Friday was a bust — weather was bad and I unexpectedly got stuck at work.
Saturday was, by objective measures, not a good day. We had almost no traffic at our spot and one of Matt’s giant QR posters went missing sometime during the day. But it was a good day .. for whatever unfathomable reasons. Matt and Chris showed up with a RepRap and had live 3D printing demos for hours. We ended up giving away a plastic octopus to some jewelry vendors that we met at random when they parked on my lawn. The solar weenie roast worked reasonably well (film to come) and we got an MSP430 POV working to display the message “HELLO ARLO” (film of this on the way as well, you can find source code here). Matt and Chris used the UV flashlight and the glow-tape pad to design the 5×5 fonts that we used for the POV — it was ingenious. They would draw the character and when I saw it, I was able to work out the hex codes in my head. We also used the fresnel lenses to turn ordinary LED flashlights into blinding search beams — when you take even a small light source and focus it to a beam, it’s shockingly bright over surprising distances.
Sunday — who knows — things are fluid …
I think we’ll try to do this next year, but with a bit more preparation .. and Matt suggested maybe we can get on the fairgrounds proper to do our thing, which I think is a fine idea.
