We’ve added a few events to our calendar, accessible here, so, in case you’ve missed any, we’ve got a round-up of the coming week’s festivities.
First up, we’ve got FEAST/FAMINE on Sunday night, kicking off at 7pm. The usual, relaxed format applies, so come down, grab a takeaway and end the week in cinematic style. Since this is our informal community movie night, it’s only open to Farset members.
On Wednesday night, we have the SuperCollider user group in our regular slot, so, starting from 6:30pm, the Event Space will be filled with odd sounds from our resident experimental musicians.
We have another Town Hall event scheduled for Saturday at 3pm, allowing members to talk to the Directors and bring up their suggestions or complaints, in personal or anonymous form. The Directors will also be bringing up some important discussions and setting out the roadmap for the next few months. Farset Labs members have voting rights, so make sure to come and make your voice heard – remember, the hackerspace is run for you!
Either side of the Town Hall meeting on Saturday, we’ll be doing a spring clean, starting at around 10am. We’d really appreciate a hand with this, so any warm bodies would be very welcome to assist in the cleaning. We’re aiming to get the entire place spruced up, but we’re intending to pay special attention to the Workshop, making it easier to use and streamlining the Store.
And, of course, we have our Raspberry Jam event tomorrow, starting at 1pm, so we’ll see a lot of you there!
Aaaand, we’re sold out of ‘In-Person Donation’ tickets for this weekends Raspberry Jam!
We’ve got 24 on the docket at the minute and if anyone wants to join, a small donation will go a long way to keep this volunteer run, community driven, self-funded operation of ours going.
Of course, if you want to be guaranteed free tickets at this or any of our future events, Membership starts at just £15/month for students and £25/month for non-students.
These memberships pay exclusively for rent, heating, lighting, power and network infrastructure and are essential to Farset’s continued success. There are no salaries…
Also, we’re eagerly awaiting delivery of our LEDBorgs, which we will be using this weekend to show how you can make your own internet-controlled mood-light by way of an introduction to GPIO on the Raspberry Pi.
If any organisations or companies would be interested in sponsoring future Raspberry Jam’s or any of Farset Labs’ other events, or joining as a Corporate Member, get in touch with us, and while you’re thinking about it, check out the awesome press we’ve got so far in our short life!
The date (and name) is set on the first All Ireland Maker Camp.
With hackers and makers from all over Ireland getting in buses and trundling off into the isolated Irish countryside for a weekend of geeking out, this promises to be a weekend not to be missed!
We’ll be representing the riotous north, and we’ll be trying to sort out transport, and since details are still very very fuzzy, check in on the Facebook event where we’ll be keeping up to date.
It’s over, and it’s a new world record. Farset Labs has contributed to the Worlds Largest Game Jam, and everyone involved should be very proud of what they’ve accomplished in just 48 hours.
With 30 registered Jammers, 11 registered games (6 made it to submission, but that’s ok!), no-one can say that Northern Ireland doesn’t have the making of a solid creative industries foundation.
With people coming from all walks of life, experience, platforms, and passions, self-organized teams came together to work on what are major accomplishments, with a tight timescale and a vague theme (a heartbeat).
The games themselves ranged from platformers where your heart-rate is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the level, to location based assassination, built purely around the sound of a heartbeat (Murmur In The Park), or the brilliant game that had the theme slightly shoe-horned in, but a kinda 4-player bastardisation of QWOP (CardiRow) for rowers where two players team up to drive the two oars of a boat, against another two player in their own boat, where cooperation, communication, and coordination is required to beat the other team without blowing your heart out! There was also Heart Wars where two players competed to collect pieces of virus or cure to kill or save a patient, and Cardiac Castle which used an iPhone Camera to monitor the players heartrate, making the zombies chasing their avatar move faster as the player got more panicked!
It’s been an amazing experience, not just because of the attendees; we had the awesome Brendan Drain from Brain and Nerd call in over Skype to chat to the jammers, and discuss their game mechanics, future marketing possibilities, and generally having the craic, and we’ve had the wonderfully patient Niall Bole from our friends at QUB Dragonslayers in working on configuring the Ultimaker perfectly. (After we recover from this weekend, we’ll be getting peoples rewards out as soon as possible!
Lessons to the reader; sell tickets, don’t give them away. We had to turn away people asking for tickets towards the end because we had already over-allocated the space. In the end we only had a 68% turnout on the first night, dropping to the 30 / 50 that we ended up with on the second night. This mis-calculating effected our budgeting, scheduling, catering, and lots of other -ings, and while we try to be as inclusive as possible, in future events we will be adding a nominal fee for non-members, just to gauge a certain level of commitment so we can more efficiently spend ours and event sponsors money on the people who really want to be involved in what we’re doing here at Farset. Members will still be free though.
