to Scrum Mastery Challenge. This is episode four, and this challenge is a little bit different to the others. Let's see what our contestants have in store for them this week. Take a photograph of an inanimate object that somehow reflects an aspect of agile delivery. The best photograph wins, you have 30 minutes, your time starts now. Yes, so they need to get out and about to find something they can take a photograph of that will represent an aspect of agile delivery. What's great about this episode is that I don't need to do a lot of explaining. Our contestants will do it for me. Let's see how Christina got on first. So how did you find the photo challenge? Quite tough. Yeah. The thing that I was trying to capture was around the evolution of what agile is all about for me. The first picture I took was of the daffodils because, you know, flowers grow and they bloom and they, okay, eventually might die, but so do some products. I thought that was a nice start to the walk. Then I saw this, I saw a really cool sign which, initially I took a picture of it because it had the seven written on it and then I thought I'll send wastes, but then I saw the two arrows that were pointing and I thought that's quite nice in terms of feedback loops. And then we walked past the church and there was a... Could it be anything? Absolutely anything. So I'm just an evangelical and just for me, some people are very evangelical about agile and they're very pure and it can be detrimental, I think. Oh, and then another one I liked was there was a poster which said report it now and that reminded me of when things are not going in the right direction and we need to stop, we stop, whether it's, we don't want to spend any more money on the department's product or whether you need to stop because we haven't understood it. I kind of like that sort of call it as you see it, pull the call almost. But I think the one that's probably the winner for me was the credit card sign which said discover because for me, agile, agile ways of working it's all about discovery, it's all about evolution. That's the picture I'm going to pick as my picture for the challenge. Brilliant. So many different aspects of agile delivery there and she's picked her entry to be judged. Let's get an insight into what Helen sees when wandering around looking for inanimate agile objects. Waste, waste on this. Waste, yeah. So I'm thinking we want to grow people, we want to grow teams so we've got new flowers poking through growth. Oh yeah, I'm loving this one. So this is a windy path, here's a journey and so this kind of path represents a kind of journey that you're probably going to have to go to. Collaboration, getting around the table and working together. So this probably represents better ideas and there's bird feeders so you've got to feed the good ideas so feed your team pizza and good stuff around. But I think the one that I'm going to go for is the house. Looking at that picture there's a number of different things that I could have pulled out but I think one of the biggest things about agile delivery for me is it's about collaboration and when I step back and looked at the house again I think that this house belongs to husband and wife who own a business and so when I reflect upon that this kind of whole area, this place that I'm in is one big collaboration. People having to work together with people that they don't know, people come into their homes and so it's collaboration for me. So a number of different aspects of agility there from waste to ideas, from visibility to growth but the overall theme for Helen was one of collaboration and she decided to illustrate that with a picture of the house. Very creative. Next up is Freya. I didn't have that many ideas when I first found the challenge but then when I was walking around I found and picked up quite a few things that thought were pretty good. First thing that I thought of was a string of fairy lights because it's like a light bulb idea, light bulb moment. There's a book called Small Great Things and I thought that you can have lots of little good things to make one really good thing. It's a picture of a dance school door because all the students have to work in the teams and they have to be very agile to be able to perform well but then most of the time they're being told what to do by a teacher so it's not very self-organising. But then my final choice was Jenga because everyone's ideas get piled up to make one big project and then the sticks are the people in the team and when one gets taken out or it's like somebody putting out or giving up on the idea then everything falls apart and you need the team to work together to get it to be like the best, like the highest it can get. Freya picked up on the ideas theme and how team members ideas can come together in the same way that lots of small pieces of delivery can create something great. She looked at the somewhat literal aspect of agility in terms of flexible dancers before settling on the analogy of Jenga with the building blocks of ideas and team members and how the sense of team can be easily destabilised by one person withdrawing or not participating constructively. Interesting. Let's see what Sam found when he went out on his Agile photograph hunt. Take a photograph of an inanimate object that somehow reflects an aspect of agile delivery. Best photograph wins. You have 30 minutes. Agile delivery. It's not agile delivery but that's so many shoes that are just outside. I just felt I needed to share that with other people. It's a dream catcher. That's for some companies. That's what agile is. We're a scrum team. Now all our dreams have come true. I mean, in some respects the jukebox is a continuous delivery of value, right? It doesn't play more at the same time either. You get one good song after the other. You know, sometimes you don't get value but that's kind of agile as well, right? You know what? I think I'm failing a principle here as well which is maximising the amount of work not done. Maybe. Because the beer pump is an excellent example of a value delivery system. Continuous delivery. Value. Flow, yeah, beautiful.  It could be reused for any beer. Reusability. It's the dream. Cheers. I think I've done that today as well. Thank you very much. That's it. Simplicity, maximising the amount of work not done. Continuous delivery or value. Flow. Reusability. Classic Sam, you might say. From iterative delivery of value while acknowledging that you don't always get what you want to appreciating that some see agile as a dream, a silver bullet, before setting his mind to the simplest thing that would work and going to the pub. For many it would be hard to argue his rationale for the beer pump's analogy to agile delivery but later on we'll see if our judges agree with him. And finally, we have Paul. It seems a shame to spoil these beautiful seals. Take a photograph of an inanimate object that somehow reflects an aspect of agile delivery best photograph wins. You have 30 minutes, your time starts now. Started with a clock. The idea was looping time box loops. Picture of a rugby ball. It's on the parallels with Scrum at the day of rugby union. Now I've got a picture of, I assume it was a milk urn, churn, milk urn, what do we call them? Anyhow, I was drawn to it by the markings on the side as some kind of indication of capacity that made me think about team capacity. I've got a picture of some ivy crawling up a brick pillar. The idea of kind of more emergent growth. And we've got a town notice board. Teams, Scrum boards are very much the same type of