a Gigatron along to tell us all about its genesis and some of its capabilities. We heard all about its philosophy of doing as much in software rather than hardware as possible before being treated to a speedy rundown of its workings, and then yet another flawless demo of a racing game. There was definitely no live demo jinx in the room for us!
FR4 Watch Faces, Boxes Of LEDs, And Dodgy Sensors
Spencer Owen gave us an entertaining run through the genesis of the story behind his RC2014 retrocomputer and how his $16 investment in his first PCB order for what was …read more
Source:: Hackaday