A few weekends ago, we kicked the Hackaday Prize into gear with World Create Day. This was a celebration of building stuff, and served as a get together for master builders to figure out what they’re going to build this year. We had an amazing turnout all around the globe, and a splendid time was had by all.
Mikkeli, Finland
According to the organizers of the Mikkeli World Create Day meetup, this town is tiny and in the middle of nowhere. Looking at a map, that seems to be a fair assessment. Nevertheless, Hacklab Mikkeli and the Mikkeli City Library put together an amazing event with over 120 attendees.
The motivation for this project was to grow and foster the local hacker culture, and judging by the pics, this group succeeded. There were robots, electronic projects, 3D printers, DIY electronic musical instruments, and the Mikkeli Robot War Season 1. That’s ‘Robotsota’ in Finnish.
World Create Day in Cairo
The Cairo hackerspace has a special place in our hearts. Their hackerspace collapsed (no, literally) in 2016, but they did manage to get all their gear and put everything in an old VW van. It’s a hackerspace on wheels, and it’s awesome.
Their event for World Create Day laid down the challenge, and they spent the day brainstorming and slapping a few stickers on their laptops. Neat.
Vancouver Hack Space
The Vancouver Hack Space has a semi-regular event, Super Happy Hacker House. This is an open house, where everyone comes in, brings a project, talks about what they’ve done, and everything wraps up with a few lightning talks. That’s exactly what we’re looking for in a World Create Day event.
On deck for this combination World Create Day / Super Happy Hacker House was lathe training, blacksmithery, fighting geese, a drinkable demo of cider thanks to [Luke Cyca] and a few Internet of Cidery bits, and a photo booth constructed from a tiny black and white CRT.
FUBAR Labs
Fubar Labs in New Jersey should require no introduction. The Fubarino came out of there, they manage a good standing every year in the Power Racing Series, and one member of the hackerspace came up with the single most ingenious Hebocon robot I’ve ever seen. No, I’m not going to tell you what it is; I still need to steal that idea for a few more Hebocons.
The focus of Fubar’s World Create Day was the TMS5220NL speech synthesis chip from TI. Yes, it’s ancient, but Siri and Cortana and Alexa and whatever else are going to be popular baby names in a few years are a thing now, so why not screw around with that? The event was great, and after giving up on the ancient TI part, the lab eventually got text to speech working with an Emic2 module. This was brought in by a high school student who was thinking about building an interface for people suffering from temporary speech loss. That’s great, and exactly what we’re looking for in a Hackaday Prize entry.
> That’s exactly what we’re looking for in a World Create Day event.
The vancouver hackspace is a horrible space that people should avoid.
https://blog.abluestar.com/alternatives-to-the-vancouver-hackspace
Their current BoD use the space as their personal workspace and have destroyed any goodwill they had in the community. There are a few good people left there, but they get drowned out by the people that are only in it for themselfs. Its too bad, it use to be a good place. Lucky vancouver has lots of alternatives.