Our correspondent Francis Irving sends this report whilst on the train back from the excellent EMF Camp:
It is part the UK’s national hackerspace festival with an amazing number of spaces turning up from all over the country. Stunning.
And part an out shoot of Chaos Communications Camp (CCC), so there were lots of continental Europeans on the crazy circuit of such spinoff camps.
Highlights for me were:
- Seeing quadcopters fly high and wide
- Sociology of computer security talk (by Jessica Barker)
- Why is there no hacking of housing infrastructure? And a call for more (Vinay Gupta)
- Learn to speak dog body language
- Arm knitting workshop
- Playing the terrifyingly realistic Nuclear Poker arms race simulation card game
- Physical version of Space Team game
Plus generally hanging out with a wide range of geek friends from all sorts of places.
Overall there was lots of talks, workshops, and good opportunities to make makery connections. And if you have a project, get help, advice, customers and so on.
e.g. A friend of my Tom Oinn gave a short talk about a simple Arduino based wheel robot with easy mounting points (eg for robot arms) he has made, and in the audience someone from Ragworm appeared, seriously interested in selling it.
Also, was good to hear unprompted reports of DoES startup Housahedron from Berlin expats!
All told, our national maker infrastructure is getting pretty good.
Would be fun to have DoES camp next time, but only if we have fun stuff to show, and the work of organising it isn’t by our overburdened usual suspects!