after a long break in posting, fabienne.us has moved to a happy new wp hosting that i am administering myself, and has had a bit of a facelift. those of you who have followed this blog for more than a year will notice that it looks a lot like it did 2 years ago. yay for a new css of shinyness and all that!
the other big news is that i am living in cologne (germany) now full time, the 3rd annual hardhack happened and there will be even _more_ hardhacks this year as subconferences of other conferences.
i am currently helping found a fablab in cologne called Dingfabrik (a factory that makes things) which you can follow on twitter (feed in german) if you are interested.
hardhack was awesome! thanks to all who participated in my and fh‘s hands-on hardware thingy this year! you all rock. heise posted about it, and i look forward to seeing you all at HARdware in August.
my second annual hands-on hardware event hardhack has sign ups for workshops and a location. can’t wait to see you all here in berlin with your soldering irons in hand!
i’ll be giving a talk at the Free Software Foundation Europe fellowship meeting in Berlin this week Thursday, February 12th 2009 at 19:30 at the New Thinking Store, Tucholskystrasse 48. more info here. i’ll be speaking on open source hardware and the presentation will be in english.
i am way way way behind on blogging, but i just wanted to start to pull myself out of this hole of online silence by starting with the mobile massage couch i helped build in amsterdam during the rfid hacker camp put on by mediamatic during the picnic conference. i haven’t finished documenting the build process, but at least i’ve started. i have more photos not on the couch’s page here. the top level trac page for code is here and the source code for the various components (microcontroller code for massage units and led display units and python code for the eeepc to talk to the network and control the whole couch) is here. the couch was conceived of and built in five feverishly hacktastic days with a team of three: Edwin Dertien, Ralph Meijer, and myself. the massage couch had rfid readers built into the armrests and gave you a longer massage if you weren’t yet friended in the picnic conference’s social network. it was all wireless and powered by a 12v lead-acid battery, thus the mobility factor. we hacked the living daylights out of every single hardware component in the couch, and started to document what we did, the most extensive being the add-on circuits to control the once-static massage controllers. we upgraded them to pulse width modulation controls and wrote our own massage programs. check out the massage couch’s project page for more info.
by the way, if you were wondering what happens when the hardware team finishes and the poor lone coder is left to do some late night coding on the last night:
thank you to everyone who came to hardhack, it was a lot of fun. the solder fumes were pervasive! for once i wasn’t the only one who was completely and utterly obsessed with circuits *smile*. so thank you one and all, i really had a blast watching people help each other and get inspired to try something new in the way of hardware. if you document all or part of a project online which you showed me at hardhack, don’t forget to email about it. my photos of the event are here. thanks again for participating if you were there.
there is a preliminary schedule up for hardhack, things may change a little bit, and a few more workshops may be added, but at least it’s a start. *smile* sign up for hardhack if you are into soldering or hardware or just want to sniff some solder fumes in berlin. [pictured above: marc’s antenna mod for what i think is an rfid device which he showed me at cansecwest last week.]
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