Fritzing at the MakeTechX conference 2013 – for the first time Fritzing had a booth at the „conference of tech things that matter, where those who make a difference meet, think & create.“ What a nice slogan, and nice it was indeed. 
For me it was the first conference I could attend with Fritzing and so I was superexcited and curious what would await us there. We met in the morning at our „headquarters“ to pack some last things and finally hailed a taxi at 9 a.m. to drive to the Platoon Kunsthalle in Berlin Mitte where the conference would take place. This was already a great start to the day, our taxi driver seemed to like entertaining his passengers and gave us a lot of secret insights into the Berlin taxi business and we will definitely follow his advice to not only try Red Bull with vodka but also with cherry brandy.
The Platoon Kunsthalle is a very interesting building – actually it is more like a huge and fancy cargo container, created as an experimental space for artists and therefore perfectly fitting the location just next to the White Trash.
The interior felt surprisingly comfortable, the front part consisted of the – definitely necessary to mention – gorgeous café-restaurant-sort of thing with a nice sitting area and the larger back served as presentation and workshop area. There were several booths, and we had one of them! Besides us there was also the Open Tech School, Bitcoin, the Fab Lab, who brought us there initially by ordering some very special Fritzing Kits in a metal case to do an Arduino workshop, and many more, including and not forgetting a whole lot of 3D printers and a transformable mountain/racing/citybike! Awesome!
So, as you can guess, maker mood was in the air! Stefan and I prepared the booth with six Fritzing kits as we had prepared a little workshop to make the visitors familiar with Arduino and Fritzing. Soon after the first conference attendees arrived and the speakers started their talks – we then asked ourselves how we should do a workshop while being placed almost on the stage ourselves? Luckily the organisers Lizzy and René Herzer had thought of everything and used a concept I hadn’t experienced before – they handed out headphones to the audience and so everybody could listen undisturbed and to their own volume. Though I couldn’t listen to the talks anymore at least we now had some peace and quiet to do the workshops (besides that it is really awesome to go to the toilet and still being able to listen to the speaker on the stage…).
At first I was a bit nervous in assisting in the workshops without being a real Fritzing crack yet, but in the end it wasn’t necessary at all. Stefan took over the harder-to-explain bits wonderfully and I learned a lot myself by explaining how it all works. We had a very interesting mixture of workshop participants – some knew the Kits very well already and, after solving our tasks in a mere minute, grabbed our Fritzing book eagerly and started contentedly getting lost in the more complex exercises. What made me very happy was that there were also a lot of people who never came in contact with an Arduino before and discovered how easy and fun it actually can be while saying before „No, no, this is really not my strength, I could never do it in physics lessons.“
So we left in the afternoon to go back to work, armed with tasty bread rolls and a very good mood, with the feeling of not only us but many more people having had a very interesting and enjoyable Fritzing day.
André explaining the old story
Our friends form Make-Munich are inviting to a christmas maker event. It will take place December 1st [1. Advent] and combine a Creativity-festival, a X-Mass-Market, fancy Maker Exhibitions [e.g. Chocolateprinters or 3D Printed cookie forms], Art, Music and Creative Workshops for everybody to join.
Link: X-Make.
Wir freuen uns heute ganz außerordentlich, bekannt geben zu können, dass wir unsere ersten Reseller in der Schweiz gefunden haben und das Fritzing Creator Kit ab sofort auch im Land des Käses, der Schokolade und Taschenmesser direkt zu haben ist.
Das Fritzing Creator Kit kann in den Shops
Wir wünschen Euch viel Spaß mit dem Kit und liebe Grüße in die Schweiz!
PS: Vielen Dank an Patzi und Alekos für die Unterstützung!
(Foto: Vasile Cotovanu)
Hello, Fritzing world. My name is Laura and I’m a creator / programmer and organizer living in Berlin. If I’m not planning a new project or talking with people about a whacky idea, then I’m probably thinking about one. I moved to Berlin about a year ago and got involved in open tech / rails girls / maker things when my friend and I started going to Everything together (yes, Everything). Workshops, meetups, tangentially related conferences, you name it. Johanna and I were there.
Johanna and I at Everything:
https://instagram.com/p/ZdE6QQGr-9/
https://instagram.com/p/ZvJy7omr6I/
This Fall we’re testing the new Fritzing Creator Kit. We’ve worked with Arduinos before, but this is our first foray into the Fritzing world. We’re going to try each project, try our own projects and document the process through this blog.
i.e., make things, break things and drink (lots of) coffee.