things sharing information radiators. Again, some more plants growing through, finding their way through brick work. Tree roots growing through or pushing out bricks in a wall. A mirror for ease of access and visibility of traffic to increase the transparency of information. And I've got a patched in piece of brick work. It's a little bit like trying to patch something together to remind me a little bit of some technical debt or something like that. So which one are you going to go for? I can only choose one. Now I'm going to go for the town notice board. Again, a mixture of analogies from time boxing to capacity to the game of rugby, emergent growth and technical debt. Before settling on the idea of visibility, community and team communication. So there we have our five photographs. Just like in episode one. To avoid any disharmony between myself and the contestants and any claim of bias, I've taken myself out of the judging process. This time, I've asked some independent and world famous agile coaches from around the globe to judge this challenge. They had no idea who took the photographs. So let's see what they thought. First up is Karen Greaves, formerly of South Africa, but now based in New Zealand. Hi. So I'm judging the photo competition for Jeff and I think my first choice would be for the photo of the Discover sign. I think it's a great idea that agile really is about discovery and learning rather than a fixed destination where once we're agile, check, we mark that box. And so I really like that as an idea. Second up, I would say the notice board. I really like the idea of visibility and also community, that having a kind of community notice board. So I think teams are also about that. I would say the Django one, I like that idea. So I put it at number three. I like that everybody contributes, but having built Django, I know it's a little fragile and so I don't really like the idea of agile teams being that fragile that one person can completely disrupt them. Although maybe that is true. And then I think I put the bear as number four and then the house is number five. I don't know, that one didn't really speak to me. Yeah, that's it. Next up, we have Howard Sublett from the good old US of A. This is the agile photograph challenge and my rankings from number five to number one would be Jenga is number five. Yes, it's about being together, but the object of this game is to pull pieces apart. So that's my number five. Number four is the house. Yes, we are together, but there's still some parts in that I'm not real happy about. I love the picture of Discover from my number three. So because we are all about self-learning and continuous learning, anything that involves beer gets a higher rating with me. Just FYI on the future, but the beer tap continuous flow and it flows happiness. And my number one is what I would call an information radiator at a housing project or whatever the photograph was, but big visible radiators are really, really crucial for an agile development. Hi, my name is Ashlyn Green. I'm an agile coach based in Ireland. Okay, for the challenge about taking a photograph of an inanimate object that somehow reflects an aspect of agile delivery. The one that I've picked to go first is the beer pumps. If you know me, you probably know why I picked that. I think the flow and continuous delivery of value to the core concepts that we have within agile is really resonating at the minute with me and resonates a lot with the teams that I'm working with because that's where some of their challenges are, is how we actually get what is value and how do we deliver that value frequently throughout the project. The second one that I chose was the community notice board. One concept of agility is all about making everything visible. So putting everything up there so everybody can see it. There's a place where people can go to find out the information that they need. It's in a common spot that people understand where to go to and this idea of that you build a community around that. So that everybody is part of something. And then the third place picture that I chose was the discover card because I think agile is a journey. There is no single right answer. It's all about discover what's your journey and how should you go on it. Hi everyone, this is Jo and I'm here to give my results for the photograph challenge. In first place I have got the community board with visibility and community. For me visibility is one of the most important aspects of agility. Even just the small step of creating visibility of our work and where our work is in the system can dramatically help to improve things. For number two I had the Jenga game which I thought was a really really good metaphor for collaboration and for co-creation. Building on ideas, building on each other's skills and working together. In third place I had the beer taps which was a great metaphor for me for flow. I really enjoyed that. After that I really liked the discover picture. It was a very tough decision between the two of those. Discovery is a very big part of software delivery specifically in complex environments. And finally there was the photograph of the house. I really liked the value and the aspect of collaboration. I guess I didn't really get the metaphor. Hi this is John Gedge live in sunny Melbourne and I've got my results here for the agile photo challenge. So for me there's a clear winner this time and that is the Jenga photo. I think this is a really great metaphor for an effective team. I love the fact it represents the way that members of an effective team depend on each other and the way that they can build on each other's ideas. I also like the fact that it represents so if you mess around with a team too much if you try to take big out of the team and replace them with new people at some point it's all going to come crashing down and you're going to be left to clear up the mess. So yeah that's my winner. See you soon. So after the five judges submitted their scores Paul came out on top with Christina and Sam in joint second then Freya and finally Helen. So that means we've got another change at the top of the leaderboard with Paul taking over by half a point from Sam who's also just half a point of Helen who's also just half a point ahead of Christina. So close. Anyway that brings us to the end of our time box for episode four of Scrum Mastery Challenge and we're almost done. I'd like to thank our judges for participating and now we're halfway through our challenges. Or are we? Keep an eye out this week is all I'll say. In the meantime maybe keep an eye out for what inanimate objects might speak to you about agile values and principles. If nothing else you might get a fresh perspective of the world around you. Until next time good luck with your own Scrum Mastery challenges and to get us to done done here are the credits.


