Adelaide Maker Faire 2016

Last Sunday (6th of November 2016) I spent almost the whole day on my feet talking to people at the Adelaide Maker Faire. It was a great event and I have been looking forward to it for almost a full year.

It took a bit of preparation in putting together a demo that would pass the electrical safety requirements and be tested and tagged. I chose to use a compact fluroscent lamp and a halogen lamp as my demo loads to illustrate the impact of power factor on energy measurements. The modern CFL's have notoriously low power-factor due to the uncompensated choke in them. I ended up making an earthed and a double insulated enclosure for my demo.

Earthed Test lamp box

Double insulated test lamp box

Earthed lamp fixture with Perspex lid

The main PCB on show was the Energy Monitor Featherwing with the ATM90E26 on-board. This does very quick and accurate measurements and I chose to send the data over serial to a laptop for graphing rather than use the rather crowded wifi and 3G environment at the faire. It also makes a more compelling demo since I can sample and display the power every second rather than every 15s with thingspeak (faster with workarounds still only down to 2s due to 8 channel limitation, must investigate running my personal Blynk or EmonCMS server).

ATM90E26 Low-voltage Energy Monitor (perspective view)

ATM90E26 Energy Monitor top view

My overall display was pretty minimalist since I focused on getting the hardware working rather than producing any marketing material. I ended up handing out notes written on the spot with my details on them. There was fair bit of interest and some people shared ideas with me on how they had solved the same problem themselves. I hardly got time to check out other displays myself. Next time I will make sure I have someone to relieve me. I did manage to have a peek at the Daleks and saw a toddler hop out of a solar car, sights you can only see at a Maker Faire. This was southern hemispheres biggest and the buzz was amazing.

Maker Faire setup with lamps on

At the end of the day the organisers of the Maker Faire handed me a maker of merit badge which I am quite proud of and next year I plan to show up with even more projects.

Adelaide Mini Maker Faire, Zoo and Indian Mela

I have been involved with the Adelaide Hackerspace on and off. Lately my attendance has dropped a lot due to work commitments and a casual addiction to photography. A few photography related hacks are stewing in my brain, so I might go back there. Anyway a few weeks back I went to the Adelaide Mini Makerfaire and it was great opportunity to see all the different things going on in Adelaide, from Dalek making, Metal working to 3D printing and Electric cars. I had a great time catching up with people and learning about new groups. The airstream guys had some hacked wireless AP's on display, including the Minitar on which I cut my teeth in cross-compiling and writing kernel modules to interact with the wifi-stack. There are a lot more photos.

I had planned a busy day, so I headed off to the zoo to attend the local photography group session and check out some pandas. It was my first time at the Adelaide zoo, so it took a while to get oriented. We covered a fair bit of ground in the hour and a half before closing. Managed a few shots of hippos, birds, otters and mountain goats. Lots of other animals which hardly stood still enough to compensate for my nascent photography skills.

We were trudging and hobbling back to the car when we noticed the bright lights and steady stream of people heading to Elder park. The local indian community was throwing their annual mela. So we headed there for a meal and to feed our cameras with some colour. The movement and low light made photography pretty difficult from the back of the crowd. It was a great day overall.