Since we’ll blog regularly in the next months, I asked Johanna a few questions to help you get to know us better. Follow the entire series, stay tuned on the Fritzing blog and follow us on Twitter: Laura Wadden and Johanna Santos Bassetti.
You have a degree in art, you're interested in agriculture, you've worked in product strategy at various startups, and you even picked strawberries while living on a Danish island. What got you involved in Fritzing?
Ever since I was a little girl I watched my dad solder things. And I knew that by soldering things he was making other things happen. At that point I didn’t really understand what computers were, but I liked the soldering process. And then when I understood what computers were, I got interested in how to make computers do stuff that serves you as a tool. I thought of them as potential translators of the physical world and imagined ways of using computers to measure how plants grow. But I didn’t know about sensors then.
So you thought about programming machines as a little girl? Awesome!
Exactly.
How did you get involved in Fritzing and Arduinos this time around?
I worked with Arduinos back in 2011 doing wearable Arduino work for a friend’s exhibition during Club Transmediale. He had a Lilypad, sensors and speakers that I sewed into a lab coat with metal string. I had to figure out a way to sew it so that none of the connections touched while the participants moved so it wouldn’t short-circuit.
How has the Berlin maker scene – Fritzing, Open Tech School, the workshops we’ve gone to, Hackidemia, the Kids Hackathon, etc. – influenced your involvement in Arduinos & Fritzing?
The project back in 2011 was really on the outskirts, but Arduinos stayed on my mind. Then all of a sudden it was much more accessible through these meetups. People were willing to share their knowledge and teach - that’s the first time I felt it was possible to work on my own projects.
What about those meetups inspired you?
The Open Tech School meetup was inspiring because there were tons of projects happening at the same time and so many different types of learning in self-organized groups. The diversity of approaches was titillating: There was a table of sound tinkerers! There was a wearables table! And a table of complete newbies!
I think seeing how collaborative, open and fluid the community was made me feel safe to try whatever I wanted and feel supported by other people.
And I inspired you too, right?!
Yes! When I started doing these projects with you – that’s when I noticed how well we work together. Our different learning complement each other. And I realized how much fun it is.
Do you have any goals with our Fritzing project this Fall? What are you trying to get out of it?
I want to test some ideas that I’ve kept locked in my brain vault for the last decade. With Fritzing, they are potentially doable now. I am excited to get to it!
Follow Laura Wadden and Johanna Santos Bassetti on Twitter and keep up with the Fritzing blog to find out what happens next in their learning adventure.
We waited for this MakerFaire impatiently and finally it is happening!
More than 250 projects are being presented this weekend by makers and inventors from all over the world, and as usual we met many old friends and users and made new friends.
It was great to see how many people came to visit the Faire, families, adults, teenagers, children, educators, hobbyists etc…
The venue was full from the opening hour till the call till sunset. This really shows that the maker movement is a solid and genuine thing. People don’t get excited then go home and forget about it, the projects and products exhibited stimulate the creative and curious part inside us in an irresistible way. Some lives are even shaped by this spark of inspiration forever.
Dale had this observation and tweeted it yesterday, we can only agree to it: There is no place in the world that can claim to be THE hub of the movement. This really belongs to us, tinkerers and explorers, any Makerfaire in the world will be full of old and young people with eyes wide open.
It also was with great pleasure that we discovered PCBs made with our fab service at the BASTL-INSTRUMENTS stand. The guys use Fritzing to layout the boards and our fab service to prototype their products.
They now sell their MIDI-synthesizers as a kit or assembled, and we are sure they will have a huge success because everyone at their booth was having a blast making music.
Our friend and reseller Yuan from EXP-Tech dropped by for a very nice conversation about the german and the chinese maker scenes, and we exchanged a lot of our experiences about managing the bits part of a hardware business.
It was another great event, we had a lot of fun and we are going home with many great new projects and a lot of feedback, but mainly with so much more excitement and enthusiasm for keeping on doing what we do for the community, and start better products and services to empower inventors and makers everywhere.
BONUS: this is a “behind the scenes” photo of us setting up the stand and building the Creator Kit examples. The handsome guy on the right is Tommaso our colleague at IXDS and one of the creators of Dandylight. We do look seriously busy :D
