Aaaand, we’re sold out of ‘In-Person Donation’ tickets for this weekends Raspberry Jam!

We’ve got 24 on the docket at the minute and if anyone wants to join, a small donation will go a long way to keep this volunteer run, community driven, self-funded operation of ours going.

Of course, if you want to be guaranteed free tickets at this or any of our future events, Membership starts at just £15/month for students and £25/month for non-students.

These memberships pay exclusively for rent, heating, lighting, power and network infrastructure and are essential to Farset’s continued success. There are no salaries…

Also, we’re eagerly awaiting delivery of our LEDBorgs, which we will be using this weekend to show how you can make your own internet-controlled mood-light by way of an introduction to GPIO on the Raspberry Pi.

If any organisations or companies would be interested in sponsoring future Raspberry Jam’s or any of Farset Labs’ other events, or joining as a Corporate Member, get in touch with us, and while you’re thinking about it, check out the awesome press we’ve got so far in our short life!

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The date (and name) is set on the first All Ireland Maker Camp.

With hackers and makers from all over Ireland getting in buses and trundling off into the isolated Irish countryside for a weekend of geeking out, this promises to be a weekend not to be missed!

We’ll be representing the riotous north, and we’ll be trying to sort out transport, and since details are still very very fuzzy, check in on the Facebook event where we’ll be keeping up to date.

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It’s over, and it’s a new world record. Farset Labs has contributed to the Worlds Largest Game Jam, and everyone involved should be very proud of what they’ve accomplished in just 48 hours.

With 30 registered Jammers, 11 registered games (6 made it to submission, but that’s ok!), no-one can say that Northern Ireland doesn’t have the making of a solid creative industries foundation.

With people coming from all walks of life, experience, platforms, and passions, self-organized teams came together to work on what are major accomplishments, with a tight timescale and a vague theme (a heartbeat).

The games themselves ranged from platformers where your heart-rate is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the level, to location based assassination, built purely around the sound of a heartbeat (Murmur In The Park), or the brilliant game that had the theme slightly shoe-horned in, but a kinda 4-player bastardisation of QWOP (CardiRow) for rowers where two players team up to drive the two oars of a boat, against another two player in their own boat, where cooperation, communication, and coordination is required to beat the other team without blowing your heart out! There was... ...

Here’s another first for the local tech community: Farset Labs is proud to announce becoming Belfast’s first and only official site for Global Game Jam, set this year for 25-27 January. This is the biggest event of its kind in the world and brings some big name sponsors like Microsoft, Facebook and GitHub. Farset will be open for the full 48-hour period, as each participant team competes to build a game in a weekend. The event is being hosted in conjunction with the University of Ulster Office of Innovation, who will be providing refreshments so entry will be free. Belfast’s hackerspace is calling out to all kinds of creative and technical people to take part, as game development brings together the likes of writers, artists, coders, character designers, production managers and many more roles.

Sorry!

Happy New Year!

And to kick things off, an apology; our provisionally scheduled Raspberry Jam on the 12th has been postponed until after the exam season as it’s been difficult to get people able to help out at the event. Raspberry Jam will return February

GoL: Thur 17th Jan

Currently proposed (but not scheduled) topics include:

• [Update] Brendan Drain from Brain and Nerd, who had recent success with Predestination, will be talking about how he got started in Games Development (and what to avoid!)
• [Update] Niall Bole, Engineer, Gamer, Organiser, and Placement student at NACCO will be talking about ‘Using Fablabs for Fun and Profit’
• Colin Kelsey, from QUB’s Centre for Plasma Physics, with what he describes as “either functional plasma physics or a big surprise”
• Rebecca Lutton, a mechanical engineer of Bright Clubfame with ‘Observational Humerology – The curse of innuendo’
• Andrew Bolster on getting your Raspberry Pi to talk to the real world using the Gertboard
• Dylan Wylie, another Physicist, who is ambiguously talking about ‘Quantum Theory, Maybe‘

As with all our lighting... ...