After The Sun Set On San Mateo, LED Takes Over Hackaday’s BAMF Meetup

After this Spring’s Bay Area Maker Faire closed down for Saturday night and kicked everybody out, the fun moved on to O’Neill’s Irish Pub where Hackaday and Tindie held our fifth annual meetup for fellow Maker Faire attendees. How do we find like-minded hackers in a crowded bar? It’s easy: look for tables lit by LEDs and say hello. It was impossible to see everything people had brought, but here are a few interesting samples.

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Tiny Arcade, Based On Arduino

Who can resist video games when they’re packed up in tiny, tiny little arcade machines? [Ken]’s hoping that you cannot, because he’s making a cute, miniature Arduino-based arcade game platform on Kickstarter. (Obligatory Kickstarter promo video below the break.)

The arcades are based on [Ken]’s TinyCircuits Arduino platform — a surprisingly broad range of Arduino modules that click together using small snap connectors in place of pin headers. The system is cool enough in its own right, and it appears to be entirely open source. Housing these bits in a cute arcade box and providing working game code to go along with it invites hacking.

There’s something about tiny video cabinets. We’ve seen people cram a Game Boy Advance into a tiny arcade cabinet and re-house commercial video game keyfobs into arcade boxes. Of course, there’s the Rasbperry Pi. From [Sprite_TM]’s cute little MAME cabinet to this exquisite build with commercially 3D-printed parts, it’s a tremendously appealing project.

But now, if you’re too lazy to build your own from scratch, and you’ve got $60 burning a hole in your pocket, you can get your own tiny arcade — and tiny Arduino kit — for mere money. A lot of people have already gone that route as they passed the $25k funding goal early yesterday. Congrats [Ken]!

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