So, who came? Well, FabLab Cardiff came with some very cool tech. Two sets of Cardiff students came up (one set had to do projects and get marked!). We had some Code for Europe (I think) folk up, some NESTA folk and some folk who'd been to a previous TTW and were up on hols and finally, but definitely not least, we had some locals!
Thursday was a rough starting time of 1pm. The weather was pretty damp and I was taking my spinning wheel this wave so Alan kindly collected myself and Jo and Amanda from our abodes and taxi'd us down.
The Cobbled Cow were doing their usual tasty catering and had been told we had 33 coming. This was the result of the first lunch:
The plates had been piled high with sandwiches and chocolate bars and flapjacks, all gone. The two cauldrons of soup were drained. Nothing went to waste.
Thursday was basically set up and intro day. We had a big intro in the auction ring after lunch and then a couple of hours of investigating and doing before folk went home to crash.
Friday started 'early' at 10am. Folk were generally perky even though a few had come down with colds.
I suspect this is Alan's MacBook as he does have a habit of pointing...
The tech, oh the tech! So many wonderful machines to play with.
A vinyl cutter to enable you to make custom stickers:
The result:
A small CNC machine (alas, unable to be used as it required a windows machine to operate and no one brought one!) and the laser cutter:
The cutter can cut, etch, or both. This was a practice with some card:
And this is the start of the FabLab Panel:
It was amazing to watch and weird (in a good way!) to feel the thing you're looking at:
These beauties plus that beast had me hooked.
They're 3D printers. You can print nearly any shape you like (some might need supports adding).
Shot glasses:
Scale models of organic outside spaces:
Robots:
Rabbits (I contend it looks more like a hare!)
And sheep:
They do sometimes go wrong though. Sheep innards should not be readily visible:
They also brought up a 3D printing pen. I can see the appeal but it was a faff. The nozzle was only hot enough to extrude plastic in bursts so you could draw for about 2s then had to hold still and wait while it reheated. This is my humble effort:
Big Steve who has been to pretty much every TTW brought his son up this time and they were both here on hols. He also brought his own 3D printer:
This one is actually about half the price of the ones above and yet has two nozzles and is enclosed. I kept thinking of it as a microwave.
Saturday was another 10am start. By lunchtime people were famished and the food massacre left no survivors.
It was also the first of the three workshops that were planned. This one was done by Big Steve and was on the 3D scanners.
The scanner is hand-held and detects movement while emitting Infrared light to work out what it's "looking" at. Here's Steve's hand:
I scanned this lovely gentleman's head/torso:
(seen here next to the printer that is printing the scan)
A quick bit of editing in some software and we have a printable file:
I think it took about an hour:
Those sheep above were being printed by Steve for a game designer who designed the game "Sheepie Sleepy" They were all white and were causing some confusion during playing so I offered to take them home for the night and paint them.
First, a quick white undercoat so that the paint would go on uniformly...
While that was drying I consulted the game's site for who is who.
Mid-painting:
Done!
(left to right): Minty, Rosemary, Zack and Dougall (Zack is a Tiree sheep. Coloured as a zwartbles, a wool sheep)
Woolly bums!
As this was a one-evening job and the paint dries quicker than a brush, I got through a few!
Random photos:
So that was Thursday to Saturday. I got through a whole set of camera batteries in 2.5 days. They usually last weeks! My photo count is now over 6k taken with this camera since May 2013. Not bad.
Sunday and Monday and seeing folk off today coming tomorrow! (Mainly because it takes a while to upload 61MB of photos!)
TTFN
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