Despite a head buzzing with ideas for things to do with the interesting combination of Raspberry Pi and Freescale KL25z, I had no time to play with them this evening. I had a meeting to go to!

I mentioned in my discussion of the Ipswich technology scene that I had discovered a group of people trying to get a local “Hackspace” off the ground. I joined their facebook group and it reminded me that there was a meeting this evening at local pub and popular techie meeting place The Brewery Tap. The meeting was supposed to start at 8pm and I arrived ten minutes or so early, so I took the opportunity to get myself a pint.

Looking around I could not see anyone who looked much like the profile pictures in the facebook group (not that these always have much relationship to reality!), so I asked one of the bar staff if she knew of the meeting. She did not recognize my haphazard description, but told me that there were “some sort of computer group” in the upstairs meeting room. I wandered up the stairs and found it packed, but at least I did recognize a couple of faces from other tech meetups. I found myself a corner and enjoyed an interesting presentation from Sam J Watkins about intellectual property, patents, copyright, trademarks and design registration. Nobody mentioned it, but I pretty soon got the idea that I had stumbled on a meeting of the Ipswich Game Developer Network. It looks like the other presentations were also interesting, and I would have liked to stay, but I still wanted to meet the Ipswich Hackspace people, so I made my apologies and left.

Downstairs I eventually found three people who bore some resemblance to the facebook pictures sitting at a table and asked if I could join them. What followed was a fascinating and wide ranging discussion covering not just the admin of finding a suitable location, marketing the idea, arranging finances, security, equipment and so on but also all sorts of maker ideas. We talked about bolts vs latches for securing boxes, drilling, routing and milling precise slots, systems for storing and finding small components, launching eggs, tomatoes, beets and pumpkins using various odd devices and generally let our imaginations ramble. I blithered on a bit about my bat detector project too.

Eventually I had to leave to pick up my daughter from an orchestra practice.

All in all a busy but very interesting evening. Boyfriend Girlfriend Affair I really hope both the game developers and hackspace groups flourish and try the www.casinodames.com games. We need more of this stuff!