Our next meeting, Hack Day 1, is on 4th October. Click here for details.

At 2pm Saturday 29th of August, on an otherwise uneventful bank holiday weekend, a varied group of men and women met at Steamshift HQ. Their purpose – to get down to business and HACK! Some arrived with projects in mind – disco lights, energy usage monitoring, laser mazes – while others turned up with little equipment but an eagerness to get their hands dirty. At the full height of the meet, there were around twenty people there, playing around with Arduino and PIXACE boards.

The meet was organised and hosted by Andy Bennett and Steamshift as part of SoutHACKton – a group of like-minded Solent residents who all want to kick back, take stuff apart and build new things out of the resulting mess.

And that they did – sometimes clusterd in small groups, working away on personal projects, sometimes coming together in larger groups to admire a piece of someone else’s handy work. Projects that drew particular attention were Ruzz’s walking robots (a hit at our last meet too), Andy T‘s LEDs (Did I mention he has 4,000 LEDs?) and my own project: Lou Lou the Furby. I hope to hook Lou Lou up to the PC and tell me when I get new email. Maybe she’ll get her own twitter account one day. For now, she’ll just have to be happy playing sounds from my eeePC through an Arduino.

Our next meeting, Hack Day 1, is on 4th October. Click here for details.

This event was kindly hosted by Steamshift.

Steamshift develops creative solutions to technical challenges primarily in the fields of web application development, flash AS3 programming and linux hosting. They work closely with their design and branding partners to deliver an end-to-end solution.