The music you heard earlier was, where is my pieces? There you go, was Kimiko. Kimiko basically made Bach public domain, because Bach is dead for quite some time, so the Bach music is public domain, but any recording isn't because, well, there's people who actually done that. She didn't like that, so she basically open sourced Bach, and we liked that a lot, and we is home, and we liked her for a, we liked her, so we asked her to give a presentation on a hacker conference, and she said, well, sure I'll do that, but once I'm there, I might as well play a bit. That's a, well, that could be a problem, because she's a classic pianist, so she needs an actual piano, to give her a keyboard, can you? So, we need him at Beusendorf, which is expensive, is also expensive to ensure. We want it in the middle of a field, in a hot tent, so it has to be tuned over and over and over again, and we have to find an actually a supplier who's willing to lend us something, something like that. So it's a lot of problems with a potential awesome, and us hackers, of course, we did it, because in the end it was awesome. So, us hackers tend to not steer away from big problems, or from bigger problems than absolutely necessarily, because potential awesome. Hacker camps like this and others spawned quite a lot of very good initiatives that were better, that better the world. We're talking about open source ISPs, open source initiative at all, cryptophones, all sorts of stuff, you guys know, so if you look at all these, well, it could be federal agents, but it's all alphabet jumbo, but at these points I think these venues are important, and not just the digital world, but the world at large.  That's not really what we're aiming for, I think. So you might think, well, you can do that more like in a hackerspace, but then again, a hackerspace, most hackerspaces don't really like sleepovers, at least not a mass, so it's not really a 24-7 thing. It's not even a 7-thing, let alone a 24-7 thing. Okay, who am I? I'm Jors Weijers. I'm a member of Tool, I'm a member of Hack 42. I did stuff for OM, and during daytime I do the Cybers, and I have a dream. The dream starts off with the most awesome hackerspace in existence. Those are not my words, mind you. Those are the words of Hackaday, who visit quite a lot of hackerspaces, and well, came up with that. That's an awfully nice building, and at this end there's even a church that we can use, and we even did a hacker wedding there, so it's full operational. So this, I think, is an awesome hackerspace that we maybe need to supersize. Make it bigger, have more rooms to enable it to have sleepovers. Maybe we need a nice entrance, just because can. A couple of weeks ago, this plot came on the market, and I won it. At the moment it's housing refugees, but that's supposed to be a temporary situation, and it actually is, because this is an old jail, and the PR thing of housing refugees in jails is apparently frowned upon. But I don't mind, I want. So a couple of weeks ago this came to market, and I had the dream for way longer than that, but because it came to market, we kind of got a kick in the butt to actually place a bit on the thing, and actually at the moment it's not, but that means we just have more time. The spot, how big is this? Well, this is our main building at the hackerspace. This whole building fits, of course it doesn't work. Can you see this? Okay, fits in this one. So yes, it's supersized. The tiny little round thing here is a open space, and because you guys do feet and inches and shillings and God knows what we do meters, I have no idea how to compare to that, so we'll put some stuff in it. In this open space, this building fits. And yes, that's the White House, so much for world domination.  If you're not into architecture, this also fits to fully adult ground blue whales, back to back, yes, and you still walk around it. Hight, if you put this miracle thing straight up, then it just does not fit. But just, if you leave the nose cone, you're done. So if you print a one-to-one mock-up of a space shuttle, what is the spot to do that? Cool. Okay, this is the plot. It has lots of it. It's brilliant. And what we're going to do is we're going to start a foundation, and that's going to procure the funds. And with those, we're going to buy the stuff. And this foundation, the first tenant will be Hack42. And yeah, that will have perks. What I want in this, because the facility has just a dome alone, has 200 rooms. That's just a dome. Rooms are us. If you look at this, let's do ta-da. So 200, still visible? Okay. So that's 200. Tiny hotel room, like dormitory kind, hostel, that kind of level. Because mind you, there are tiny. So those we're going to give out and hire out, rent out. It depends on who's coming.  This will be, where are we? This will be office space for startups, tech companies, and mind you, tech companies we like. And it's going to be different. This is a sports arena. So we just print a big white H on it and be done with it. Again, we will have a church, because well, it can't downgrade, can you? So it will be a hacker space, but stupidly super-sized. My idea is it becoming a European hacker hub, like the European hacker hub. So if you come to Europe, of course you go there. There will be more luxurious accommodations than just the hostel. Those will be primarily for our paying customers. We're looking at ways to get electricity virtually for free. And that will get us, as one of the first clients, will be a ISP or a Colo location, because, well, their main cost is electricity and ours isn't. We're also having contacts with universities. You can house PhD students here for God knows how long. And of course, as a hacker space, now you can have hackers in residence. So if you have a hacker coming from abroad, just, well, you can house him. There will be eating facilities at, this is the brilliant entrance you saw the picture of.  And there will be a canteen also, which will be serving food at almost cost.  That's the idea. How am I on time? Okay, cool. Okay, that's the other way around. So that's the initiative. And, well, you saw me pointing at buildings and every now and then telling what we're going to do with it. And I didn't point at them all for a reason.  Actually, our old hacker space, which was bigger than a new one, also had that. We had rooms to spare, which gives you options and flexibility. So if you come, if somebody comes along and says, I have this cool project, I need that room for about three months. And then it's a tiny, tiny vote.  So that's that kind of flexibility works.  I don't know. I have some options. But I mean, one of them was, because it's an old building, we thought a message system being not IP. So tiny quadcopters, oozing around from between all those 200 rooms, that would be awesome. It's a bit of Harry Potter-esque, but then techie. It's brilliant. So the idea is to actually get there, because it's in Arnhem, which is quite central in Europe. If you look at it in a weird way, which is what we do, then it will be quite central and it will be brilliant. You can get there. It'd be in a prison, of course, it's walled. It's in the middle of the city. But because it's walled and the walls are quite thick and quite high, you can get away with quite a lot without disturbing the neighbors. Which is, yeah, kind of what we want to do. So the church will be used for, well of course, all our weddings. And at least once a week they will be given a lecture and that will be open for the public, of course. And yeah, basically that's it. I mean, so you have tech companies who... Oh yeah, and one thing we do, we try to make the canteen and the coffee place that interesting and that cheap that no one will even think of putting a coffee machine in his own room. So the canteen will be the mingle place of all the people. So if you just come in, oh, that's cheap office space, I'll rent it and I won't bother with the rest of us, then you'll have a very short lease. Basically the same goes for the housing cost for the building itself. So that's basically it. So we're looking for a couple of million now. And actually what we're looking for is not so much, well, of course we're looking for money, everybody is. But we're actually looking mostly for ideas. So if you have