HAR 2009
Written by Walter on x/x/2009
The NerdHero team had a blast at HAR 2009! First day we used our kart to transport all hardware to the camping site:
This was a UFO like object created by the tent next to us which gives a good vibe about HAR2009 atmosphere, lot's of creative minds working on overload ;) :
For me it was ripping apart my macbook, replacing the 80Gb with a 320Gb drive. Then doing new install of avrdude and avr-gcc in preperation of flashing some atmega chips. Enjoying some talks afterwards and drifting around with the E-kart while enjoying/soaking up the atmosphere during first day.
Second day we had pretty much setup our kart, tent, network, pc's etc. We started to pimp the kart. Tim placed some led head&tail lights on it. Then we found this led-matrix at the blinkin lights stand. Here is me soldering the kit together during third day:
It had a atmega168 controller and some asm code included. We basically threw away the asm code and wrote new firmware in C from scratch to create our own LED-MATRIX scroller (The blinkin lights village). This is the result after 2 days of hacking on the DotBlox by our nerdhero team.
And we pasted the module on the back of the e-kart (see below post). Then pretty much cruised around and let people enjoy some zero-emission fun by letting them ride our kart ;). We enjoyed the scenery a lot, everyone helped each other out so that all projects went faster than expected. When we needed a powered usb hub or an arduino we got it in minutes and it all just fell together nicely.
Here are all pictures of the long weekend @ har, taken by chekko
This was a DIY laser show project we enjoyed on thursday or friday night:
We also saw someone with a complete electric mountain bike (60km/h topspeed and about 70km of range). We hope by the next edition of HAR we will see lots of electric vehicles and hopefully some full electric cars. If not we will drive our home made one ;). Or we might find something totally different to do by then. Anyway it's hard to predict what will be hot 4 years in the future. Hopefully by then electric cars, bikes and segways are common and we can focus on something new ;). Here is a promising all electric e-mini:
It's a 1-year lease only car, hopefully history does not repeat itself and these e-mini's will not be impounded and destroyed next year as was done with the EV1 ;)
There's even a better electric mini created by pml (640hp, 4 wheel drive, the motors are in the wheels just like our e-scooter we ripped apart for the electric kart project).
We didn't take pictures of many other cool thins like the TESLA Coil burning old cd's, the laser shows, the weirdo network noise generators, the killbots etc. But that's ok, they will stay in my memory until the next edition of HAR ;). Including this nice view across the lake :
