Show and tell

On Friday, we had a BCS Mid Wales show and tell. These are informal evening events where people who have cool projects come along and talk about them, and the BCS pays for free beer and pizza. They’re good fun, we’ve had about 5 of them now, and it doesn’t seem like we’re running out of projects. Indeed there are loads of cool things going on in and around Aberystwyth involving technology, coding, robots, and other stuff. The format of the evening is a set of short (5 minute) talks, then a break for pizza and walking around to look at stuff, then another set of talks. This time we had…

Jim Finnis talking about his Gormenghast minecraft castle generator…

This makes automatic castles in minecraft. Some of the code looks great.

And then Jim showed off his homemade electric oboe thing.

After that we had a couple of other talks – about whether we could do 3d modelling of traffic accidents and therefore open up roads quicker; some stuff on artificial life and insects, and about an online code thing called 3301 involving Tor and steganography, and all sorts of other stuff. Then we broke for pizza and strolling around – exhibits/demos included leapmotion, an octocoptor, sailing robots, and a humanoid 3d printed robot. Here are a few shots looking in to the venue with people chatting to exhibitors.

In the second half of talks I spoke about WWLUG, the west wales linux user group, and then John Murray from Lincoln uni talked about 3d printing robots. The last two talks were on autonomous robot boats – from Colin Sauze, talking about the big project “Minty2”, trying to build an autonomous vehicle for surveying glaciers, and from the Aber Sailbot team who spoke about their boats and their plans for the coming year’s sailing robot competitions. Colin bought minty2 along to show and tell but it was too big to fit in the doors, so I coudn’t get a decent picture. Here’s the sailbot which went to the world robotic sailing competition last year:

Each show and tell has a prize -this time a raspberry pi with camera board – and it goes to the person or group who collected the most stickers (everyone gets a sticker to give out). This time, the sailbot team won – here they are with their pi:

It was good they won – they actually need a pi for their robot…