I’m getting fairly close to collapsing so I’m going to leave you with some snaps from the weekend, including our lovely 3D Printed Logo. I’ll close with a special thanks to the University of Ulster for kindly sponsoring this amazing event, and to Tibus for giving us more bandwidth than you could shake a stick at, and Davy Sims for the lend of more chairs, because we were still very slightly over subscribed….
The University of Ulster are kindly sponsoring refreshments for the weekend to fuel the starving Jammers!
Here’s another first for the local tech community: Farset Labs is proud to announce becoming Belfast’s first and only official site for Global Game Jam, set this year for 25-27 January. This is the biggest event of its kind in the world and brings some big name sponsors like Microsoft, Facebook and GitHub. Farset will be open for the full 48-hour period, as each participant team competes to build a game in a weekend. The event is being hosted in conjunction with the University of Ulster Office of Innovation, who will be providing refreshments so entry will be free. Belfast’s hackerspace is calling out to all kinds of creative and technical people to take part, as game development brings together the likes of writers, artists, coders, character designers, production managers and many more roles.
Global Game Jam
Global Game Jam is essentially a hackathon, focused on games of all sorts, from full-scale console productions to mobile, web-based and embedded games, as well as non-digital productions like board and card games. Some will be frivolous, others developed for solid causes, such as social impact in the case of the Games For Change movement. We expect some exciting announcements on the day from the sponsors and organisers as to what data and platforms they’re going to let us play with, and we have plans to put some mileage on our new 3D printer.
The first Global Game Jam was run in 2009. Last January, 242 locations in 47 countries created over 2,000 games in one weekend to become a Guinness World Record. But sites for this year’s event have already been registered in around 300 locations in over 60 countries, so your involvement will be part of a new world record. Farset’s Andrew Bolster is the official organiser for the event in Belfast and has been collaborating with other organisations to make it a special occasion.
As part of the Jam, participants (or ‘Jammers’) will have access to a range of materials provided by corporate sponsors. The details are on the GGJ page, but there are a few that deserve highlighting:
$100 credit on the Joyent high performance cloud, a perfect place to host your online games,
Corona Labs are giving away 3 months of it’s full Indie SDK, perfect for building and hosting mobile games and social applications,
Mixamo, the film-grade character animation suite with simple import and export to a range of applications including Blendr and Unity, are opening up loads of toolkits for Jammers,
YoYo Games are also giving away licenses to their GameMaker:Studio software for developing cross-platform mobile games, and finally
GitHub, the heart and soul of so many developers, are giving $70 credit to each location, and we’ll be putting it up as a ‘Peoples Choice’ prize on Sunday Evening
A few key considerations:
You don’t need any specific skills to participate, although having a coder in your team may prove useful.
You don’t need a team. In fact, the organisers discourage the formation of teams in advance, and suggest working that out at the time.
A secret theme will be announced at the start, by which all the games will be influenced.
Kick-off will be at 17:00 on 25 January. There will be video presentations from some big industry players to get everyone going.
So… maybe you’ll head down to Farset Labs to play your hand in a world event that is set to be a real game-changer.
And to kick things off, an apology; our provisionally scheduled Raspberry Jam on the 12th has been postponed until after the exam season as it’s been difficult to get people able to help out at the event. Raspberry Jam will return February
GoL: Thur 17th Jan
Currently proposed (but not scheduled) topics include:
[Update] Brendan Drain from Brain and Nerd, who had recent success with Predestination, will be talking about how he got started in Games Development (and what to avoid!)
[Update] Niall Bole, Engineer, Gamer, Organiser, and Placement student at NACCO will be talking about ‘Using Fablabs for Fun and Profit’
Colin Kelsey, from QUB’s Centre for Plasma Physics, with what he describes as “either functional plasma physics or a big surprise”
Rebecca Lutton, a mechanical engineer of Bright Club fame with ‘Observational Humerology – The curse of innuendo’
Andrew Bolster on getting your Raspberry Pi to talk to the real world using the Gertboard
Dylan Wylie, another Physicist, who is ambiguously talking about ‘Quantum Theory, Maybe‘
As with all our lighting events, this is an open call, so even if you just want to say something on the night, we’ll have the blackboard grid up so can literally sign up to talk during the other talks.
We’ll also hopefully be live streaming this one… maybe…
The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the world’s largest game jam event. Think of it as a hackathon focused on game development. It is the growth of an idea that in today’s heavily connected world, we could come together, be creative, share experiences and express ourselves in a multitude of ways using video games – it is very universal. The weekend stirs a global creative buzz in games… while at the same time exploring the process of development, be it programming, iterative design, narrative exploration or artistic expression. It is all condensed into a 48 hour development cycle. Although the event is heavily focused on programming, there are many other areas where people who don’t code can contribute to a game.
