Hackaday SuperCon & SoCal MakerCon
The GroupGets team attended two awesome maker events within a week. First the SoCal MakerCon in Los Angeles and then to San Francisco for the Hackaday SuperCon.
Hackaday SuperCon
The Hackaday Superconference took place in San Francisco at DogPatch Studios in the heart of Potrero Hill from November 14-15. Dubbed the "most awesome hardware conference ever," the GroupGets team was excited to part of Hackaday's first ever conference and mix with an enthusiastic crowd of quantum, atomic, bio, radio, software, and hardware hackers.
GroupGets engineers and their creations have been previously posted on Hackaday, which is one of the best websites highlighting innovation in open hardware and software hacks. Recently the Portable Pi2 Thermal Imager with Overlay created by GroupGets was a featured post on Hackaday and was even a promoted at the SoCal Maker Con (more on that below). The software and 3D-printed mount for the project are both open-source. Nonetheless, the GroupGets team was very excited to attend the creative conference and learn from technical talks and be inspired.
The weekend was filled with lively presentations and workshops covering hardware, engineering, creativity in technical design, product design, prototyping and projects.
GroupGets snuck in a thermal test photo using the new Pure Thermal FLIR Lepton Dev Kit v1.1.
One highlight was the Sprite_tm talk about the Tamagotchi Singularity where his "Tamagotchi as a Service" hive was proudly displayed. We were truly blown away by the depth and years of research that was built upon to pull this off. This is definitely a presentation worth looking for on the interwebs.
Members of GroupGets had a quick opportunity during the lightning talks to go on stage and demo our new FLIR Lepton development board. Afterwards, quite a few people visited our table to learn more and see it in action - thanks!
At the end of the day, GroupGets came back home with a lot of inspiration, knowledge, new connections, and some awesome swag. Big shout out to the Sparkfun team that dropped knowledge on the ESP8266 Thing (which we love) and of course the Hackaday 2015 Prize winner, Eyedrivomatic. Finally, a big thanks to the event's host, Supplyframe, for bringing together a lot of special people who are shaping our future in positive ways.
SoCal MakerCon
Earlier this month GroupGets traveled to the Los Angeles Fairplex in Pomona, CA for the SoCal MakerCon. This conference was more diverse than Hackaday as it also included hobbyists, 3D printing, drone racing, robot battles, and yes even Storm Troopers.
This was definitely one of the largest events celebrating inventiveness, innovation and ideas in
Southern California. If you were an emerging maker, this day conference had just about everything you needed to find your niche and get started.
Another Santa Barbara tech outfit and GroupGets friend, Santa Barbara Hackerspace was also present representing the SB maker movement. We actually keep a tiny office in their space back home in SB.
Once exciting feature about this conference was seeing a GroupGets Labs product set up at the Hackaday booth - cheers!
It has already been an eventful November and the GroupGets team is feeling more inspired than ever. All of us at GroupGets would like to thank Hackaday and SoCal MakerCon for the motivational maker and hacker events. We look forward to many more. We'll be in the lab fine-tuning our new Pure Thermal FLIR Lepton Development Kit which will be released at the end of November. Until then, Happy Hacking.