I'm attending Euskal Encounter 2007 (July 20-23rd this year). It's a
pretty good place to meet tons of people of all interests - they have
conferences, scene contests, random contests, there's a guy that brings
in a few mainframes every year and shows them off, there are some really
cool hardware mods, gaming competitions, and a lot of bandwidth.

I'm setting up a robotics lab this year - some 15 or so basic kits,
including a generic control board with a PIC18F2520, H-bridge drivers
for the drive motors, bootloader and serial interface, power regulation,
and a whole bunch of I/O, plus a prototyping area. If it all works out,
we'll get people to build their own robots and we'll host a
mini-competition, to see what others can come up with. All the software,
including bootloader and load application, basic framework for the PIC,
schematics and PCBs, etc will be free and open-source (well, except
Microchip's C18, which we're using because I don't expect people to be
able to learn PIC18 ASM in a day).

I've also been "hired" by the organizers (read: they asked for my help)
to build a control system for a certain event that they might host. Will
be PIC-based too, of course.

If anyone happens to be near around that time, they might want to drop
by and have a look :)
-- 
Hector Martin (hector@marcansoft.com)
Public Key: http://www.marcansoft.com/marcan.asc

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