a bold idea that needs room that we will have, time-wise this is about, hopefully will be here in about three years, so it's a process. So if you're interested, drop me a line of this address. There's a little tiny quiz asking a couple of questions and none you have to answer, but please do. And well, looking forward to your great ideas and hopefully I can join you. You will join us at the opening party in about three years in this awesome space. Now I'm done. So I'm BSB and I'm here to try and keep things moving as they all fall apart. It's affectionately known as the Muppet Show because it's lightning talks and there's always some technical difficulties. I have to say thanks again to Yoss for opening things up for us. I really enjoy this guy's company because he rocks a suit and steel-toed boots at the same time. And as an industrial systems hacker I really appreciate this, right? A lot of times I go on an engagement and I have to find dress shoes that are also steel caps so I can go out to the electrical plant and do some work, but also go back and present the findings to the execs. So we have a couple of basic announcements. One is they need lots more volunteers today. So if you're willing to work in the kitchen, we'll feed you. And if you're willing to work audio-visual stuff tonight, they really need people on the AV teams and speaker ops teams for this evening. So please volunteer. We really appreciate it. Secondly, if there's anyone else doing a lightning talk in the room that's signed up in advance, I'd like you to please come to the front so I can identify you and know who's here. We had lightning talk difficulties this year because we were trying to schedule some of them and leave the Friday night ones open and flexible. And that wasn't made sufficiently clear to everyone else. So are we good? Are we good for the next one? All right.  So I appreciate it when you make noise for the speakers. And in particular, this speaker got cut off last night, which is really quite a tragedy because he wanted to show you his API. He was hoping that you would hack some things here at the camp and they have a really exciting project. So I won't say any more about it. I'll let him say what he likes about his own project. But please give a warm round of applause to Charles Yarnold for waiting until today to give his talk. This one's yours, right? I'm also giving out badges while things continue to not stream properly. So I've been to a lot of conferences and I've enjoyed myself and we might play a game with these badges later. I'm just talking until you let me know that that presentation is sorted out. So anybody want a badge? Are you awake? Is anyone awake? Have you had coffee? You want a badge? All right. So the right side is louder than the left side. What are you guys going to do about that? You want a badge? There you go. I'm sort of the redneck Mr. T in this sort of scenario. Partly because of the hat. Partly because I grew up in the States. So left side, not awake. Hasn't had any coffee. All right. Right side? Yeah, you're not doing very well. So what is the left side done? Anybody giving talks? Yes? No? Are you awake? There's talks over there. Oh, you're lightning talk speakers as well, right? Okay, cool. Come on up to the front. You can have badges. Just take a badge. Yeah, just take one. In a little while, we will use these for some sort of silly game and you can see how you enjoy that. Cool, one for each of you. And we still having trouble with the streaming? Yeah, this is why this is the Muppet Show. So usually we play the Muppet Show theme tune because, you know, we're Muppet Shuffling, right? We move around, we do our lightning talk. Like I said, I really appreciate the lightning talk so I don't know about the rest of you. But it's difficult to get up and speak for the first time and even if you've spoken before, you have a strange idea.  I found it amazing. I'm not used to audiences laughing at jokes, or Lambda Calculus jokes. But that's EMF camp for you, right? I've had a really good time. I hope you guys have. Have you said thank you to the organizers? No? On Twitter at least? Or like in a text message? No? They do appreciate that. How's it going, Charles? All right, good. Well, how about a warm round of applause for the EMF camp organizers? Thank you. Very nice of you. Good, almost there. Moving slides around. All right, cool. J-Duck presentation. I'm a big fan of J-Duck. In fact, that's worth an anecdote. I went to 44con two years ago or something and there were a bunch of people playing the Capture the Flag competition and there was one team that was beating all of the other teams severely. Had something like 40 challenges out of 50 and the others were still solving 10 or so. And I was standing outside and I said, you know, who is this person, this team? And J-Duck walked up and he was like, oh, that's me. I just thought I'd do the whole CTF on my own. I didn't need a team of eight. I just rock on. And he is a very talented guy. So he did win that competition and then let the second place people have the prize because it was sort of unfair to be competing against J-Duck, right? Anybody know J-Duck? No? Still not set. It's really difficult up there. Honestly, those lights are really bright. That's why I'm hanging out down here with you. I'm not used to sunlight, as you can imagine. They don't let industrial systems hackers out into the sun. All right, we're all set. Go ahead, Charles. Nice round of applause for Charles again. Do the talking for us every once in a while, I guess. Hello. There you go. This never gets not nerve-racking. Hi, I'm Charles and I'm responsible for the weird white cubes that are all around the camp. Thank you. Thank you. They are Lumos nodes. They're also known as what's that weird white box you're putting next to my tent? It's not going to make lots of noise, is it? I promise you there's no hidden base speakers, but I'm thinking next time distributed base around the camp just so we can drop the base at midnight as the curfew hits, but I'm not sure if the organisers will like that or not. This is a project that I actually wanted to do way back at the first EMF. The idea was to have distributed lights around the camp site that was running off of the same NRF modules that the first camp badge uses and it was going to be a nice distributed network of blinky LEDs. But then EMF actually happened and I was responsible for setting up the stages, getting in all the higher kits, designing the first EMF badge and getting it manufactured, driving around in a golf buggy and delivering stuff and at the last moment our caterers pulled out and Claire and I rented a food truck and cooked meat for an entire weekend and then we didn't eat meat for about three months because we couldn't stand the smell of cooking meat anymore. So sadly that all had to go in a box in the corner and it never got made. So I thought as it's been a couple of EMFs time, I'd actually try and get these projects done that I'd never managed to do. So this year I thought I'd actually try and make it. I had all of the gear from the first EMF but I thought I've got time, it's January I've got a few months so maybe I'll improve it. So instead of just using these Wi-Fi modules that were a bit flaky and they couldn't be very far apart, I thought why not use Wi-Fi. We've got Wi-Fi around the camp that would be stable and nice. This was before I heard from my friends who made the badges this year that they'd also be using 2.4 GHz for the badges. So it's still holding up but they have to be very close to the DKs to