Day 2 of Makerland, a new European maker conference, started with more talks, including Spark Devices CEO Zach Suppalla. Zach shared how Spark went from a blinking LED on a breadboard to shipping the Spark Core (now available in the Maker Shed) in just over a year. He also shared advice for hardware startups including designing for manufacturing and working with contract manufacturing partners.
The afternoon was filled with 16 asynchronous workshops, with attendees learning topics such as how to use a personal fitness tracker to activate RGB LED light bulbs in their homes, how to program drones, and getting started with the Raspberry Pi by building retro-styled arcade games.
Makers were showing off some great projects they brought to Makerland. One of my favorites was the Pixomat, a portable photo booth made by Andreas Kopp. The Pixomat website explains, “By holding a pink Post-it over the camera for 1 second the camera is triggered and a pixel picture is created. The pixomat pixelates the picture to about 3% of the cameras resolution and prints out a beautiful pixelated picture or shares it on twitter at @thepixomat.”
Pixel picture Nr. 18152646 #makerlandpixomat @makerlandconf pic.twitter.com/a1RHzEcfxt
— pixomat (@thepixomat) March 18, 2014
During my “Hacking Your Career and Your Community” workshop, I met Rick, creator of the “Dollybot”, a motorized camera platform controlled by a phone app. Rick built Dollybot using tools at his local hackerspace over the last year. I was quite impressed with the design – you can see Dollybot and more of Rick’s projects on his tumblr.
The Dancebot and NAO workshops led to an impromptu robot dance party as the workshops closed at the end of day 2.
With the workshops finished, attendees are excited for the hackathon on day 3. Teams have been forming since the event began, and I’m sure that napkin sketches, 3D models, and lots of code have already been created. I’ll be back tomorrow with a slideshow from the hackathon.
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