The Open Knowledge Foundation is organising the EnergyHack Berlin hackathon this weekend as a contribution to the “energy revolution” everyone is talking about in Germany, and we are also sponsoring this event.

All hardware hacks that will be documented using Fritzing and shared online will get free PCBs from our Fab Service.

This will be a very exciting opportunity to use public big data and combine it with small data collected with IoT devices. If you are a tinkerer, a developer, a designer or just interested, just join us and spread the word!

Expertenworkshop für den Hackday “EnergyHack” from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.

… but just for some maintenance, we are back very soon :) Wegen Wartungsarbeiten musste unsere Website kurzzeitig abgeschalten werden. Lang wird es nicht dauern :)

DE: Zurzeit kommt es mir so vor, als ob ich gar nicht mehr zum arbeiten komme. Der Mai war gespickt mit Feier- und Brückentagen und dazu kam unserer Umzug.

Im Moment sitze ich gerade in unserem neuen Werkstattraum. Auf der Tischplatte und dem Boden bildet sich gerade wieder die Baustaubschicht, die ich gerade noch beseitigt hatte, während im Nebenraum ein Arbeiter mit einem Bohrhammer Heizungsrohre fixiert. Unsere zukünftige Küche, in der gerade mehrere Bauarbeiter damit beschäftigt sind den Putz von den Wänden zu schlagen (offene Klinkerwände sind in Berlin gerade Mode), ist noch mit einer Gipskartonwand von unserem Büro getrennt. Die Toilette ist nur über den Hof erreichbar.

Sicherlich wird es noch etwas dauern, bis wir uns hier zuhause fühlen, es geht aber voran und das Ende ist absehbar.

EN: There was not much time to work the last days. The whole May was full of public holidays, bridging days and of course our move.

This minute I’m sitting in our new workshop. The builder’s dust layer on my desk and the floor I just cleaned reappears while a drill hammer worker is retaining the heating pipes. Our future kitchen, where some builders are currently detaching  the render from the wall (this days, blank brick walls are in vogue in Berlin), is still closed with drywall. The toilet is only reachable through the court.

Certainly it will take a bit until we feel home but we are looking forward optimistically.

Codemotion is not just another tech conference where developers and engineers attend to compare tools and argue about what’s best and what’s cool. It is a meeting point for many disciplines, hardware meets software and design in a unique and powerful combination.

We were invited to present Fritzing in the “Makers” category and we gladly accepted to do so. Fritzing was created in the first place to close the gap between creatives and electronics, to take away the fear of electrons and to transform physical computing mystery into creative material just like any text, graph or animation. We believe that Codemotion is one of the best meeting points for all people who use Fritzing, or should be using it.

Come and join us on Saturday, May 11th at the HTW in Berlin, the talk is at 16:10. You can see the page by clicking on the image below.

We are looking forward to meet you there and put a face on your projects and PCBs.

Our friend Wolf who is doing a talk about FabLabs will sell our Starter Kits at his stand friday and saturday, and our friend Stefania will do a talk about teaching kids technology.

Back in 2008, we had to make a decision about source control. We were then using googlecode with Subversion. The Fritzing application had been built in Java on top of a couple of frameworks that were in turn sitting on top of the Eclipse framework, but we had decided to switch to Qt and C++ (and looking back, we have absolutely no regrets about that).

The question was whether to switch source control as well, and I remember Brendan arguing that we should go over to git, but at the time googlecode didn’t support it and git was still a bit of a new kid on the block, so we made the conservative choice and stuck with Subversion.

The world looks different in 2013, and we are belatedly moving our repository to git. We are remaining with googlecode because our issue tracker is a very rich resource which is nicely integrated with source control, and there didn’t seem to be a way to move it elsewhere without losing that coupling.

The old svn repository is still available at https://fritzing.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/fritzing, and for that reason (and because we tried it, and it didn’t go so well), we decided not to convert the Subversion history, just the latest trunk code. This will also make cloning a lot quicker. You can clone the code using: git clone https://code.google.com/p/fritzing/

There are a number of different workflow styles possible using git. For the moment, if you have made code changes you would like to see in the core, add an issue to the issue tracker, and attach a git patch.

Cheers and a happy May Day.