Farm Hack Day

[thos_thom]

I recently went to an event called the farm hack day here in Brighton, took with me my picaxe box of bits and sensors and with the Brighton Coding Dojo guys we built an inform text adventure that was hooked up to some picaxe driven sensors.

The idea for the event is to get together with people you may not know and spend one day building something fun/interesting/useful.

One of our team blogged about it here.

I'm not sure I would have been able to do this kind of thing with any other microprocessor. The code for the 08m we used was even written by someone other than me (we were getting all agile on the development process) who had never done anything like this before.

 

[Brietech]

that sounds like a fun event! I wonder if there are things like that here in the states . . hmm

 

[profmason]

Things like that in the states

Any metro area in the US probably has a robotics club. Our So cal club meets twice a month and includes build sessions, demos and competitions. It gets us our of our attics(No basements in So Cal) and gives us deadlines to make things work. It also puts in touch all the different local folks working in different engineering, IT and academic environments that are interested in robotics.
There is a pretty good list at:
http://www.robotics.com/clubs.html
have fun!