Electric Sea 2026 is hosting a so-called hackerthon at ArtLove Salon, where I took a few art classes recently.
I signed up for a workshop taught by Grant Hinkson.
He has prepared 6 nicely crafted wooden box, precut plexi-glass plates, PCB board designed by him and manufactured in China (shipment arrived in 4 days!).
In class 1, we hooked up the wires with the controllers, and an Teensy 4.0 microcontroller (Amazon or Sparkfun).
In class 2, we downloaded his code, and flashed onto the Teensy with Arduino IDE.
We verfied that our connections were correct by checking the readout in our laptop using his debugger, for all the controllers: 4 rotary, 2 sliders, 2 buttons.
Then we screwed the bottom plate on, jammed the USB cord through the outlet.
Too bad that the plug where the USB cord goes through is too tight.
I, and Daniel, fried our microcontrollers.
Last, open Visual Studio, grab any example from OpenProcessing, modify it by using AI (Claude) with an example he provided.
3/28, Saturday, evening, OK and I arrived almost at 7pm.
I asked her to sign up for the award ceremony.
But no one checked her registration.
We walked around different installations, ate sandwiches and spring rolls.
Saw a group using VR glasses, one girl with her colored fabric patches of her year of pain, a group with LED lights that get brighter if one light is near another, a large screen of static kelp and sound of water (diving), a cut piramide-shaped robot, a large paper-mache with lights that turned color when you touch it, a webapp that registers user's hand gesture to ~8 emotions based on predefined questions and then plot the the questions in shiny spheres colored by aggregated emotions...
The inventor (or the group of designers) stood by their products and tell you what they are about.
To be honest, a lot of crap.
But a great chance for people of different discipline to get together and play.
Here's Grant's station showcasing what we built: 3 boxes here (total 6 students).
None of these are final prototype, but a tool to use in some projects.
At 8:15pm, Elizabeth Churchill gave a talk to encourage everyone playing with AI. She's part of a planning team for an AI univesity in United Emerit. Luckily she's not there now, with the ongoing war. A good speaker. Afterwards, the organizer Third Place Technologies presented awards to the "digital kelp", and the "light together".
Danial's microcontroller woke up last evening. Grant gave me back my dead MCU, however, when I tried it later, it was still dead.
