Campus Party, 6000 geeks cannot be wrong
(cc) 2009 D. Cuartielles, general view of Campus Party
This year’s summer adventure for me was going to Campus Party in Valencia, Spain. Over 6000 technology interested users and developers meet up inside a huge tent where an 8.5 Gb connection makes sure everybody gets at least 11Mb of wired network towards the others and towards the world. Sponsored by Telefonica, the Region of Valencia (Generalitat), Nokia, Microsoft, Intel, etc. is the biggest computer-related event in Spain (and probably Europe).
(cc) 2009 by D. Cuartielles, Campus Party - Arduino TV workshop
(cc) 2009 by D. Cuartielles, Arduino on TV hack
Participants bring their computers from home, sleeping bags, arm-chairs, a couple of clean t-shirts, food and play, work, meet, eat, sleep in front of their terminals. There are contests in cracking the security in a server, modding your computer, making the best techy-monologue, or building the fastes line-following robot.
(cc) by D. Cuartielles, Arduino Nano robot
I ran a hack-the-TV workshop with Arduino where we started with the classic Arduino PONG for PAL TVs example from the forum, added some sound, increased the resolution, included our own typeface, and read data from an SD card. I designed a special shield just for the event and we had fun during two days with it. When I get the time in the following weeks I will clean up the code and give the credit to those that deserve it the most (specially Alastair Parker for his PONG code).
I got to see a lot of robots built with Arduino as intelligence and got happy to see Juguetronica (owned by Robotronica, one of our distributors) mixing up Arduino boards with some robotic toys for running their own workshops. I expect seeing much more from those people in the future, their work looks promising. You can see my collection of flickr pictures here (the guys sleeping by their PCs are priceless), but the official one may give you a much better idea what Campus Party is all about.
August 5th, 2009 at 14:23:22
“is the biggest computer-related event in Spain (and probably Europe).”
That is probably incorrect, the Dreamhack event in northern europe, had 12 782 participants last hear, http://www.dreamhack.se. This does of course not diminish the excellent Valencia party.
August 6th, 2009 at 16:31:43
My respects to Dreamhack, it would have been cool attending there as well … funny enough I have never been invited to that one, even if I live in Sweden 🙁
August 10th, 2009 at 08:06:01
[…] is a nice piece of Open Hardware, perfect to introduce students to the world of electronics. Visit David´s blog for read his thoughs of Campus Party and the workshop we […]
August 11th, 2009 at 16:34:25
[…] Arduino 🙂 Props to Alastair Parker. There’s a post on the Arduino blog fro David Cuartielles about using that code and about Campus Party in general posted on the Arduino […]