This is going to be an in-demand event so please register attendance beforehand!
Note that Donations are not required for this event as refreshment costs are covered by UUOI, but donation tickets will go directly into the general Farset fund, for which we’ll be paying the bills to keep Farset going day-to-day!
Raspberry Jam: Sat 9th Feb
After the success of our last jam, and already falling behind our schedule due to a)Christmas and b) Exams, we’re finally bringing it back to life!
Raspberry Jam is a Farset Labs Members event, so visitors are expected to make a small donation either in the form of an online ticket, or chucking a few coins in the tin in person.
You do not need to have a Raspberry Pi to come to a meeting. In fact, not having a Raspberry Pi is an excellent motive for coming along. You will discover what you can do with a Raspberry Pi when you do manage to get hold of one.
Stuff we’ll be trying out:
A ‘beginners guide’ walk through of how to get started with your Pi
Getting started with Hardware interfaces to the Raspberry Pi (including the Gertboard)
Some show-and-tell demonstrations of cool projects people have already done with their Pi’s
Breaking to a relaxed evening of Pi-Jamming, where everyone is encouraged to share their experiences.
Children are welcome to attend the event, when accompanied by a parent or guardian.
We will try to get our hands on as many HDMI compatible monitors as we can, but please try and BYO monitor. We have plenty of mice and keyboards, but few HDMI compatible monitors.
Also, if anyone would like to present any projects or just help out with the organisation of this event (or give feedback based on the last events) get in touch with us via events@farsetlabs.org.uk (or any of the dozen or so other ways you’ll be able to get us on!)
After a wonderfully democratic Doodle, distributed through our Twitter, Facebook, and IRC channels, the community has decided to have another, informal, ‘Gathering of Sleet’ (aka Gathering of Lightning Event) squeezed into the year at very short notice.
This Sunday! (Thanks for that guys… :P)
Anyway, standard Gathering of Lightning rules apply:
Flying pigs after 7 minutes
No Presentation tools (Prezi, Powerpoint, Keynote, Beamer, etc)
Arbitrary order or presenters
Heckling Encouraged
(Unconfirmed) Presentations offered by the community over the thought process of this so far are:
Chrome OS: Are you ready to live in the cloud?
Ruby/Javascript/Io/Twillo/Erlang/Go/Linguistics (One person offered these… brave lad)
Parallelism in Web Programming
Windows 8/Windows Mobile App Certification processes / pains
Dr Strangethings, or How I learned to stop worrying and love Rapid Prototyping
Probably more!
Since it’s short notice, we’ve got no sponsor for this one, but we’ll grab a few crates to drink and people are, as always, free to BYO Food/Drink.
Farset Labs would like to introduce our latest corporate member, Evorack!
Owned and operated by Belfast firm ABPNI Computer Solutions Ltd, and run by our own member Jonny Tripathy (don’t worry, he’s still paying membership as well!), Evorack provides Linux and Windows virtual server hosting solutions based on the open source Xen Hypervisor platform.
In conjunction with Evorack’s infrastructure and experience, Farset Labs hopes to roll-out server hosting tools to our members, enabling them to develop, test, build (and break) cool cloud apps and services.
With the number of new innovations in web-based apps and services having some sort of cloud back-end, it is only natural that Farset provides these resources to our members.
Over the next days we’ll be transferring much of our web infrastructure to Evorack, and implementing member level, private web storage, VPN, and community application servers. As with most things there may be a few hiccups… But we’ll make it through.
Friday night saw the Event Space in Farset Labs packed with eager attendees to Northern Ireland’s first ever Raspberry Jam.
Raspberry Jam is a rapidly growing global network of Raspberry Pi users that regularly meet and, following the success of Friday’s Jam, Farset Labs is pleased to announce that the event will be joining our wide and eclectic event calendar as a monthly fixture.
With the Event Space stuffed with in excess of thirty attendees, with an age-range stretching from six to sixty and abilities ranging from the simply curious to the robot-controlling masterminds of future world-domination. In respect to the latter, one of the most impressive projects on show was the use of a Pi to control an NXT robotics system; this was from a (impressively uniformed, for 7pm) sixth form student from Dalriada School, giving weight to the hopes of the Raspberry Pi Foundation that their innovation will ignite the passion for tinkering and technology in schools. Of course, not only is the Pi a wonderful development system, it can also run a variety of more consumer oriented tasks; if loaded up with RaspBMC software, you now have an immensely capable £25 media centre.
