HackFest Enschede: The Type Of Indoor Event We Wanted All Along [Hackaday]
The Best Of Both Worlds, In One Place
To give an idea of what’s here it’s time for a virtual trip round the hall. I’ll start with the music, aside from the demosceners there’s Printstruments with a range of 3D-printedmusical instruments, and Nerdy Gurdy, as you may have guessed, that hacker hurdy-gurdy I mentioned. This is perhaps one of few places I could have seen a spontaneous jam session featuring a 3D-printed bass and a laser-cut hurdy-gurdy. Alongside them were the Eurorack synthesisers of Sound Force, providing analogue electronic sounds aplenty.
Competing with the musicians are the sounds of 8-bit gaming, as the Home Computer Museum are here with an array of Dutch computers including the Philips range, a Tulip PC, and the super-futuristic Holborn business computer. They’re joined by Atari Invasion, and I’m as always pleased to see youngsters discovering the machines my generation had at their age, for themselves. The more hacker side of the hardware community is here in force, with the local Fablab Saxion and Tkkrlab hackerspace. The Fablab had brought along a really neat Lego assembling robot derived from a 3D printer. Then there’s badge.team showing off their electronic event badges, and the ever-enthusiastic Mitch Altman bringing his soldering workshop. This representts only a snapshot of what’s here, I’ve also seen printing (the old-fashioned kind), combat robots, dancing corn starch, Yvo de Haas‘ robot tentacles, and Ubuntu Mobile, to name but a few others.
Can We Capture This, And Bottle It?
Such an array of cool stuff is always good to see, but my take-away from this event lies not on the tables at the hall. Instead it’s in the way that here they’ve managed to capture what was great about the early maker events, the raw edge of creativity before all the STEM and webshops selling blinky LEDs moved in, and maintain an attraction for people from the hacker community. I think the key to the success lies in combining the stuff described above with a more hacker-friendly set of talks, and oddly in the venue itself. Enschede is easy to get to but not somewhere that demands premium prices on everything, so going along wasn’t the deal-breaker that a more shiny event might have been.
It’s great to see an event’s first try draw to a close with a feeling of success, and we hope there will be another Hackfest to go to in Enschede next year. But I’m more interested to see whether this event may seed others, fresh new events trying a similar formula. I hope I’ll see you there.