Maine Hackers
I found the Maine Hackers by luck rather than design. Sitting at the Maine Grind, a coffee shop in Ellsworth, where I like to work sometimes, I glanced at the computer screen of the guy next to me. It looked like a Github page.
After scratching my head a few times, and hauling out the inner extrovert that I use for such purposes, I apologized for my nosiness, and asked him was it indeed Github? It was, and my recognizing it told him that I was more-or-less as geeky as he.
Turns out he attends, from time to time, meetings of the Maine Hackers club. We exchanged email addresses and he sent me a link to the club's home page and invited me to drop by.
So I did, and found the place filled with my kind of people. Or one of my kinds, anyway.
It's certainly a cross-generational group. At 70, I may be the oldest person there, but if so, not by much. The youngest, so far, is a sophomore in high school. And people are spread out more-or-less evenly between there and about forty, with two of us outliers pushing the upper reaches of agerdom.
The group is targeted toward technical enthusiasts in central and northern Maine. We welcome any and all technical interests whether you're into software, hardware, networking, or mobile app development.
I'd say, lots of enthusiasm. And lots of different technical interests.
The group meets at the Maine Discovery Museum, a really nice science museum for kids. Their feature attraction (as far as I am concerned) is a nice (meaning not the very lowest end) 3D printer. So there are a number of people doing 3D printing projects.
A couple of guys fly drones. One of them has built a drone out of 3D printed parts.
Arduinos seem to be a hot item of interest, partly because arduinos power the drones, and partly for other reasons.
A couple of guys are working on an "open vehicle tracking system." It's intended for use by cities and towns to track, for example, where their snow plows are, or where the busses are.
It includes a device that uses GPS for positioning and wifi or cellular for communications and that can be attached to a vehicle. It also includes a software app that plots current locations on Google maps.
They're not the only hackers club in Maine--there seems to be one in Portland, too.
And who knows, I might be able to create one around here.
After scratching my head a few times, and hauling out the inner extrovert that I use for such purposes, I apologized for my nosiness, and asked him was it indeed Github? It was, and my recognizing it told him that I was more-or-less as geeky as he.
Turns out he attends, from time to time, meetings of the Maine Hackers club. We exchanged email addresses and he sent me a link to the club's home page and invited me to drop by.
So I did, and found the place filled with my kind of people. Or one of my kinds, anyway.
The goal of this group is to establish a cross generational technical community in our region of Maine.
It's certainly a cross-generational group. At 70, I may be the oldest person there, but if so, not by much. The youngest, so far, is a sophomore in high school. And people are spread out more-or-less evenly between there and about forty, with two of us outliers pushing the upper reaches of agerdom.
The group is targeted toward technical enthusiasts in central and northern Maine. We welcome any and all technical interests whether you're into software, hardware, networking, or mobile app development.
I'd say, lots of enthusiasm. And lots of different technical interests.
The group meets at the Maine Discovery Museum, a really nice science museum for kids. Their feature attraction (as far as I am concerned) is a nice (meaning not the very lowest end) 3D printer. So there are a number of people doing 3D printing projects.
A couple of guys fly drones. One of them has built a drone out of 3D printed parts.
Arduinos seem to be a hot item of interest, partly because arduinos power the drones, and partly for other reasons.
A couple of guys are working on an "open vehicle tracking system." It's intended for use by cities and towns to track, for example, where their snow plows are, or where the busses are.
It includes a device that uses GPS for positioning and wifi or cellular for communications and that can be attached to a vehicle. It also includes a software app that plots current locations on Google maps.
They're not the only hackers club in Maine--there seems to be one in Portland, too.
And who knows, I might be able to create one around here.
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