Friday 26 July 2013

BuildBrighton night of all nights

Something peculiar happened last night.
Maybe it was the breaking of the weather, or that with fewer people turning up it was easier to concentrate - but at BuildBrighton, the place where nerds go to drink tea, eat pizza and talk rubbish on a Thursday night, things started happening.

What was particularly unusual was that, completely independently, four or five projects all hit a success-milestone at around the same time.

CNCPaul and Scropp have been working for a while on a servo-motor controller board. Paul had a massive character LCD display which had been giving him grief for a few days and he couldn't get it to display anything onscreen.

Justin was soldering and debugging an AVR programmer, and hadn't yet got it to talk to a PC over USB.

James and Sam were fighting with the red laser cutter, which had recently started to baulk at complex cutting patterns with more than just a few simple shapes.

And we had successfully managed to create a wifi hotspot using some RN-171 modules from Farnell after spending hours trying to work out how to upgrade the firmware, without being able to connect to the (sometimes flaky) BuildBrighton internet connection.

And all this happened before the usual "witching hour" deadline of midnight. Instead of taking a break and going for a walk to clear heads and re-consider where things were going wrong, last night we broke for pizza at about 10.30pm with a list of things, all ticked-off!



It was definitely a date for the diary. The day stuff actually got done.
Maybe we'll have an anniversary celebration next 25th July.



 
Steve's new mug. Anyone found using it in future is likely to find a cup of tea tipped over them!

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