Big Trak

After a typical festival showers experience we wander up to visit Footleg’s residence up at the Cambridge Makerspace Village. I’ve arranged to charge our devices and he graciously provides juice and coffee. I leave my laptop and Jacob’s iPad charging. Jacob heads off for the first of many rounds of Point Blank – a laser tag game among the trees. I head off to a talks about LIDAR scanning, and low-energy wireless networks which will run off a small battery for years.

In the afternoon Jacob and I attend a workshop to build a small digital synthesiser around an AVR microcontroller. Jacob does much of the soldering, and after assembling around forty components, we’re the first group to finish, and our creation works first time.

In the retro-games arcade, a sustained effort with Jacob gets us in the high-score table for Arkanoid. Impressive, given the likely competition.

Later in the day, folks start leaving for home. I spot a fellow using his phone-controlled 12:1 scale Big Trak (a robotic toy vehicle introduced in 1979), to transport his camping equipment back to the car park.