dc501 at the Tinkerfest

Posted by FirmWarez on 7 Aug 2012 in Blog | 2 comments

Wow! What a day! The Museum of Discovery invited us at dc501 to participate in their first “Tinkerfest” — described as a mini MakerFaire. We were invited to teach lockpicking and soldering.

Unfortunately most of the preparation time available after the invite was during DEFCON 20, meaning key dc501 members would not be around, however we all managed to organize a team and get equipment together for the event.

The MoD supplied parts and supplies for the “learn to solder” station, as well as lockpick sets and other tiems. dc501 provided locks of varying difficulty, some nifty prize filled boxes, and instructional assistance via power point from our friends at TOOOL. We had wafer locks, door knobs, padlocks, some pinned to make them easy to open. In the “learn to solder” area we made “blinky bug” spider things, using guitar strings as antennae/switches and LEDs for eyes. We had a whole zoo of mini Tachikomas!

The event was very successful, with the MoD experiencing a much higher than normal number of visitors. The lockpick and solder stations were set up side by side in the Tinkering studio. Our area was open from noon until 16:00. We had a constant flow of people. All of the visitors were very positive about learning to pick locks. Thanks to ShortGrrl, Snide, XAlg, and Mont for showing up at the MoD and helping out.

The Tinkerfest itself was a great event. There were artsy folks, tech folks, some local guys called qu-bd with a MakerBot style company, a car take apart outside, just a surprising and phun array of local people doing cool stuff.

The MoD took care of us — we were fed Friday night and all day Saturday, including a wonderful catered dinner Saturday night. It was a lot of work, but it was a phun way of providing some community outreach and interaction, as well as a chance to see what other makers, creators, and hackers are up to.

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