Forem: Guergana Tzatchkova

Working on the Open Data Editor at the Open Knowledge Foundation

Guergana Tzatchkova — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 22:58:03 +0000

I've been terrible at keeping this blog alive. Today, after 4 long years 😓 I finally found some time to write about a project I worked on last year (2024) with the fantastic team at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

In April 2024, I was hired to polish the front-end of the Open Data Editor, an open source tool for non-technical data practitioners to explore and detect errors in tables. This app serves mostly as an easier-to-use alternative to Open Refine focused on data cleaning and validation for tabular data (with a lot less features, the tradeoff being a much flatter learning curve and more pleasing-to-the-eye interface).

My responsibility in this project was to work closely with UX to adapt the designs of an already existing prototype. We were using Figma for the UX, ReactJS, Zustand for the store, Python for the backend in an Electron wrapper since this is a multi platform desktop app.

We had a pool of very talented people in our small team, comprised mostly by people from the Global South. You can read about our lovely team here. I am super happy with the result, from design and UX to programming and project management. I think we did a great job and I would have loved to stay working in this team had the project not come to an end.

The only thing I regret was not sending in a better picture. I had just bought a phone and sent the first picture I found in my gallery, a selfie I made the day before, so now I will be forever on the internet with this picture. But what's important is the project. 😩

You can download the Open Data Editor for Linux, Mac and Windows here. If you find a bug, you can also open issues on the github repo, since it's -of course my horse-, Free and Open Source. Isn't that super awesome?

That's it for this post. Now I'll plunge again into the darkness for another 4 years. Until the next post. 👋

Writing Free and Open Source Software at Wikimedia Germany

Guergana Tzatchkova — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 09:05:48 +0000

It's been hectic times and I hadn't had much time to write. But here are some 2020/2021 updates:

Since June 2020 I have been working for Wikimedia Deutschland as a Fullstack Developer for the Wikidata / Wikibase team at first, and now at the Wikidata team after the team split It has been a crazy rollercoaster of learning. I had been wanting to become a Fullstack developer for a while and this has been a great opportunity to expand my knowledge on more backendy things (will see you later down the road beloved microservices), but also I've learned crazy lots about Open Source Software (everything we do is open source, even our sprint boards!), about Creative Commons Licensing, about the inner workings of Wikipedia and its community, about the nuances of working in non-profits and a whole lot about democracy (the good, the bad and the ugly).

We usually divide the work in feature development and maintenance. I have been mostly contributing in the development of features, some examples:

Simple Query Bilder. A visual interface that helps users make queries to Wikidata without the need to learn SPARQL.
The Wikidata Mismatch Finder. A tool to review mismatches between Wikidata and External Databases.
Wikit. A design system / component library for Wikibase.
Wikibase Reconcile Edit. An Api to reconciliate items from an external database to a Wikibase instance for Open!Next an Open Hardware project funded by the EU.

More features coming up. You can find me on Github , Gerrit and Phabricator.

Support open source!

Acoustic Atlas @ Web Audio Conference

Guergana Tzatchkova — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 22:33:38 +0000

Last year I participated in the Web Audio Conference with Cobi van Tonder presenting a website called Acoustic Atlas. This project allows the visitor to virtually experience the acoustics of natural and cultural world heritage sites. Please make sure you have access to microphone and or headphones when exploring it.

You can read more about Acoustic Atlas here.

You can also find the paper abstract here (PDF).

Web Audio Berlin Meetup

Guergana Tzatchkova — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 10:55:56 +0000

For almost a year now I am co-organizing the Web Audio Meetup in Berlin with Attila Haraszti.

What is Web Audio?

Web Audio is a Javascript Api for the browser to develop sound-related applications / websites.

There are some libraries that abstract some parts of the Web Audio API and can be easier for beginners. areknawo has listed them in this article:

9 libraries to kickstart your Web Audio stuff

Arek Nawo ・ Feb 13 '19

#javascript #webdev #libraries #webapi

According to MDN Web docs:

The Web Audio API provides a powerful and versatile system for controlling audio on the Web, allowing developers to choose audio sources, add effects to audio, create audio visualizations, apply spatial effects (such as panning) and much more.

