London Dorkbot 48; Art geek wanking (in a good way)

Neil and I went to Dorkbot last night. I love Dorkbot but I haven’t been to one in about 8 months. We arrived at a smarter venue than the previous ones I’ve been to. They were having it in an art space near in the East End. We got collared by some from the art space who collected our email addresses (puzzling me) and directed to an art opening on the wrong floor.

After a lot of perplexed wandering around and amusement at some slightly trite banksy-a-likes Neil suggested we try the other floors. We finally found Dorkbot in time to see a presentation by Der_T on building home-grown multi-touch consoles. How very on vogue considering the Microsoft announcement (also on Mac Daily, Daniela Barbosa, Engadget). It was really interesting to see people hack this stuff up. I’d love to see some schematics in the wild from these efforts.

Mike “Dr High Voltage” then did a quick and dirty demo of demo of some kind of flying machine made of tin-foil and other household items. I have some very sucky photos, so I’m going to wait and post my video. He pointed out the experiment was totally useless for anything practical but it was a lot of fun. Of course being Mike it was also very high powered. He explained how we could do this at home by taking apart a monitor for the power supply (yes that’s the kind with massive warning yellow stickers on it).

Finally there was a nice open dork on using an audio jacks port services to allow you to rendering applications to a spectrum analyser to do fun things. The demo was a pretty visualiser that split up and image and did gravitational effects with the tiles. Pretty cool.

Links to the stuff going that happened are available on the Dorkbot London #48 event pagge.

Updated: I’ve published a video of Mike’s Spaceship Dork.

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