DON-8r in Denmark (and Being Saved By Hackers)

In mid May I received an email from Danish design consultancy, Innovation Lab, inviting me to exhibit DON-8r at an event they were organising called NEXT. The idea behind the exhibition, I was told, was that they wanted to bring to together emerging technologies and innovative designers for an event where people can not only play with some products but also meet the makers to discover the inspiration behind their ideas. This event was under the overall brolly of the annual festival in Aarhus which this year had the quite brilliant title of Beautiful Mistakes. It sounded like fun so I thought, why the hell not!?

A few months and emails later, flights and accommodation were booked by Innovation Lab and I managed to wrangle a sneaky week’s holiday from work (despite having worked there for less than a month – thanks guys!). The catch was though that the week before flying, I discovered that DON-8r did not work. I didn’t know why and it quickly emerged that the main reason for it not working was that hacking electronic components together and hoping for the best will often result in things eventually breaking. Regardless, I made a few ‘educated’ guesses, ordered in some new components tinkered about with a few possible issues I assumed could be the cause however this began chewing into the time I was supposed to be exhibiting. At least I was showing off a live demo of how things can so easily all go wrong when it comes to technology!

Salvation came however in the form of Aarhus’s resident team of techno nerds & hackers (and fellow exhibitors at NEXT) – Open Space Aarhus. I can’t express enough how helpful they have been, primarily because they know what they are doing! I was well and truly schooled by them. It went a bit like this: “you don’t have ANY bypass capacitors!? What, you have no idea what they are!? How on earth do you expect to control the surges from the microcontroller? And what’s THAT? Why are you running 6V into the microcontrollers when they only have a maximum capacity of around 5.5V? Did you not read the data-sheet – they will get fried in no time! Where is your voltage regulation…!??”

…and so on.

Needless to say, DON-8r is now working better then it ever. It’s still not hugely energy efficient but as long as it can afford to pay for its own batteries I can live with that for now until I befriend some electronics wizards back in the UK. With that in mind I intend to get a membership at London’s Hackspace as soon as I can. If those guys are any where near as geekishly brilliant as their Aarhus counterparts then I will love it.

Anyway, thanks to DON-8r actually working it was featured on national Danish TV on a popular talk show called Aftenshowet (struck me as equivalent to BBC’s One Show). So it been broadcast to an audience of a few million which is amazing! Oh, and the host managed to break DON-8r’s flag live on air – it was covered up successfully though!

Also had a chance to have a head to head charity-off with a worker from the Danish charity I was supporting, Folkekirkens Nødhjælp (don’t ask me how to pronounce it, it was a challenge). This was filmed and edited however the clip is in Danish so to make sense, DON-8r lost to the human by around 100 Kroner (around £12) but this was primarily because someone gave the guy a 100 Kroner note because they knew him. Interesting for me though, can we develop relationships with robots that could promote aid in the same way? Anyway here is that clip – particularly enjoyable if you want to see me sitting awkwardly while people speak Danish around me.

More on the other exhibitors and NEXT conference to follow.