Hackaday’s London Meetup Was A Corker

Upstairs at the Marquis Cornwallis pub in central London, around 75 Hackadayers convened, ate well, drank well, and were generally merry. Nearly everyone in attendance brought a hack with them, which meant that there was a lot to see in addition to all that socializing to be done.

I spoke with a huge number of people who all said the same thing: that it was fantastic to put faces to the names of the writers, hackers, and other readers. As a writer, I finally got to meet in person some of the people who’ve produced some of my favorite hacks, in addition to most that were totally new to me. I can’t say how often I heard “Oh you’re the person behind that project. I loved that one.” A real sense of the Hackaday community was on display.

One of the most Hackaday moments occurred when [Pyrofer] showed me his fiber-optic cable checker. I had just been reading the comments posted to a similar project, and he mentioned that he had built a similar device a few years ago. Now here he was, 24 hours later, showing it to me with a beer in his other hand. It was a great-looking project with removable laser units and a sweet little OLED display. It also featured wireless charging for the battery, because wireless charging is cool.

Someone (say hello in the comments!) brought a super-quick prototype from work with him. To get the job done, he needed a six-layer PCB, but no PCB houses could turn those around in time for his deadline. The solution? Split the design up into a two-layer and four-layer design which they could handle quickly, and populate the middle sections with a surface-mount connector for the shared signals. The connector solves the alignment problems, as well as the obvious inability to solder inside the PCB sandwich. Very clever, and a hack that I’ll have to try out to beef up my home-etched designs.

And so it went. The entire evening was full of gems like this, punctuated by cask ale refills and delicious shrimp and mini-burgers. If you were there, let us know what your favorite moments were in the comments. If you weren’t, enjoy the photo gallery, and look out for when we’re in your neighborhood.