If you have been listening to sound projects on the browser that involve more than playing back files, most likely you've been using the Web Audio API.

Why a meetup

Having audio on the browser allows novel ways in which audio applications can be concieved due to the participatory and wide-spread nature of the Internet. Our intention by organizing this meetup is to offer a place where artists / developers can show the product of their experimentation with the API and get inspired.

We are always looking for presenters

If you are in Berlin and have an idea for a talk please write to us. You can present works in progress, your school projects, a fancy library. We are open to talks from both technical and creative perspectives. If you still don't have a project come to our meetup and get inspired. The Web is your Canvas!!!

Past editions

We have had very interesting talks this year so far:

Web Audio Meetup #10 - Visionary Noises

👁 Rafael da Silva: A Gift of Sound and Vision

This talk is a curious journey through signal processing on browser. Image and sound are arrays so let's invert things and hear a color! If a guitar pedal affects wave's characteristics how an image will look like if it passes through an overdrive pedal? Was David Bowie predicting how awesome would our APIs be in 1977 when "Low" was released?

https://twitter.com/rafael_sps
Article - A Gift of Sound and Vision

✅Christoph Guttandin: Using the Latest Features of the Web Audio API in Every Browser

About 4 years ago Christoph started a little project to polyfill some parts of the Web Audio API he needed the most. Nowadays standardized-audio-context brings an almost feature complete implementation of the latest spec to every major browser. It is covered by 1364 tests and uses 385 more tests to monitor the API surface of all supported browsers.

This talk is about the latest API changes and how they can be used today. But it will also cover how things are implemented behind the scenes and will explain why some fairly new concepts can't be implemented in a every browser without trade-offs. This talk will also hightlight some things which can only be achieved by using a polyfill like testing Web Audio code outside the browser or having reliable type definitions.

standardized-audio-context @ github
Chris Guttandin Website

🙌 Spencer Rudnick: Synth Kitchen

Web Audio provides a nice API for dynamically defining audio graphs, with AudioNodes acting as useful building blocks.

Synth Kitchen is a project with the goal of using internet software to make modular synthesis cheap and accessible. With plans to add support for external MIDI, the web app will eventually be able to integrate with a DAW or act as a standalone instrument.

synth.kitchen @ github
synth.kitchen/
youtube demo

Web Audio Meetup #9 - Distributed Sounds

🙌 Carlo Cattano: Popularsynth

Popularsynth is a collaborative proof of concept that uses web audio to synthesize sounds on any device. Each user gets a different role assigned on a locally running server. Made at the sonic code sessions at Spektrum as a project to learn about collaborative non invasive music making apps that can run on any device that can run a browser.

📈 Martin Guder: Blockchain Sound Synthesis

The talk will give a short overview of how to make music with cryptocurrency trade data, how the idea was born, how the sounds are generated and why prototyping with jQuery and vanilla Javascript is still a valid strategy today.

Martin Guder - Website
Martin Guder @ Twitter

Introducing recurBoy, a raspberry pi video instrument

Guergana Tzatchkova — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 08:46:41 +0000

In the past months Tim Caldwell aka cyberboy666 and I (aka ichi raramuri) have been working on a very cool project called recurBOY, a raspberry pi zero based diy video-instrument for live performance on TVs that have composite output. This project is a spinoff from another project that Tim has been working on for a longer time called r_e_c_u_r (more info below) point_down, a more complex and complete video sampler / all-in-one fantastic video tool.

We lauched the project in its workshop form at the 2019 fu/bar glitch art festival in Zagreb, Croatia and we are very happy with the way it was received. If you don't know about this festival you should definitely check it out, it was an amazing combination of very talented and fun awesome people.

The motivation of the project:

for many people there is a barrier to enter the world of hardware video-art making instruments - both due to the general higher cost of video gear compared with audio equipment and in some cases its obsolescence and thus rarity.

this project aims to remove these financial barriers by enabling you to build your own art-making tools. by creating together we can learn from each other and help foster community in a physical space.

features

outputs sd composite video
2 source modes : sampler and shaders
process any source with additional FX
control shader/fx parameters directly with 4x knobs or externally with 4x cv inputs

origin of the project

the recurBOY is a spinoff from an existing project tim has created and maintains - r_e_c_u_r : an open diy video sampler ; r_e_c_u_r is simple to assemble but can be more complex to operate due to its scope and customisablity. recurBOY distills the best parts, aiming to be simpler and more beginner friendly. it uses cheaper parts and runs on a raspberry pi zero which can be a fraction of the price of the pi3 used in r_e_c_u_r.