get a nice strong signal that's getting past all the badges. There was also the first one was going to have some LED so I thought why not have three nice and bright. And also ArtNet. I trained as a theater technician and ArtNet is the network version of DMX and DMX is the kind of control protocol that you use for lighting and moving lights and theatrical stuff. So all of these nodes can actually be used by lighting desks so if somebody brought their own lighting desk they could use it. They also used 5 amp-power batteries from China that when I tested them they were more like 500 mA so they wouldn't have lasted long either but luckily I managed to find the same supply that Adafruit uses for their batteries and whilst it's not the cheapest they are actually the rated amount that they say so the new nodes now have 8.8 amp-powers and they can pull quite a lot of power from them. I thought there's space on the board so let's add a connector for neopixels so they can also do strips of neopixels now and before they were just going to be in Tupperware boxes that I found I thought it needs to be bigger so making boxes out of rubble sacks which sounds like a good idea until you realise that woven plastic is like a dull cheese grater so when I'm flipping them inside out to put them through our sewing machine my hands got ripped to shreds so I regret that quite a lot next year well next year MF is going to be different and originally it was going to be 10 but now it's 50 around the campsite because quantity means cheaper but I also didn't factor in quantity means I'm going to be sitting in front of Netflix for a lot of time I've based how long this project has taken me mostly in series of Netflix making all of the big cube housing was four series of deep space nine so that took quite a while so this is the custom PCB that I ended up making it's got an ESP8266 runs the the wireless and all of the logic for it there's three boost LED drivers it's got a 3.7 volt lithium ion in it it boosts that up to about 12 volts or so to light up the LEDs and then PWM's for all the nice colors and then also on the bottom right there's a connector for a neopixel strip if you want to put those in and on the color changing that you've seen at the moment going through the rainbow they last about nine hours on the batteries before I go around in the morning and charge them all up and yeah got those all manufactured and brought across and then I sat and placed about 5,000 components by hand which was actually quite fun I also realized I needed charges they're all nice one amp power charges for the batteries that let me charge them individually rather than having to do a whole pack slowly I also had some space left on the PCB so I thought why not make it an internet of things because that's the cool thing so yeah they can tweet me once they're finished charging I regret being one of those people so in my tent at the moment is lots and lots of charges I can do half of the nodes in one go and then flip them over and do the other half so if you see a giant lithium fire raging over near the dome it's probably my tent, just keep a wide berth so yeah the housings are cheap industrial rubble bags with bamboo canes and webbing sewn in to keep them in place to give them structure luckily our sewing machine we bought it to make corsets which means that it can go through about an inch of leather at speed with no problems so it can do several layers of plastic quite nicely mostly the only bad thing about it is that it goes so fast I'm like yeah so I managed to make 50 of those without killing myself I only killed three needles which I feel proud about but probably should have done better people in my local park have been looking at me very oddly when I've been out there at 9 o'clock or midnight once I'd finished testing some pieces so if you're in the Hammersmith area and you saw a random guy, that was me I also built a control server for it, rather than just having standard art net there's a Node.js server which gives me an overview of all of the nodes they heartbeat back to the server with their current voltage their settings so I can see their calibration and then that all goes into here I can see which ones are live which ones have run out of battery so I need to go and charge them up I can also enable, disable and mess around with them I spent far too long making an also updating graph so I can see as their power's running out or if anything's wrong with them and a few tools which I need to flesh out but I feel like God when I'm standing up on top of the hill seeing all of these nodes around the place and then just going off, on off, on so if you see me with an iPad giggling to myself that's why so yeah, there's 25 chargers, 50 nodes, 150 RGB LEDs quite a lot of stuff it looks more impressive when there's big numbers but it all adds up into these nodes that are pretty there's an open API with the control server and if you go to any of these links or just search for Lumos nodes there's a github page with all the details you can do HTTP requests with Josson data you can get information of all the nodes that are online, their battery status what color they are you can post it back and you can set the color of any of them currently there's no API keys so anybody can set them and if people are fighting they're going to change color so I'd love it if anybody wants to write some really nice stuff for the nodes around we put up 10 on the ridge last night so if anybody wants to make a Larson scanner that goes across there that would be awesome just hit me up on Twitter or my details are at the end and I'll turn off other scripts so you can play with them whilst they're running but all of the code will be open source and open hardware I haven't put on the licenses yet but you'll find all of those details on there huge thank you to Nexus Interactive Arts they sponsored the project and gave me some money to buy all of the hardware they're an awesome company who work a lot with Google on their made with code projects which is designed to get girls young girls into coding we did the White House's lawn for their Christmas trees a couple of years ago where you could use Blockly which is a visual programming language to animate their trees which was partly where the idea for this came from and also LED dresses and stuff thank you to Adrian Godwin if he's around who put up with me poking him at one o'clock in the morning on IRC going I chose the wrong drivers and they're not working please help me and if you're around tonight my friend Tom Wyatt is making a Vive experience over in the Gold Members Lounge it's so he's making a version of his own visual scripting language so you put on the VR and you can drag around components, make chases to color transitions and then that all gets propagated out to the nodes that all around the place so if you haven't used a Vive before it's a good excuse to come over and play with one and thank you to everybody else who's lent me their pictures for this talk and yeah if you'd like to get involved and I'd really love that you do because at the moment it's just my laptop running a rainbow chase during the night hit me up on Twitter or on FreeNode I'm Selexius and yeah that's my nodes they say a good lightning talk should be like a comet right it should be dazzling and brilliant and over in a flash and I certainly feel that that was I like the blinking lights the shiny lights I know other people do too so thanks again for all of that and apologies for not being able to put you on yesterday so hopefully you guys will get out