I went to Dorkbot DC yesterday. Goodness, there were some great presentations. Before I gush, here's a description of the group for those of you who may be unfamiliar with them:

Dorkbot DC is a monthly meeting of artists (sound/image/movement/etc.), designers, engineers, students and others in the DC area who are interested in electronic art (in the broadest sense of the term.)

Basically, people have goofy ideas, mock some stuff up, and come in and show it. Some projects are great, some less so. I've seen a guy presenting on how to build a megawatt laser at home for under $1000, someone else who made a USB voodoo doll that reacts differently depending on where you needle it, a guy who made techno out of the human genome, and another guy whose art is making quilts out of circuit boards. Some of it has been incredible, some hilarious, and some completely confusing.

Yesterday's was pretty much 100% excellent.

Gareth Branwyn started us off with a report from the recent Maker Faire Austin. He blogs at Street Tech and is a contributing editor at Make. Neat guy. Anyway, it sounds like the event was a huge success, with something like 20,000 attendees. Gareth pretty much just excitely narrated slides of photos he was had taken, his main points being "ah-ha" moments about the maker community. One of those moments occurred while eating a sandwich in the event's main arena area. He was watching as a crew of circuit benders skronked away while visitors speaking with makers at their project displays dodged tshirts being fired at them every now and then by a 20 foot tall robot. This was told as if from the perspective of an excited kid. It really made me wish I had been there. His best comment about the faire went something like "it's like Burning Man, but without the icky hippy nudity." Laughing Squid has an excellent set of photos here.

Next up was Philip Kohn. I had seen him doing some sort of computer vision/camera tracking project nearly a year ago. This time around, he had built a rough-around-the-edges speech to photo matching project. The idea (I think) was to have photos flashing on the screen based on what he was talking about. Basically, he ran some speech recognition perl scripts (sorry that I can't remember which) that tried to match detected words to images from a pack of 10,000 he'd grabbed from Google Cache. In practice, it meant that while he was giving his presentation, some really NSFW images would pop up while he was talking about the difficulty of getting a computer to understand speech. The audience was falling apart laughing throughout the presentation. Philip was clearly having a good time up there.

Lastly, Mark Adams got up and spoke to us about RepRap. It was fascinating. RepRap stands for "replicating rapid-prototyper." It's a 3d printer. Anyway, the idea of the project is that it's cheap to build (around $500 for the parts) and fully-dependent on community. All of the parts save for the special plastic joints that hold it together are available relatively inexpensively. The idea is that someone receives a set of the plastic joints to build one. They do, and the first thing they do is make two copies of each joint, one set for themselves as spare parts, and one set to mail off to the next person who wants to build one. Therefore, the RepRap community expands exponentially, etc etc. There are some interesting politics that grow out of a machine that makes itself, leading to the elimination of wealth, and we'll see, but this is certainly cool. I think Echoditto needs one. Adams says that the community has some amazingly nice and helpful folks and that the documentation is excellent.

If you're a nerd or just generally into goofy electronic stuff, I really, really, really recommend making it out to the next meetup. It's going to be in January, and it'll be a joint Make DC and Dorkbot DC event. They're going to be doing the LED cube project. If you have your own soldering iron, bring it, but they say that they'll have all the gear available for people to use who don't own their own. The idea is that anyone should be able to do it. I hope to see you there!