We are planning on giving more workshops, if you are interested in knowing more / booking us for a workshop contact us via github or write to us to tim@cyberboy666.com or in the comments section below.

recurBoy on Github:

cyberboy666 / recurBOY

a rpi0 video-instrument – created in collaboration with Guergana Tzatchkova

recurBOY

a rpi0 video-instrument – created in collaboration with Guergana Tzatchkova

this circuit is distributed by UNDERSCORES - an open video hardware label : it is available to purchase - as a pcb, kit or assembled unit - at underscores.shop
the schematic for the circuit can be found here
the pcb gerber files for the lastest version can be found here
interactive BOM is here
link to latest rpi image is here
link to FAQ/TROUBLESHOOTING page can be found here
consider donating to the underscores project to help us continue creating for the commons

description

recurBOY is a stand-alone digital video synthesizer and sampler. it can trigger clips and run shaders to create and manipulate sd video.

outputs sd video over composite or hdmi
2 source modes to generate video : sampler and shaders
process any source with additional FX
control shader/fx parameters directly with 4x knobs or externally with…

View on GitHub

I am a creative coding teacher!

Guergana Tzatchkova — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 16:41:34 +0000

I have been wanting to write this post for sooooo long. Finally today after having a long walk under the beautiful spring-is-almost-here sun of Berlin I got inspired.

It's been now 5 months since I am a teacher. At first I thought I would not be able to deal with children and not know how to do it, partly because I was a very rebelious student myself even through Graduate School (afraid of bad karma), and also because I have fear of speaking in public, two things that don't add up too well for being a teacher. 😅 self-deprecation continues for a while... truth is not only it has a been a wonderful experience so far, but I also discovered that I am not bad at it and children are a lot of fun to work with.

I teach at a creative coding school for children called Bit&Byte, a project originally from Lithuania that now has expanded to Berlin and hopefully soon will conquer the whole world, MUAHAHAHA. The classes range from block programming with Scratch, to creating interactive VR and AR experiences, to designing and prototyping Mobile Apps, programming physical boards like the Microbit and Makey-Makey... you name it.

If I was a kid I would be very happy to go to these classes. (Being a childish adult makes me enjoy them even more).

One of the parts I enjoy the most is scribbling and making diagrams and drawings on the Whiteboard. I am starting to think that my call in life is being an ephimeral whiteboard painter.

See for yourself:

Here are also some videos of the fantastic creations of my students:

Fetching songs from Spotify and making characters dance to them:

A Pacman like game on the MicroBit:

An App prototype:

A Joke Narrative in Scratch:

And last but not least, one of my students showed me a couple of weeks ago a game he was developing outside of class from what he was learning:

This was one of the biggest rewards of giving classes, seeing them applying what they learned.

React Native Resources

Guergana Tzatchkova — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 10:00:23 +0000

This is a list of resources that I have found helpful when building apps with React Native. Some of them are tutorials for beginners and some of them are helpful to troubleshoot on the way. I have written the dates of the articles, usually any articles written before 2017 are not relevant anymore, but some things from 2016 still made it through. I hope some of you will find it helpful as well.

Note: This is not a collection of random articles I have found on React-Native but a list of things that I have tested and used in my projects, so I can guarantee that most of it works in versions 0.53 to 0.57, which is the latest version now that I am writing this post.

All of these links are for projects done WITHOUT Expo. That is, with the

react-native init

command. I would say Expo is a good tool to start, but in the end you will have to get rid of it mostly if you are developing a more professional application that extends beyond learning purposes.

I really recommend that you have a clear idea of the features that your app needs before starting to implement it (in an ideal world this is the way things are done) because some things will be hard to implement if you don't structure the project in an appropriate way. I have learned the hard lesson by trying to add deep links to my project at the very end. It will be a far more difficult task now than had I taken that into account since the beginning.

