The Computeum, One Of The Biggest Computer Museums In Germany

November 16, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

QWERTZ Everywhere

I cannot say in words how perfect the venue for our Hackaday Munich party was. Not only was there a gigantic collection of vintage video games just around the corner, there was also a freaking warehouse full of mainframes, tubes, transistors, and some of the old retrocomputers you may have used in the 80s and 90s.

It’s called the Computeum, and without a doubt it is one of the most complete computer museums in Germany. There are fantastic computer museums in the states, but these don’t hold a candle to the pure amount of big iron and silicon found at the Computeum.

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T Minus Several Hours Until The Hackaday Prize

November 13, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

We’re only a few hours away until we announce the winner of The Hackaday Prize. Until then, we have a huge workshop and party to put together. It’s only noon here in Munich, and we’ve been up since the crack of dawn putting stuff together.

The doors open in a little bit, but so far we have people putting together the workshops. [Ben Gray] from Phenoptix is busy putting together a few MeArm robots for a workshop. They take one person 45 minutes to put together. There’s kinda something resembling an assembly line going on:

[Ben Gray] @phenoptix working on a MeArm

Hackaday Prize judge [Sprite_TM] made it out to the workshop/party. He’s working on soldering up some Teensy 3.1s for the Moog workshop. There are a ton of parts for this, everything from extremely expensive slide pots to opamps, audio caps, pressure and pulse sensors, and a vintage wah pedal that also has +5v CV expression output. Really cool.

Since we’re announcing the winner of The Hackaday Prize, there was the question of what the trophy should be. Trophies are not utilitarian in any way, so we thought we would put our own spin on this. It’s a PanaVise, emblazoned with a 3D printed plaque.