In the last few weeks, we’ve been seeing a remarkable growth in the entries to The Hackaday Prize. This is due in no small part to World Create Day, a worldwide celebration of building stuff. It’s a worldwide buildathon with hackerspaces all around the globe. Now we’re getting a peek at the results of these gatherings, the videos are posted, and we’re simply gobsmacked by what was created during World Create Day.
Spinal Cord Hacks
The gang over at the Blusson Spinal Cord Center in Vancouver put together a two-day event for World Create Day. The goal of this event was to build a lipsync; a device that enables people with limited use of their hands to use touchscreen devices. It looks like a ray gun, but it’s actually a sip-and-puff device entered into last year’s Hackaday Prize.
Gardening in Cyprus
The Limassol Hackerspace in Cyprus had what is probably the best World Create Day out of all the hackerspaces who took part. Why? Grilled meat, of course.
Instead of trying to improve the entire world, the team at the Limassol hackerspace decided to think locally. Improving their own hackerspace with an automated irrigation system for their vegetable garden, planting vegetables, and building a barbecue took up most of the events of the day. One member even built a few serving platters out of sections of a eucalyptus trunk. These sections of tree cracked, but with the clever application of a CNC router, this hackerspace was able to inlay a few butterflies in the wood. It looks great, and even better with a pile of skewered, grilled meat.
The Osaka Makers’ Space
A few of the members at the Osaka Makers’ Space — like most of us — are interested in miniature robot battles. The first part of the event was, of course, spent tinkering with these tiny robots. A few members of the space made a breakout board for a BLE module, coding it so it could be voice-activated. No, that’s probably not the best way to control a battling robot, but you should do what you want, not what other people think is best.
Also during World Create Day, a few members of the space built three tiny chairs for children. The kids, unfortunately, were busy watching Sesame Street. But hey, at least the screw holes were doweled up. Also on the roster for Osaka’s World Create Day was fixing a broken MacBook Air. The fan quit, and the repair involved soldering wires from the fan to pads on the motherboard.
La Orotava
The folks at the Orotava Hackerspace put on a great event for World Create Day. Wait, where’s Orotava? It’s a town on the island of Tenerife, in the Canary islands. No, the birds are named after the islands, and the islands are named after the dogs.
While they didn’t have hordes of hackers come to a Hackaday meetup on an island in the middle of the Atlantic (St. Helena meetup, anyone?), the Orotava hackerspace did have a few people show up to discuss Hackaday Prize projects. The interesting projects generated from this discussion included an automatic farming robot, mobility problems for mental patients, and a low-cost bandsaw.
Be careful serving meat on wood, keep it away from raw meat. Even if you bleach it and then run it through the dishwasher you’ll never really be certain that the salmonella from raw chicken isn’t still lurking in the voids. I only use wood for bread and vegetables.
I know the serving platters were used safely and never touched raw meat, I’m just mentioning because I’ve had food sickness after a cookout and I’m >90% certain that it was from the cutting board.
That said, it looks nice. Could be better, but it can be very difficult working with slices of tree-trunk. They warp when they dry, and then you can sand them flat.
Some reearch was done comparing bacteria on wood vs on plastic. They found that on wood the bacteria soaked into the wood and they were unable to cultivate it after that. On the plastic boards the bacteria got stuck in the grooves made by cutting on the boards. Even after washing the plastic they were able to re-grow the bacteria.
I wonder if thats why a butchers block is wood ?
I will have to do some research now.
Maybe it was the potato salad that made me sick.
That’s why cheese vats that are made of wood cultivate less harmful bacteria, and thus lead to a higher ammount of consumable cheese.