Please let me know in the comments if you have other good free resources. Enjoy!

General resources

25 React Native Tutorials (Mar, 2018)
React Native Training @Medium (ongoing)
React Native Coach @Medium (ongoing)
Awesome React Native (ongoing)

How to build from scratch

How to build a news app in React Native (Apr, 2018): Link
React Native Bootcamp (Aug, 2018) This 6 hour bootcamp by Tyler McGinnies will get you set up to start working with React Native, it includes how to set up Android and iOS and link libraries. Bootcamp Video 1 - Bootcamp Video 2 - Bootcamp Video 3 - Github repository

React-Navigation

Some of these articles use the deprecated libraries, but are still useful if you just replace the navigator names. (createStackNavigator instead of StackNavigator and so on...)

How to properly navigate with React Navigation (Feb, 2018) by Shovon
Adding badges to elements in react-navigation. Link1 - Link2 - Link3
Handle Tab changes in React Navigation v1 (Feb, 2018) by Andrei Pfeiffer
Handle Tab changes in React Navigation v2 (Jul, 2018) by Andrei Pfeiffer

Using refs

React Forms: Using Refs (May, 2017)

Shapes & Animations

How to draw shapes with React Native's own version of CSS. The Shapes of React Native
Lottie is a wrapper around React Native that lets you export Adobe After Effects Animations to React Native.
Expanding and Collapsing Elements Using Animations in React Native

How to add a SplashScreen to Android and iOS

How to Add a Splash Screen to a React Native App (iOS and Android) by Spencer Carli (Feb, 2018)

How to create carousel sliders

How to create a ScrollView progress Indicator in React Native by Michael Leung
Custom Scrolling Carousel in React Native by Mike Heavers (May, 2017)
React Native Zoom Carousel by Mike Heavers (Jun, 2017)
Simple Carousel in React Native by Binoy Patel (Jul, 2017)

Pinch to zoom effect

React Native Apply Pinch to Zoom Effect on Image iOS Android Example Tutorial (Feb, 2018)

Managing state with Context API

Replacing Redux with the new React context API (Feb, 2018)

AsyncStorage

Saving objects using AsyncStorage (Feb, 2018) by Luis Bajaña

Managing offline behaviour

Offline Notice In React Native (Dec, 2017) by Chiamaka Nwolisa
Building Offline First React Native Apps (Nov, 2016) by Spencer Carli.
Handling Offline Actions in React Native (Dec, 2016) by Spencer Carli.

Video

Video Streaming in Your React Native App (Aug 2018) by Adhithi Ravichandran

Responsiveness && Adapting for Tablets

Scaling React Native apps for Tablets (May, 2018) by Akshay Kadam

Placeholders

Achieve skeleton loading with React (Jun, 2017)
rn-placeholder

Push Notifications

How to set-up Push Notifications with OneSignal (Apr, 2018) by Spencer Carli.
How to set up React Native and OneSignal (Apr, 2018) by Endre Vegh.

Deep Linking

Deep Linking with React Native (Feb, 2017) by Ihor Burlachenko.
Handle deep links in React Native apps (Jan, 2018) by Artsiom Staratsitarau.

Android configuration specifics:

3 Things to Know About Android as React Native Developer (March, 2018) by Adam @ Desmart.
Picking your compileSdkVersion, minSdkVersion, and targetSdkVersion 2016 by Ian Lake.

Fonts:

How to install custom fonts in iOS and Android (Jun, 2017): React Native Custom Fonts, by Dave Hudson.
Easiest Way to Load Your Custom Fonts in React Native (Jul, 2017) Link, by Fullsour.
Ultimate guide to use custom fonts in react native (Jan, 2019): Custom Fonts, by Mehran Khan.

Tinkering workshop for girls

Guergana Tzatchkova — Sun, 19 Aug 2018 08:56:41 +0000

Some months ago I joined an organization called Future Legends in Berlin whose aim is to teach girls aged 6-10 about technology, be it programming, physical interphases, body language and confidence. The objective is to help close the gender gap in technology for the next generation. We want more women in tech!