there and write some code and play with the API and do some other stuff our next speaker is going to speak to us about robots I believe and in particular dangerous things does anyone here like danger and once again the right hand side left hand side what are you doing are you sleeping are you awake alright now the left hand side non-danger non-danger ah okay good so yes are you ready Robert is ready and he's going to talk to you about building your first combat robot I believe music doesn't work ah music doesn't work it should do you should be able to just play it I'm just going to try the presentation anyway okay as you wish warm round of applause for Robert how do I get it up ah there you go okay cool hi so this is talking about building your first combat robot Robert was just started back on CV it'll be on tonight 8pm BBC2 I don't know if you can actually get iPlayer in the tent on the campsite at the moment because BBC you think yeah I think it's in Germany or something so yeah I'm Robert I've been into combat robotic stuff since about 1998 which is when the first season started up that's my website that's my twitter so feel free to give us a poke prod later on so and as you're just covering my experiences I don't profess to be any sort of lesser expert on this yet give us a bit of time so in the UK you've got three classes because you've got to split robots into weight classes the ones you see on TV are heavy weights right at the bottom there they cost about 100, sorry they weigh about 100 kilos I think we've gone up to 110 kilos now for the new robot wars they cost anywhere from 2 grand to about 8 grand which is a lot of money so the one I just carried up on stage is a featherweight it's more cheaper so that one's about 800 quid that's 13.6 kilos it's quite popular for getting started it's big enough that you learn how to build robots it's small enough that it doesn't break the bank there's another type called beta weights they're 1.36 kilos they're about 200 quid maybe or less, you can get away with a lot less for a beta weight they're absolutely tiny they're also good for getting into robots if you're into that if you want to start so the way I look at building robots is balance you'll find more money but you won't find more weight it's always just another speed control just another motor but you have a limit on how many grams something can weigh and you can't change that if you can, talk to me afterwards you've got to split what weight you have on your chassis the thing that everything else gets bolted into the armour that stops you getting beaten up some sort of drive motion system so you can actually drive around and something to hit the other guy with and if you focus on one of them then you lose out on the others so starting with a chassis, everything bolts to it every time you get hit it's going to go into the chassis so the chassis needs to be able to take that hit needs to be kind of rigid which will include you getting thrown up in the air a couple of metres and then dropping on your weakest edge so that's something to think about you can be a little cheeky and make the chassis and the armour the same thing but then if someone hits the armour hard enough your chassis gets bent which means wheels don't touch the ground so that's what my chassis looks like once you take away all the outside skin on my little robot down here at the front you've got the two big motors at the top that make it move and then the big motor in the middle makes the arm go up and down so armour is quite important because you're not going to dodge everybody you're always going to get hit the two popular ones are special steel the stuff they used to make digger buckets out of it's very tough but it's very heavy the other option is plastic to use chopping boards well, HDPE because it's so light you can make it really thick and it has this really weird tendency to tear rather than stick together so when a big weapon hits you it just tears a chunk out of your armour rather than tearing the armour chunk off of your robot which is useful because it means the rest of the armour is still there for the next hit there's always another hit you want to avoid vertical sides oops and you want to avoid sharp corners double loops because what happens is with spinning weapons they will catch these edges and then they will drag your robot and throw it around I don't know if you've watched the first episode of Robot Wars but you saw the little robots getting thrown out of the arena that was some sharp corners on flat sides so that's what my robot looks like so I've covered in the thick steel armour and I've got polycarbonate on top of the bottom it's not particularly strong but it is very light and it does look cool so motion, that's all about putting big motors in you need to be able to drive around so you can control the arena so you can put your opponent where he doesn't want to be and where you want him to be namely in front of your weapon you'll find a lot of people are quite bad at driving their robots and they constantly do bad things like driving into the wall instead of driving at the other guy or driving into the pit and that's because a lot of people don't practice enough the only time they actually drive the robot is when they're fighting it they don't take it home and have a play around in the garden or out in the street so you should totally do that these days a lot of people are using cordless drills for feather weights so you go down to home base you buy yourself a cheap 18 volt cordless drill take off all the plastic you've got a nice powerful motor you've got a nice gearbox you've got a nice big shaft it's great and then for speed controllers there's an Australian company that takes very cheap Chinese brushless motor controllers and turns them into brushed motor controllers by changing software it's the cheapest one out there there are others that are better and more expensive, heavier so there's a lot of options so that's what mine looks like so I've got one big motor at the back and then that drives one wheel and then I've got a belt that drives the front wheel so I've got four wheels I've only got four wheel drive but with only two motors works quite well until the belts come off and then it kind of sucks so weapons so if you have been watching or even the American Battle Bots which is on at the moment, which is awesome spinners are amazing they look kind of simple because they're just basically some metal bar or disc with a tooth and then they spin it really really really fast and if it hits you, it kills you so they're quite simple but there's a lot of nuance in it and it's quite hard to get right the other option is flippers so you use pneumatics which is something that's been very popular in the kind of the off television robot wars that's been happening it's probably the most effective weapon the way the UK arenas are built is we have a gutter around the outside of the arena so if you can throw your opponent into that gutter they've lost and it means you don't take damage, they don't take damage and you can win a fight in three seconds and people have done that unfortunately it makes for terrible TV which is why they've changed the arena to not have such a big gutter now the other option is to just be a ram bot lots of armour lots of big motors and just drive into the other guy at full speed 13 kilos running at about 20 miles an hour will hurt I'd show you my weapon but it's really awkward to show so I'll probably have it going in a second at the end of the talk so it's not very easy you get to keep