After the scheduled session, the assembled users had the chance to mix, compare experiences and work collaboratively, demoing, among others, Quake 3 running on the Pi and a system for the Pi built entirely from Freecycle, including a hacked screen from an in-car entertainment system and a jury-rigged powered USB hub with connections to a keyboard, mouse and wireless card.
Future sessions intend to cover alternative distributions (operating systems for the Raspberry Pi), strange use cases and hardware interfacing, both via direct link and also the Gertboard. Suffice to say, having seen the users on Friday, the road ahead will be fast, interesting and, above all, full of unexpected turnings.
Check out the obligatory timelapse below, which is slightly cut off due to the fact that the level of activity throughout the day filled the modest card!
(Apologies for the awful, awful pun, but William Cully wasn’t available for consultation at 3am.)
Entrepreneurial students Ben Crawford, Priory College and Sarah Moore, Lismore Comprehensive School demonstrate the Nexus 7 controlled AR.Drone 2.0 to Meagan Blanton, NISP-Connect.
Last Night, we were invited to join NISP and a range of other sponsoring agencies to help out at the Generation Innovation event in the Titanic Building, which is a mentor-ship and networking programme for the Next Generation of Northern Irish Entrepreneurship.
This event was not only an awful lot of fun for us (apart from nearly de-limbing a few people with the catastrophic failure of our recently donated AR Drone 2.0 experimental platform… Sorry) but was also a great opportunity to show this brilliant young group of people what you can do with a little bit of gumption and a lot of hope, and just a little bit of enabling tech.
Kids from all over the province joined us, having been selected in each of their schools for being ‘high potential’ (read: Not “Highest marks”, or “Fastest Legs”, or “Most Popular”), and we were also joined by a cavalcade of tech founders from companies big and small (somehow all three Farset Labs directors got asked to speak…), dotted across the room.
360 Production made this fantastic animation to showcase what Generation Innovation is all about.
But the real show stoppers were the interviews and speeches given by some epic members of the Northern Ireland Entrepreneurship Family, such as Steve Orr (NISP Guru In Chief), David Perry (Gaming God), Andrew Fulton (Gen I Alumnus), Danny Moore (Wombat-er, CTO NYSE Euronext, and now Lough Shore Investor) , and Carol Fitzsimons (Young Enterprise NI) which were truely inspiring to the rag-tag group of young people.
By my favourite bit was the Pi’s. Raspberry Pi’s
Each Lucky Kid was given a Raspberry Pi gratis. Good For Some.
Somehow I managed to gatecrash the stage and putting this fantastic opportunity they’ve been given, and tied it to our recent successful funding for our 3D Printer, and said something long these lines…
Me, presenting the Generation Innovation kids (and the lightning team) with a challenge!
“Technologies like 3D Printers and the Raspberry Pis you’ve received today are revolutionising the world of design and manufacture; physical prototypes take hours to produce not days. With flexible hardware and software frameworks, even the most intricate product and service ideas can be developed rapidly, tested quickly, presented immediately, and if they are failures, they’re fast failures, allowing you, as the next generation of Northern Irish Entrepreneurs, to move onto the next idea.”
Raspberry Jam
You do not need to have a Raspberry Pi to come to a meeting. In fact, not having a Raspberry Pi is an excellent motive for coming along.
In the spirit of such unprepared and completely not rehearsed (!) sentiment, I’ll remind you all of our Raspberry Jam event coming up next week.
Raspberry Jam is a rapidly growing global network of user groups that meet every month to support hobbyists, developers, teachers, students, children and families – in fact, anybody that would like to put their Raspberry Pi to good use. While Raspberry Jam is not endorsed, sponsored or associated with Raspberry Pi or Raspberry Pi products or services, some of our regular members are volunteers for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. At our meetings we have helpful people who can help you with everything you need to get what you want from your Raspberry Pi.
This will be Farset Labs’ first Raspberry Pi centred event, and if successful, will be built into the event calendar.
Raspberry Jam is a Farset Labs Members event, so visitors will be expected to make a small donation either in the form of an online ticket, or chucking a few coins in the tin in person.
You do not need to have a Raspberry Pi to come to a meeting. In fact, not having a Raspberry Pi is an excellent motive for coming along.
You will discover what you can do with a Raspberry Pi when you do manage to get hold of one.
Stuff we’ll be trying out:
A ‘beginners guide’ walk through of how to get started with your Pi
Some show-and-tell demonstrations of cool projects people have already done with their Pi’s
Breaking to a relaxed evening of Pi-Jamming, where everyone is encouraged to share their experiences.
Under-18’s are welcome to attend the event accompanied by a parent or guardian.
