This weekend¹ During the late August bank holiday weekend we headed to “the heart of the Pennines” for Wuthering Bytes a technology festival in Hebden Bridge. We were there for three days of the event:

• Festival Day
• OSHCAMP
• OSHCAMP workshops

Hebden Bridge is a lovely little town, and the venue was great with a onsite bar/cafe and decent AV setup. Moreover it’s great to have a technology event not in London or one of the other big cities for once.

Festival Day

The first day was full of talks all related to “technology”, but the range of talks was very broad, form a project to get your own chips FAB’d in silicon, to technology in Music and poetry.

One stand out talk, mostly because it was much more interesting than the title would lead you to think was on the History and future of the the UK’s telephone exchange buildings. I would recommend checking out Lisa Kinch’s work, and the twitter feed for a stream of Telephone exchange building pictures. Whilst many exchanges were cut and paste copies, some were very interesting architecturally and it would be shame if we lost nay more of these buildings because of the listing processes distaste for industrial buildings.

**Exhibition announcement**

I am really excited to exhibit some of my work to date at BT's London Headquarters.

The exhibition is open to the public 5-7pm on Thursday the 21 September.

Please RSVP via https://t.co/gElnaGycZL if you would like to join as spaces are limited. pic.twitter.com/oNngxTQHuu

— The Telephone Exchange Building (1940-1981) (@tele_exchange) August 23, 2023

There is still a chance to see this exhibit (depending on when your reading this) at 5-7pm on Thursday the 21 September.

OSHCAMP

The second day with the first part of OSHCAMP leveled up the geekery with focus on hardware instead of technology in general. Talks ranged from why you should consider four layer PCBs instead of two for your next board project, to custom guitars with 3D printed bodies.

We also get introduced to this years conference Badge by Omer and Oomlout.

The laser cut additions were a great idea, and it was really cool to see what everyone built and used them for.

OSHCAMP - Workshops

The final day was workshops, these included learning MicroPython, building your own keyboard (which I am sad I missed), and learning how to SMD solder by building up the conference badge. This was teh first time I had used a solder paste stencil and through I would need to buy some extra equipment did reduce the fear factor of trying this out myself some day.