#HackAroundBerlin Quick Walk Around Maker Faire Berlin

Still trying to catch up with real life and get the #HackAroundBerlin videos finished.

The main reason I was in Berlin was the firm I work for Pimoroni where running a stall at Berlin Maker Faire met lots of exciting makers and maker business with really inspiring projects.

  

This is  a quick walk around Maker Faire Berlin looking at stands hosted by Watterott, Elekor, Berlin Raspberry Jam, HackLace and many many more.   

Pimoroni Picade and The Saturday Of Production Madness

As a few of you are aware my day job is the Electronics Production Manager at Pimoroni in Sheffield.


Pimoroni is a collection of Pirates, Makers and engineers who design and manufacture electronics and laser-cut accessories for the educational, maker communities and anyone who wants to get into electronics and physical computing.

On Friday (31/07/15)  we finally released the retail version of Picade with was officially the UK's first Kickstarted project and raising over £74000 more than twice its pledge amount. The backers orders were shipped and all went quiet of quite a while. At this point there was lots of behind the scenes development as well as a move to a larger workshop that put the project on the back-burner for a while.

So back to my story:     

So Saturday (01/08/15) I had left my car at work, I arrived at the workshop to find the guys beavering away like mad making up the Picade kits. That was it, bribed with a (very tasty) Baked Potato I was off to manufacture as many of the Picade PCBs as possible.

   
It was a hard slog of a day but we now have enough boards to start fulfilling orders on monday.

Phil Howard (known to many as @gadgetiod) on of my colleagues, fellow maker and friend had done a Periscope video of the day answering question showing some of the production process. unfortunately just want to link it in and the broadcast had expired. :(

I'll see if I can persuade him to upload it to Youtube and link it in later. 

The Picade has been released in several variants. The full version that comes with an 8 inch display panel, there are also versions which you can add your own display, the Adruino compatible controller with amp and the brand now Picade Console.

The Picade Console  a very nice stripped-down controller panel with space to house a Raspberry Pi and hook direct to a TV or monitor via HDMI. 

   

Hopefully these systems will satisfy a lot of  retro gamers looking for and quality arcade feel, and i can't wait to see what hacks come from it.

Flotilla The NEW making tinkering platform for the Raspberry Pi by Pimoroni

Kickstarter is all a buzz with excitement as Pimoroni launch their new campaign.

Flotilla is a brand new development platform for the Raspberry Pi with a focus on 'Hassle-free Digital tinkering for everyone'

Flotilla consists of a Dock that different Modules plug into consisting of sensors, controls motors and displays.

The Platform is designed to be used by everyone from a young beginner to hardened maker with programming systems from basic suggested 'Cookbook' projects ,a webpage icon based programming interface called 'Rockpool' to well supported Scratch implementations and python Modules.

At the writing of this post The Campaign was over 1/2 funded within a few hours at over £16500 and 191 Backers :)

This is a fantastic project that, if executed right will make entry into tinkering with electronics so much easier, removing the need to understand wire protocols and endless debugging, and just getting on with being creative.

UPDATE: 
As of around 9.30am 18/01/15 Flotilla reached its campaign goal of £32,768 it has really raced through hitting its goal in just over 24hrs, and at writing this update was most of the way to £40K.

This is an incredible pace and hopefully there will be many stretch goal to keep new backers clocking in, It is made even more incredible because it has only been advertised through twitter and Bloggers like myself Mike Horne and a few others (sorry if I haven't listed you, I can only find this one at the mo ;) ) .

At this point  Kickstarter prediction engine Kicktraq predicts based on current trend could reach just shy for £600,000 by the end of the campaign.

Watch and see :)