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Fak’ugesi 2017 – What you missed at Market Hack

As part of the Fak’ugesi Digital Innovation Festival South Africa’s makerspaces joined forces to host Market Hack, a one-day event where anyone could come and learn about making with the interactive displays and activities.

Market Hack 2017 took place this weekend so if this is your first time hearing about it, you’ve unfortunately missed out. Luckily, we were there to cover all the festivities.

If you’d like not miss out, make sure you keep your ears to the ground for next year’s iteration. Alternatively, there’s a lot of other great events taking place during Fak’ugesi that you should check out. We suggest A MAZE. / Johannesburg which starts later this week.

PCB Festival Pass

Like last year Tom van den Bon created a festival pass for attendees that did a lot more than hang around your neck. The custom PCBs were used to teach attendees how to solder to they could activate the LEDs attached to the board.

Far more than being a pretty set of lights, van den Bon put in some Easter Eggs that can be found by tinkering around and a few people have already created projects around it, like this wire loop game.

Underwater experiance

Another project from Hous4Hack we’ll hopefully have a full story on soon. This display used RC FPV components to give you the experience of piloting a submarine.

Next to the headset and joystick setup (which you can see being manned by above) there was a small swimming pool. Inside of it a floating toy boat houses a transmitter array to send signals between the control setup and the camera which was underwater.

You could then drive the “submarine” around while being fed appropriate sounds through the headset.

Trick Photography

Henry Levine from Made in Workshop had a great Schlieren setup to show off the weird world you can’t normally see with your eyes.

While explaining how the setup works, Levine was also showing off a 3D printer and this drawing robot which had great company on the day thanks to the numerous other art projects on the day which we’ll get into later down this page.

Red Bull gives you (3D printed) wings

With Red Bull being a sponsor for the festival, Tom van den Bon created these hats which come complete with motorised Red Bull wings.

Each hat is hiding a 3D printed bracket inside with a pair of batteries and two small motors. The motors are attached to the wings (also 3D printed) which will flap up and down at random intervals as you walk around.

Drawing robots

theMakerSpace Durban brought a lot of robots to the show that could draw in different ways. There were two versions going around that attendees could build and then use on the large pieces of paper on the floor.

The first was a “dumb” robot consisting of a laser cut wooden body, three coloured markers, and a small motor attached to a weight. Turn the motor on the the robot would vibrate around, creating patterns. We were told that a total of 50 of these were made on the day.

You can find a guide to make your own over on theMakerSpace YouTube channel.

Artist Chloë Hugo-Hamman shares a canvas with the robots.

The second type of robot, based on an Arduino, used a programmable arm to make more precise art or lettering. Some of the versions we saw being worked on were even attached to magnets so they could stick to a whiteboard that had been set up.

This is an adaptation of the Plotclock and was brought to Market hack thanks to theMakerSpace Durban, Morgan 3D Printers, House4Hack and Dino Fizzotti.

Market Hack was an amazing kickoff for Fak’ugesi and we can’t wait to get back to Braamfontein to see what else there is to do.

Make sure you check out the festival website to find an event you’re interested in, because there really is something for everyone.

Alternatively, this coming weekend, there’s another maker event in the first official South African Raspberry Pi Jam.

 

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