Electromagnetic Field Camp 2026
Electromagnetic Field (EMF) is a “hacker” camp which takes place every 2 years. Like previous editions, Nottingham Hackspace had a village, or dedicated camping area and we ran various events, and took various installations with us. It was all very exciting. More than usual, these projects took the form of collaborations with many members sharing the work and developing different parts. It was really lovely to work on something with other members of the ‘space, which is not something that happens very often outside of Hack The Space Days. Badge Like any good conference, EMF has a badge. EMF’s badge is a hexagonal “Tildagon” which is actually a rather powerful micro-computer. The tildagon is designed to be an expandable hardware platform, and we can make “hexpansions” to plug in and add more functionality. We wanted to make a Hexpansion to be the point of a soldering workshop. We settled on a rotary encoder that you would use to scroll through the solar system, and assembled a crack team of Steve (hardware), Gareth (graphics) and Mags (code). To save money, we went with an infra-red optical rotary encoder, and Steve came up with a clever system where the order in which some light-dependent resistors are occluded by a rotating disk indicate the rotation direction. Mags coded up a game where you get to scroll through the solar system, Gareth made some beautiful sprites, and then we squeezed it all into a tiny 8kB EEPROM. ROBODROME In the midst of heatwave-related delirium, Steve and Sam took it upon themselves to make an arcade-style physical robot wars game. That is, you walk up, and fight real (small) robots using arcade style controllers that are in front of you. This was swiftly christened the ROBODROME, and rapidly spiralled out of hand (and Aaron, Gareth and many other hackers joined the collaboration). By the end, the project contained 4 custom-built, highly-robust remote controlled antweight robots, an automatic arena controller which could lower a pit and time matches, an LED matrix “Jumbotron” with custom graphics, a clever infra-red system for identifying which robot had fallen in (and lost), and hacked arcade-cabinet style controllers. They report: We had to scale a few things back to get it working at EMF, but after some Saturday morning troubleshooting we had it at a Robot Wars Series 1 level of functionality where the robots could move at push each other around! We decided to revisit the pits and automatic victory detection for a future iteration and the ROBODROME now resides upstairs in the space, and will one day soon be completed and fully functional. Come and see it on an open day or tour Stickers One of the things you’ll see a lot of at EMFCamp is stickers. Thousands of them. In almost every space you went there would be a box of stickers to take, swap and stick to things! Tim made a project out of stickers, building a story over the course of the weekend: “Sometime previously I’d made a laptop sticker of the Arecibo message, so when EMFCamp announced that the theme was going to be “Space” I made a bunch more to give out. I applied a nice sparkly holographic laminate and cut them on Shane’s Cricut. Shane, Jon and I had fun giving these out to people at the film tent leaving “Contact”, it felt like an appropriate film and people seemed to like them. Closer to EMF I wanted to make even more stickers and in multiple designs. I settled on the idea of telling a story through a series of stickers and workshopped it with Shane. The first sticker would encourage people to take a tourist trip to Mars with subsequent stickers becoming progressively more alarming about not doing so before revealing that Martian brain-worms had made their way to Earth via human hosts and were now running for President. We gave most of them out via the sticker box at our village but we released each design at different times to reveal the story over the weekend. I also put some in other boxes around the site, whenever I would revisit with later “episodes” I was happy to see that most of the previous ones had gone. I do wonder if anyone outside our village realised they were a connected series but I liked seeing a couple of them appear later on Mastodon, either in pictures of peoples sticker hauls or on something in the background at the places we stuck some to. Mags had fun campaigning for Mars Worm but my favourite was the one giving the symptoms of infection, “Sounds from head” still makes me chuckle. (Though if you do have sounds coming from your head, it’s very serious, see a doctor).” Slushies One late night, James impulse bought an industrial slushy machine on Facebook Market place. Then began the project of hacking into a usable “automatic” (requiring minimal attendance) Slushy Bot… James describes the challenges and process of bringing the Slushy Bot to life: “We started with a slushy machine with very limited info on how it works, found it was left in auto mode with no settings enabled. Once the machine was placed into manual mode, it came back to life. I then started to look for spare parts and manuals for this machine, or if there was a model or brand name, which was finally concluded to be a 2nd gen SPM FIZZY VFCB SLUSH MACHINE. I then managed to find a local part supplier and main dealer in Australia willing to send info on this machine. After replacing some parts and cleaning the machine, we ran it for the first time with some extremely blue syrup from Amazon to find both heads were in good working order! It turned everyone in the Hackspace at the time blue. Oops Now the machine was fully working, it was time to automate it for unattended use for events or even in the Hackspace. I started this by working out the simplest way to stop the machine dispensing when a payment has not been made. I designed my own spool valve to open and close the slushy ports and 3D printed them, these would be controlled by an Arduino Mega with a Ethernet shield, a big red button and SumUp machine to take payments. This was all completed days before EMF camp in true Hackspace fashion, with the help of several collaborators including Aaron (who did the software) and Gareth (who made some beautiful graphics). Despite some minor WiFi and end-user instructional issues, we still managed to produce 299 units of slush mostly automatically, well covering the project’s costs. Much was much learned at EMF for Slushy Bot 2.0: time to remove the human error! Pre-chill the mix and add bigger back up tanks with auto top-up! I look forward to the challenges ahead.” The Village We hosted some great workshops and meetups at our Nottinghack village, including a Solder the Nottinghack Voyager! workshop showcasing our Hexspansion board, 3D Printing and Laser Cutting CAD design meet-ups each day, Circuit Cutter and Laminator Crafts showed off crafty skills, an Introduction to Role-playing games with Dungeon Crawl Classics and D&D allowed for some fun one-shot roleplaying well into the night, and a few off the cuff sessions with Boardgames at Nottinghack and two relaxing Model Painting sessions. All the workshops were filled to capacity (even the late arranged ones) and we had great feedback on how good they were from the people doing them! We also had a couple of scheduled workshops, including CriCut fundamentals (Betty), MRI physics/craft (Mags) and Website Making (Mags, Aaron, Jon and Alifeee). The village itself was a couple of donated/borrowed marquees (thanks marquee and van people)! Which we set up a little too close to a busy and dusty road. At least it gave us lots of through traffic for the slushy machine. One of these marquees was a very red workshop area, and the other (open) was a nice kitchen-cum-social-area. We had a few problems with overly attentive wasps, but better organisation, cleaning and fan placement got this under control. Although EMF took place over a very hot weekend, the evenings and mornings were cold when the sun had gone in. It was really lovely to sit as a group of Hackspace friends beneath the marquee, sipping our tea and chatting about the wonderful things we’d seen that day. This is the heart of EMF, and we carry it with us! Coda You can read more about the projects we took to/from EMF on our wiki: Nottingham Hackspace Telecoms “PLC” The Robodrome Slushy Bot Nottinghack Voyager