On these pages we bring you plenty of reports from events, most of which are from the hacker or hardware communities. These can be great fun to attend, but they’re not the only game in town when looking at things adjacent to our community. At what you might describe as the consumer end of the market there are the Maker Faires, which bring a much more commercial approach to a tech event. While so many of us are in Germany for Chaos Communication Camp there’s a maker faire ideally placed to drop in on the way back. We took the trip to Hannover, a large and rather pleasant city just off the Berlin to Amsterdam motorway roughly central to the top half of the country. It’s got one of the German emissions zones so without the green tax sticker in the car we took a park-and-ride on one of their clean and efficient trams to alight a short walk from the congress centre.
Plenty To See, And It’s Not All For Kids
After the formalities of buying a ticket, we were straight in to the halls. It was a big event so we’ll pass on trying to list everything, instead it’s probably better to take a look at the flavour of a typical maker faire, and assess how this one measures up. It’s something you may have noticed over the years that here at Hackaday we’ve spent more time at camps and conferences than these events, and often with good reason as they tend to veer towards vendors and stuff for kids. There are only so many educational robot kits that we can cover, and after a while it’s clear that perhaps these are not the events for us. So when my friends suggested dropping in to this one I was initially up for it as a day out, but not necessarily as a hot prospect for these pages. I was thus pleasantly surprised to see that the organisers in Hannover had pulled off the impossible, because alongside all the stuff for kids was a healthy dose of grown-up tech. My day started to look interesting.
First up was a walk round the event, from which it’s best to try to give you a flavour rather than individually list everything. The whole thing was spread across several halls and through the grounds of the centre, with what I would class as the main hall being the first one beyond the entrance. In here were many of the traditional maker faire exhibitors, but it was in the further halls where for me the action lay. We hung out for a while with a bunch of friends from Makerspace Minden and enjoyed their supreme-quality German cake, before looking further.
Stand-outs for me were the people with an impressive array of working teleprinters, a stand populated entirely with exactly my kind of aged test equipment (I never did get exactly who they were, my German is nonexistent), and outside in the open air a group of German blacksmiths who had set up their forge. This wasn’t the only opportunity for me to wallow in the past though, because they also had an entire hall set aside for robotic combat. It’s rare for me to wish for SMIDSY again, but it’s good to see such creativity on show.
You Can’t Go To Germany Without Visiting A Beer garden
So that was Hannover Maker Faire, and I hope the pictures tell the story better than the words. It was hotter than hades and the catering and drinks prices were scandalous, but the quality of the sausages at least lived up to their price. Meanwhile the event was unexpectedly good for a maker faire, and definitely worth going to. The day wasn’t over though, because the lads form Makerspace Minden had further plans. Wülfeler Biergarten is a traditional German beer garden somewhere on the southern side of the city, and we repaired to its comforting embrace with them to wash away the day with the local Gilde beer and mountains of some of the best pork ribs I have ever tasted. Thhe perfect end to what turned out to be a pretty good day.
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