Wanted to write about the Hack Weekend we had here in NYC a month-or-so ago, it was my first time putting one together, and I thought it would be good to share wisdom.
My reason for putting the weekend together was selfish, I wanted to learn more about hardware hacking. Our Christmas sweater was my first experience and it was super fun. So, I wanted to take up another project myself.
I'm lucky enough to live in NYC, there are a bunch of experts that live here. Rick Waldron made Johnny-Five, and Francis Gulotta is Levo League's own pro. I asked them, and a few other people, if they wanted to help put a weekend together.
Basically we just put an Eventbrite page together and charged $30. We spread the word via Twitter and Emails, which sold us about 30 tickets. We charged because we didn't want sponsors, so the $30 was for food.
Levo League donated the space for the weekend. Day of we ordered some food, and people arrived around 11-12.
Rick gave a great talk about Johnny-five (which is an amazing library that makes JS and Arduino easy as pie) to kick us off and then we went about our weekend.
An environment where people are creating is awesome. Everyone spent the weekend buzzing. We brought tools and had some extra parts but people made a few runs to the hardware store to pick up some things.
At the end of the weekend we did demo time to show off what we made, here are some really cool ones.
Here is what I made, this LED changes colors based on your tweets.
Rick made a robot that that moves when he moves using the Kinect
This glove changes the volume on your laptop
The coolest thing to come out of the weekend was dorby our Levo League robot that opens the front door via the internet.
Our weekend was a great time, and we plan on doing it again soon. LMK if you are interested in joining.
