Hardware & Making

Making Experts Makers and Makers Experts

Saal Dijkstra
Over the past year, we have been developing open source wheelchair add-ons through user research, ideation, design, prototyping and testing. We present the outcome and insights from the process.
The project started one year ago with a wheelchair hackathon at MakerFaire. Driven by ideas of the users, we intensively worked on three topics: transport and storage, driving in the snow and lighting. In particular, following criteria played a central role: feasibility, time spent on DIY production, costs, aesthetics and impact on wheelchair users. From numerous ideas and prototypes, two products have gained resonance amongst users - OPEN LIGHTS, a wheelchair lighting feature and OPEN TRAILER, a wheelchair trailer. The project is completely open source and can be reproduced by users themselves with DIY rapid prototyping technologies. The designs and files can be downloaded for free under Creative Commons License. It is important to us that the products can be easily and inexpensively replicated so that as many wheelchair users can benefit from them.

Additional information

Type lecture
Language English

More sessions

12/27/17
Hardware & Making
Paul Emmerich
Saal Borg
Network cards are often seen as black boxes: you put data in a socket on one side and packets come out at the other end - or the other way around. Let's have a deeper look at how a network card actually works at the lower levels by writing a simple user space driver from scratch for a 10 Gbit/s NIC.
12/27/17
Hardware & Making
Saal Borg
Did you ever want to run your own IoT cloud on your IoT devices? Or did you ever wonder what data your vacuum cleaning robot is transmitting to the vendor? Why a vacuum cleaning robot needs tcpdump? Nowadays IoT devices are getting more and more powerful and contain a lot of sensors. As most devices are connected directly to the vendor and transmit all data encrypted to the cloud, this may result in privacy issues. An IoT device with no internet connection lacks numerous features or is even ...
12/27/17
Hardware & Making
Jean Rintoul
Saal Clarke
An open source biomedical imaging project using electrical impedance tomography. Imagine a world where medical imaging is cheap and accessible for everyone! We'll discuss this current project, how it works, and future directions in medical physics.
12/27/17
Hardware & Making
Saal Borg
The Apollo Guidance Computer ("AGC") was used onboard the Apollo spacecraft to support the Apollo moon landings between 1969 and 1972. This talk explains "everything about the AGC", including its quirky but clever hardware design, its revolutionary OS, and how its software allowed humans to reach and explore the moon.
12/28/17
Hardware & Making
Katja Bach
Saal Dijkstra
„5.-Klässlerinnen, die über die Millisekunden für einen delay()-Aufruf diskutieren! Gibt es nicht? Doch, gibt es!“ Ein Modellprojekt mit sieben Schulen in Aachen hat diese Frage untersucht – wir haben die Schülerinnen und Schüler begleitet und würden gerne darüber berichten, denn wir wissen jetzt: Programmieren macht ihnen Spaß!
12/28/17
Hardware & Making
MathiasL
Saal Clarke
In this talk I describe the basic makeup of FPGAs and how I reverse engineered the Xilinx 7 Series and Lattice iCE40 Series together with the implications.
12/28/17
Hardware & Making
Saal Clarke
The Blinkenrocket is a DIY SMD Soldering Kit that was designed to teach different manufacturing and soldering skills. A lot of work on both Hardware and Software was done in CCC erfas namely shackspace, chaosdorf and metalab. The kit is used in workshops since 1.5 years at the chaos macht schule events and is very successful in its purpose. Creating this project was plenty of work and there is so much to show and tell around it, it will blow your mind.