Everykey was on tour in Hungary this summer. Budapest is awesome, they still have actual electronic stores that have an actual inventory of parts that are actually useful:

This is Lomex (walking distance from Nyugati Station). The people from the Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge were kind enough to provide me with a list of stores, which I will share in case you ever have the pleasure to be in Budapest and need some surface mount devices:

• Lomex 1134 Budapest, Lehel utca 17. 
  
•  HR Elektronika 1074 Budapest, Vörösmarty utca 5. (has no English,
•    homepage open on Monday to Friday, 9.00-17.00)
•  – Mikronika 1111 Budapest, Budafoki út 10/B. (has no official homepage, open on Monday to Friday, 10.00-16.00, maybe till 17.00)

Also, the folks at the H.A.C.K. were kind enough to allow me to hold a small introductory workshop. It’s a really cool place, well worth visiting if you are ever in the area.

Short term notice: We’ll have a short talk about the Everykey at the Minikonferenz located at the Startplatz, Mediapark, Cologne, on March 7, 2013. Since we’re hackers (and painters, sort of), we decided to tell some stories. You have been warned. Unlike our other presentations, we might not start it with pictures of cats and babies, you’ll see.

The place will most likely be quite crowded with interesting people and ideas all around – sounds like it’s going to be fun. Have a look at their site – participation is free!

We’re in the middle of a Workshop at the “Frühjahrsfachgespräch” of the German Unix User Group. Here are the slides… …

Everykey goes International!

We’re currently planing to hold an SMD Soldering workshop during which you will build your own Everykey in The Netherlands at the hack42 in Arnhem. Apart from assembling an Everykey, we’ll discuss the entire design so you’ll learn what all the parts is good for and will provide a quick introduction to programming the device with our SDK . You can read a description of a previous workshop here in case you are interested and would like to learn more. We’ll be able to stick around all day, so we can go into more details than normally and hack a bit more.

If you are interested: the workshop will take place at the beginning of next year and we are currently trying to find a suitable date, you can help by filling out preferences:

http://doodle.com/zpupmndagvnmigxu?

Participation in the workshop will be around €35 (we’ll split our travel expenses among all the participants + €25 for parts and materials)

The workshop will be help in English (though we can answer questions in German and pretend Dutch!)

More info.

So we’ve been busy these last couple of days. Apart from our new toy (more on our progress with our CNC router soon!) we’ve hosted two workshops last weekend, totaling 16 Everykeys built. First workshop was on Saturday at the Elisabeth-von-Thüringen-Gymnasium in Cologne. It was incredibly fun to work together with a group of highly motivated young adults and we’re very anxious to find out what sort of things they’ll be building with the keys….

The second workshop was a public workshop at the Dingfabrik in Cologne:

unfortunately in a way, there was such high demand for the workshop that we couldn’t fit everybody in. More people ended up showing that had registered and it was quite a tight fit with 10 participants. Because of the waiting list, we’ll definitely be holding more workshops, including not just  “solder your own” events, but also some more in depth programming workshops in which we’ll delve deeper into embedded programming. Send us a quick mail (info@everykey.de) in case you’d like to be informed about future workshops, know of a good venue within a reasonable distance from Cologne or would like a “private” session at your school or company or just want to chat.

Thanks very much to all the great participants and the feedback you’ve provided!