Celebrating 10 Years of Aachen Maker Meetup
This was an event with a lot of people! With more than 70 makers attending, the room was packed to the last seat. After gathering at 6:30pm as usual, Jan Borchers kicked off the event at 7pm with a welcome note, followed by his presentation of the Greatest Hits & Misses: 10 Years of Aachen Maker Meetup (PDF of Jan's slides, with links to videos). He highlighted the most special locations, visitors, and events of the first ten years. The video of his and all other presentations is available below. If you want to see more cool projects, also check out our event highlights that date back to our first meetup in 2009!
Next, serial maker and original member of our Aachen maker scene Mario Lukas presented his most recent advances on the FabScan Pi, the DIY 3D Scanner that you can order as a kit and build for just 185 Euros. FabScan started as a Bachelor thesis project here at Jan's lab in 2011, Mario redesigned it in his own Bachelor thesis here at the lab in 2013, and he's been improving it ever since. He just launched an online community website for it, and shared some exciting secret plans to radically grow the FabScan user base in the near future.
After some hilarious technical difficulties, Jan managed to interview René Bohne, the original manager of the Fab Lab Aachen here at Jan's lab since it opened 2009, and one of the Aachen Maker Meetup / Dorkbot cofounders in the same year. René organized our meetups for many years before moving to Berlin, where he now hangs out at a cool coworking and makerspace MotionLab Berlin a lot, when he isn't busy pursuing his day job helping startups use Telefonica's IoT infrastructure.
Afterwards, unprecedented amounts of pizza were delivered and consumed, and the Computer Science Bachelor students from this year's Multimodal Media Madness (M3) course at Jan's lab presented the interactive games they had built in the Fab Lab. Also other makers brought along their favourite project of the last years or something they have been working on for a while. Also members of the Bombini publishing house and Elektor stopped by and gave us free books on electronics and making. Thank you very much for that.
Here is a video of all talks and presentations:
The Aachen Maker Meetup is funded as part of our Personal Photonics project by a grant from the Open Photonics Initiative of the German Ministry of Education and Science (BMBF).