having a go at it it's quite good as long as you build it all right it's very rare for your robot to get torn into complete shreds so you can iteratively tweak stuff and make it better and fix the thing that broke last time and most of all it's really good fun so for finding out about building stuff these are places to go so the fighting robots.co.uk pretty much all the guys from Robot Wars hang out there are live events so that stuff held at leisure centres and the like roughly every month and a half, two months so it's worth going along to them either as a look-see or just to watch robots kick the shit out of each other there's the American website spark.tools which is where a lot of the guys from BattleBots and the other homegrown events hang out you've got Robot Wars robowars.com is the Australian website the Australians have got some nice robots going on each of the iPod plus one is this American guy from MIT who does some nice robots it's worth looking at he also does some nice silly vehicles so I'm from Cambridge Makespace which is where I built most of my robots we've got some great kit and yeah find your local Hacker Space it's full of cool kit do we have any time for questions? there you go, a minute and a half I can't see nothing show my weapon it's a family show, family show so you have something called a little key which you can see so you need to be able to remove that to stop it from going out of control and hurting people toss about 30 kilos up in the air fantastic yep, excellent now we have to do the changeover a robot changeover before that's a first for me so we'll remove the robot from the stage and our next presentation involves a demo Bob Durham's going to get up and do something very special for us in just a moment and I know it involves two of my favorite scientists one of whom unified theories of time and gravity I'm sure you know who that is and another one who unified theories of electricity and magnetism does anyone let's just go for it who are those two gentlemen? Einstein and Maxwell fantastic I learned recently that Einstein started the work on time because he was trying to unify the timetables of various railroad stations in different time zones so when he got to thinking about relativity he had already thought about the relationship of time and distance across multiple time zones hopefully we'll learn a lot more about that stuff in the next few minutes once again if you've just come along they're desperate for volunteers at EMF camp particularly for speaker ops this evening and for cooking and doing dishes and they're offering food tokens for people who help out a lot of things have been done in this kind of temporary autonomous zone by us and I certainly appreciate that so maybe a warm round of applause for yourselves for setting up camp and putting it out in this tent well it's very very warm today so round of applause how are you doing? you all set? I'm going to introduce you to Bob and he's going to do some demos for you and enjoy yourselves good morning my name is Bob today I'm a maker primarily I used to be a professional programmer but don't do that anymore and now I go to make affairs with my mate Dave and we call ourselves we just like to make stuff you might have seen our table with chess sets that we've made and discovered but we got together we've known each other a long time but we got together because we built a heavyweight robot and it's about the size of that cabinet over there and we got flipped we got annihilated they're harder than you think and it did really cost us over £2,000 but great fun we got on the tally the tally competition was actually a quarter final you have to beat a couple of robots before they let you on so we didn't do too bad but we were tired anyway today I thought I'd talk about electromagnetism now it's very common to assume that everybody knows about electromagnetism particularly in an event like this but we find that people don't know well they know a little bit and so hopefully I'll enlighten some of you and those already know that's great those who don't, hopefully you'll leave knowing I'm going to start with a couple of classic demonstrations and then talk more about how they work can you hear me at the back can you hear me at the back brother plastic number plate magnets this table is level I can swing this plastic through these two magnets it's a stage it's not level, not me as you see it swung quite freely this is a bit of copper now they did say I did read somewhere that you shouldn't start a presentation by apologising so I won't apologise that you can't see it but take as an opportunity some of the demos more closely we're only up the path up there at the end and I'll have a table out after this for a little while this is copper and it's stopped so that's a classic demonstration of electromagnetism I'll come in and copper pipe plastic rule plug in this hand one handed I'm going to drop the plastic through the pipe there it goes brass bolt a conductor brass bolt talk amongst yourselves for just a couple of seconds I've got no slides to go wrong but obviously everything else to go wrong demos are hard right we usually find when doing demos you have to sacrifice a calculator before you get on stage and then everything works fine I'll tell you what I'll do I'll turn it into a thought experiment just think I've got a little magnet in my fingers I'm going to drop it through the pipe now and it comes out the bottom another classic easy demonstration of electromagnetism and I want to explain what's going on here I have a wire if I pass if I make a charge electric charge move along that wire which is called a current I'm always going to get something I'm always going to get a magnetic field produced that's the electromagnetism bit I always get a magnetic field which is if I call up the wire I can concentrate that magnetic field many times and it becomes very effective now the converse happens that if I pass if I can make a magnetic field change or in the presence of an electric charge I can make the charge move so suddenly I've got two things now I've got three things I've got an electric field magnetic field and movement so what's happening in this demonstration is that my electric charge which is on top of the metal the metal has electrons that are free to move about they're passing through these two magnets a large magnetic field which cause those charges to move and that's called NEDI current and because it's now a moving charge it generates its own magnetic field which opposes that of the magnets and if you come up afterwards I can show that feels quite sticky feels like it's going through honey or glue or something it's the same with the copper pipe when I drop a magnet through here the breaking of that field causes NEDI currents in the pipe which then oppose the passage of that magnet and which is why it runs so slowly as you saw earlier so that's the basics so what? well it turns out that this is incredibly useful I have here and apologies for those who can't see at the back oh damn I'm not going to do that this is a coil of wire held in the frame and around it goes this magnet so if I turn that coil so I've got the motion I've got my charge carrier in the wire what am I going to get out the back or rather it's in a magnetic field so I'm going to get I'm going to get movement of that charge it's a generator built on the same principles as this the NEDI currents so I can generate, so I can turn that with a windmill, I can turn it with a steam generator or my electric power station also does this just heats water making