Yesterday I co-tutored in the first session, we taught the girls some basic electronic principles: what is a motor, what is a battery, what is a closed circuit, and how we can put all these principles together to make an art robot. A robot that draws with its marker legs.

They also got to decorate their robots using googly eyes and markers. This way we showed them that technology is also fun and open for creativity. It can also be used to do arty stuff.

Here are some pictures of this experience:

And here two videos of the little bots in action:

Some of the bots were so balanced that they drew like spyrographs. It was so cool, took me back to when I was a kid. I got very excited.

If you are in Berlin bring your daughters to the workshops, they are for free!

You can find all the info at the Future Legends Facebook page.

Maker Faire Berlin 2018

Guergana Tzatchkova — Sun, 12 Aug 2018 10:36:11 +0000

For this year's Maker Faire in Berlin, we came up with the idea of recovering old music media and make a cool project. We ended up choosing music boxes and casette tapes for creating two totally different musical experiments.

One of the experiments is a cassette tape mixer. You can hear two cassettes tapes playing simultaneously and choose the output volume with a mixer.

The cassette mixer:

This second project that I did is a synthesizer that reads notes from paper in the way of the old piano rolls. My main idea was to make music storage media readable and understandable because since the introduction of magnetic media the distance between the creators of the media technology and the consumers has become very big and all the media is like a black box that cannot be decodified without the use of very complex machines also created by the producers of media technology. This leaves the consumer with almost zero means of using their storage media without depending on the big (damn capitalists) machines. In this experiment you can draw on a paper and the paper is at the same time your storage media and the notes and you can understand them in the same way the machine does. Thus bringing the user closer to his/her creation (inclusive writing, of course), bridging da big gap, if you know what I mean.

I want to elaborate further on this idea, I was thinking about building a machine that reads colors on a stripe of paper and produces music and play with the concept of Synesthesia.

Link to the project description from the Official Maker Faire website.

Hunting for electronics in Tokyo

Guergana Tzatchkova — Sat, 09 Jun 2018 09:34:23 +0000

I was in Japan in April and of course I couldn't avoid going around looking for electronics. From what I had seen in the media I thought I would feel in some kind of dystopian materialization of the future, where cyborgs roamed the street and people didn't interact because their souls were being sucked away by some electronic game (which you can see in some places, like the pachinko parlours), but (almost) everything felt strangely familiar, a very well balanced combination between hi-tech and traditional culture. I felt home, like in Mexico City most of the time.

I was on many missions and one of them was getting prepared for the Maker Faire that took place in Berlin at the end of May of 2018, I will write a post about this great experience later: I had a project in mind already but I hadn't started to build a prototype and time was ticking.

THE BOOKSTORE

First thing I noticed that was unlike other places I had seen (but I could be proven wrong by visiting more bookstores in Berlin), is that you could find boards in regular bookstores in the tech section. In other places I have visited you only find Arduinos and Raspeberry Pi's in specialized electronic and DIY stores where people go usually already with some knowledge of what they are. Though at least where I took this picture was in Akihabara, the center for electronics and Otaku culture of Japan, so that may be the reason.

This picture is from the Shosen Book Tower at Akihabara. A quite big bookstore that also had quite a collection of all sorts of fetishy anime and Hentai.

Another thing worth mentioning about bookstores in Japan (and this I saw in all major bookstores I visited) is that they have lots and lots of technical books in store, they have only Japan edition of editorials like O'Reilly and Make and even the translated ones are much more beautifully designed and illustrated than the English ones (dough, of course, they are Japanese books).

I was felt incredibly frustrated because being the book junkie that I am, I wanted to buy lots of these books, but I couldn't understand a word. :'(

Just a sneak peek, these books don't seem to exist in English:

This series also looks very cool, haven't found it anywhere in English so far.

THE STORES

Akizuki Denshi

After roaming around with books I finally got some electronic stores in Akihabara.
Akihabara is well known for being Tokyo's electronic district and I was expecting to find lots of electronic component stores... actually you can find lots of stores for consumer electronics like cellphones, SD cards and the like. The stores that sell components and kits are not that many and not that big, you need to search for them.

I was at several stores and my favorite one was Akizuki Denshi, they had a very good supply of components and again, I was amazed on how the Japanese are so organized and manage to make the best of small places.

