April 13 2024 in the fantastic Motionlab Berlin, Hackaday took over all our lives for a whole day.
Last year I attended the 1st Hackaday Berlin event which was awesome! This year did not disappoint.
Paul from Pimoroni and I ran a workshop (Supported by Digikey), building a Raspberry Pi Pico based robot. The workshop was aptly named ‘Robot Carnage’.
Last year we had done the same thing but in a smaller scale just handing out a pico and servo and asked folks to go make cool stuff. But this time I got prepared with a new robot kit I had been working on.
The idea was that you could slot the Pico into the the ‘U’ shape and sandwich it between the bigger base plate and stick. This means you still have access to the pinout of the Pico and could even remove it from the plate without really unscrewing it.
So with the Pico and a couple of continuous servo motors with wheels, you would have the makings of a robot like this:
Armed with this kit and some cable ties our workshop attendees did exactly that. In fact they exceeded my expectations!
I love what people game up with and how they used the kit. Nearly everyone had a pretty respectable robot at the end and of course they get to take the kits home to really get stuck in.
Its a great honour to be co-hosting a workshop at hackaday but the downside is that I miss all other cool happenings downstairs. Thankfully we get a lunch break to run away and work on our stuff and myself and Paul get to walk around and get chatting with the awesome likeminded people.
The awesome people at Hackaday uploaded all the talks you might have missed on their website so the downside was at a minimum anyways.
I also took the opportunity to make a timelapse using my new picamera2 WebUI system on a Raspberry Pi5. I have to say the result was awesome.
Finally the icing on the cake was the badge!
Oh my I love this badge. Exactly the same to the 2023 super con badge. Its a vectorscope with a Raspberry Pi Pico on the back! I have not had the time to really sit down and mess with it yet but as soon as I do I will be reporting it here!
Finally I have to thank Paul and the staff at Hackaday, Digikey and Motionlab for making all this happen. I had wonderful time and chatted to countless awesome people! I am very much looking forward to next year!
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