the steam and turn it now if if I'm going to go the other way if I put electricity in my moving electric charge, electric fields I've got then I've got charge I've got my magnetic field, what do I go out the back motion so if I put power in I get motion that's my electric motor all for all running from this basic principle of eddy currents this is normally I do this talk just with one or two people intimately here and they can see things like this and I can ask what's this I'll try it, what's this but you can't see it can you sir this is a little electric motor okay and we've seen how that worked in my very clear demonstration just now does anyone know what this is it's written on it this is a stepper motor so the coils here arranged not continuously but arranged such that the turning motion is quite discreet it turns a step at a time very useful for robotic control skid turning that sort of thing stepper motor made possible by modern electronics that can control the current going into each individual coil now here's a good one and this usually falls most people does anyone know what this is this, I'll stop doing that this is a brushless motor now I'm sure you've all seen a lot of these particularly you've got drones or ready-to-call aircraft because they're very small, very powerful how does this work compared to the other motor well in this one on both of these examples I've got my magnet round the outside and it's the coil of wire that is turning on this one I've got coils inside and it's the magnets that spin so now we don't have to have a brush to carry the current to the coils it's electromagnetic induction produces a turning force it's a very very efficient, very lightweight and that's the only difference between a brushless motor and a brushed motor as mentioned in the previous talk I think we use motors that we found on the internet for our robot and we used to say that there were nose wheel actuators from English electric lightnings but no one really believed us we didn't know what it would come from okay I'm getting to the interesting part soon everything in hand all this work was done by Faraday essentially in a workshop he trained as a book binder and he was employed by Davey in his workshop and discovered all this just shows how important making is and doing stuff in your shed all this practical stuff this is a Faraday torch sometimes called there's a magnet here which I'm bouncing up and down between two springs and two coils of wire this is designed so that the current that is produced, the electric charge stored in a capacitor and generates electricity that's how Faraday torch works and it's all built on the same principle of electromagnet induction here I have a bit of breadboard which a lot of you will be familiar with I have here a ferrite ring ferrite is just something that will concentrate my magnetic field and I've got a coil of wire a coil of wire quite efficiently makes a magnetic field I've also got on here an LED and a transistor a transistor is just a switch on my intimate demo I can show that this battery it's one and a half volt battery it's not powerful enough to light that LED there's not enough juice left in it however if I put into this circuit which is called a blocking oscillator it's a lovely little circuit to make no soldering involved it all pushes into this breadboard the light will then light the reason is that the battery has enough juice in it to turn that transistor on it only takes about 0.6 volts that current then creates a magnetic field around that coil so it stores energy in the magnetic field however the way things are when the magnetic field is created wants to create its own current and that's backwards against the current that's changing it that's Lenz's law or back EMF that's enough to turn that transistor off so I've got a magnetic field will collapse again generating a current now I've got a secondary winding here which takes that current and feeds it to the light which added to the limited power in the battery lights the light and then because there's no back EMF the transistor then turn on again and the whole cycle starts again this is called a blocking oscillator and it oscillates about 1000 Hz preparation I've learned a lot, preparation is the key this is another example and it's called a mini Tesla coil this is exactly the same thing except that my two coils on my ferrite ring ferrite rod and I've got one of my coils the pickup coil has many many more turns than the original coil this is effectively a transformer it'll transform the voltage I put into it into a higher voltage and this is demonstrated by the fact that here I'm not using LEDs I'm actually using neons or what we used to have as LEDs in the old days before LEDs were invented these are little tubes of gas that arc at about 90 volts and I'm running out from a 9 volt battery so you can see that just by using induction and changing the number of turns between those two coils of wire I can get at least 90 volts out of that and you see all those lights being lit what you can't see is that all the legs of these neons are in a kind of W shape and on this end there's nothing nothing connects to it how are those being lit well the answer is in the previous circuit it's an oscillator this one is oscillating at about 1 megahertz now that is a radio frequency and so essentially all those neons are acting as an antenna and the oscillating electric wave is coming out the end and disappearing off into space okay and we see that it's working you have to take it from me that that's not joined I can short it and like that last one the battery is a bit low alright yes it's not the exciting bit but let me this is an antenna an Uda Yagi antenna Uda was the student and Yagi was his supervisor but he gets his name on it so sometimes people call these Yagi antennas now I want to mention this because this is part of an electromagnetic system this antenna is tuned and it's tuned to two different frequencies determined by the length of these these arms antenna it's got when fully assembled it's got some more radial arms that are two meters and it's for satellite communication basically 70 centimeters up two meters down so you can communicate with satellites using this all based on that principle of electromagnetism I didn't get to how many seconds well I think we should probably cut it off there because the next speakers need to come in but Bob does have a demo table somewhere in the camp where is that here no no no it's just on the path so why don't you invite people to come and see your demo which is on which path it's up near the accessible camping just on the corner there so it's up the main one of these paved paths up here fantastic so just keep an eye out for the demo and go and see Bob again and we'll talk about that one round of applause thanks Bob you're too kind too generous I have to admit that is the most meta presentation I think I've ever seen about EMF at EMF so that was kind of fantastic and apologies to the three lightning talk speakers who didn't get a chance to speak this year but again meet them outside and go and have demos inside the little camps that's part of what EMF is about is just doing it anywhere sit down and have a conversation and learn some stuff from each other and thank you again for coming and seeing all the lightning talk speakers I've had a difficult time because I usually work in circus and burlesque and cabaret keeping it clean so particularly with the Faraday torch you know I found that that was a notable sort of moment for me and so thanks for coming if you did