Another thing that made me very happy about this store is that I wanted a Mastech 8260 series multimeter, and the only way you can get them in Germany is to order them from China, I ordered mine, it got lost somewhere on the way, I even got the money back after two months... and I found it at this store... and it was cheap!

Marutsu

Another very good store, bigger than Akizuki Denshi is Marutsu. I think it was there where I got the board I needed for my maker faire project. They had all sorts of qualities and prices, which was good because it was on the last day of the trip and I was broke already.

Electric City

This is an indoor market with small booths selling each very specific electronic parts. It reminded me a lot about the electronics markets in Mexico, where you have all these booths crammed in a very small places. Like there is one if you want to buy only switches, another booth for capacitors of all types and so on.

It took me a while to find it, because the entrance is really small, and the staff wasn't as friendly as in other places in the city. :-/ It is still worth a visit maybe if you are looking for something very specific.

The location of Electric City.

To conclude, well yes, you can find lots of interesting stuff in Akihabara, but I didn't feel they had more things than in Mexico for example, which is not considered a tech capital by most standards. I think also because in Mexico there is a big market for reused parts, as it is part of the third world there is a bigger tendency to repair electronics rather than buying new or maybe because I know Mexico much better or the stores are bigger there. In Mexico they don't always have things in stock though and they don't sell as many boards for Makers and DIY projects, you need a special store for Pis and Arduinos, I know only two or three places where you can get them and getting books on the subject and in Spanish is very difficult.

Well, that was it for this post. I hope I find some time soon to post about my project at the Maker Faire Berlin and what I did with that board I got at Akihabara. (That board has already travelled more than many people).

Happy Akihabara electronic shopping!

It would be fun to make a post about buying electronics in Berlin, the city where I currently live... though it didn't come to mind immediately because that's part of my routinary life... not as exciting. Though I just remembered when I went to an electronic shop in Chiang Mai in Thailand... it was a lovely experience. I will write about that in a future post hopefully as well.

Conferences, Meetups, Hackathons: A learning rollercoaster in the past two months. Part III - The Workshops

Guergana Tzatchkova — Thu, 05 Apr 2018 14:45:43 +0000

Workshops are my favorite events in the geek world. You sit there and learn how to use a technology, there are usually freebies, if you get stuck there is a mentor to help and they don't have the inherent competitive nature of the Hackathons because we are just here to learn, buddy, relax!

Workshop 0. Women Who Go Berlin - Bill Kennedy's Ultimate Go Workshop.

I was actually not going to mention this one, because I ran away from this event. Front End can be very frustrating: adjusting pixels to please the designers, having to learn a new framework every two weeks because the one you are using is already not hot and in anymore, having to adjust things for a gazillion devices, etc. So thinking to myself, let's do some real engineering here, let us dive into back end development, I found a Go Language Workshop organized by the fabulous team of Hello Fresh and Bill Kennedy. It was an all weekend event, and well... I was there for 4 hours and soon realised I needed to sleep and recover on the weekend. The time I was there I could see it was a very good and detailed workshop, but for people who were already familiar with the language.

(Well, you see why I started counting from 0).

The other two workshops I did attend till the end. I could have even stayed there my whole life and never go back to doing anything else. These workshops rocked!

Workshop 1. IoT and MicroPython workshop

This is one of the many events I have been to already organized by the fantastic, awesome, amazing, wonderful Women Techmakers Berlin and PyLadies Berlin Groups.

I am not a Python developer but I was very excited they were offering a workshop on how to program a (somewhat) new board called Micropython. I bought my board in advance, it was a bit pricey, I paid 32 pounds all n all, but you could apply for a free board alleging that you don't have that much money. I work a lot so I didn't feel like being Berlin miserable and I paid for mine, the workshop was for free already.

As we all know this board is not going to be that fast since Python is a high level programming language, in comparison to let's say Arduino. But the strength of this board lies in the beginner friendliness of Python, so this would make a great option for educational and prototyping purposes. And I mean, ultra speed is overrated, we should all be more patient and calm, anyway.

When we got there we were received with a bag of freebies that included a touch LCD Screen, two continuos microservos with attacheable wheels, a humidity - temperature sensor, an LED and some more things I cannot remember.

We worked on some examples included in the official Micropython documentation.

And a github page with tutorials made specially for this workshop that included using the LCD screen in different setups, including displaying the information received from the Humidity/Temperature Sensor.

Here is the github repo.

This is the technical description of the board:

And this is my board, it has a golden housing. It is f***ng Golden!!! I love my Micropython board so much, yo ppls.

We were mostly trying out the syntax and the wiring and there is a slack group where there are proposals for groups to develop more advanced ideas.

The coolest thing is that I arrived a bit lateish to the workshop and I sat in the only free place I found. We were like 7 people at one table and I was staring at a girl that had some earring that looked mexican, in the end I asked and yes, she is indeed mexican, then another girl at our table is colombian and a student of Data Science and the guy next to me is originally from Venezuela and he is an electronic engineer that is learning Python and making his own company developing a product with IoT applied to agriculture. The other people at the table were super cool and friendly too but it was great to see so many people from Latinamerica in a techy event.

There was even a talk from Amazon Go. Have you seen this ad where a woman goes into a shop and she just puts stuff in her purse and then it is all automatically charged to her account when she goes out? Well, it doesn't seem to be fiction. Someone from Amazon was there to show us what is behind this technology, he even brought a prototype of an IoT device with a camera and a very powerful processor that used machine learning I think to recognize objects. He had a ping pong paddle and a ball and the thing was recognizing it correctly but was having trouble recognizing the people standing all around.

I would write more about this workshop, I really had a great time there. The ladies at Women Tech Makers Berlin and PyLadies are doing a great job. Even the catering was really good. Keep up doing these fantastic events, please!

Workshop 2. From E-Waste to Sound

This workshop was a bit different, the previous one had somehow of a gender focus and had lots of sponsors, we were pampered and given lots of stuff, the intenton here, on the other hand, was to build something an electronic device using the cheapest, not even cheapest, but free electronics you can find: e-waste! And we all have a lot of that lying around.

This one was at Common Ground, a small store / small manufacturer of synthesizers at the epicenter of the hipsterness of Neukoelln (I am talking about you, Schillerkiez).

Our mission was to build a contact microphone with an amplifier using parts recovered from the trash. And that is what we did!!!!

Take a look.

The piezo is the contact surface, if you put the white ceramic side on a surface and then make it vibrate you can hear the sound amplified through the loudspeaker. This loudspeaker was kindly given to me by the very nice person sitting next to me that did the homework and brought a whole bag full of electronic oldies.

The capacitors we took away from some circuits that were already at the workshop. We had to desolder them and make sure they were not damaged in the process. Man, that was hard. We also had to polish our soldering skills because the board was quite small. I left pretty proud of my soldering, look at this beauty:

Hahaha, we were almost going inside the boards to test the connections and see that everything was working.

At the moment of truth most of the devices worked. A couple of people had some trouble though and they stayed fixing their little monsters.

It was a lot of fun as well. I really recommend Common Ground to anyone who wants to learn about electronics and sound. I am looking forward to their next workshops. They also sell pretty cool stuff, like these synths. I want one of those Berliner Schule synths since quite some time now, but they cost 90eu, I may as well just build my own:

So, that was it. I hope I find some time to write about the Meetups (Part IV) I attended in these two months.

Conrad Maker Faire 2017

Guergana Tzatchkova — Sun, 01 Apr 2018 17:12:51 +0000

Oh, I just realized I hadn't posted this. I was supposed to post this in December 2017.

Well, in December me and a friend, Katrin, took part in the Conrad Maker Faire.

We were doing a demonstration on how to charge a cell phone with a solar panel. We forgot that we needed the sun also for it to work out but we managed with a table lamp and a big solar panel.

It ended up being more like how to transfer energy for dummies. Which was also very helpful for ourselves because we didn't know anything about the subject before diving into the it.

So basically how to store energy from a solar panel to a battery and then from the battery to a cell phone battery. We could also demonstrate that you can transfer energy directly from the solar panel to the telephone but that is not exactly a best practice.

These are some pictures from our stand, which was also very DIY. Improvisation queens.