This weekend I hosted a post-Halloween kit building party at MightyOhm HQ.

Nine close friends built Conway’s Game of Life kits from Adafruit Industries.  This is my favorite kit for these kinds of workshops because it’s easy for beginners to complete in about 2 hours, and when everyone is done, you can wire all of the kits together to create one large cellular automata display.  The last time I helped people build this kit was at a Make:SF workshop at the TechShop in Menlo Park.

Here’s a timelapse video of the afternoon, shot with a Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro webcam on an Eee PC 4G running Booru Webcam 2.0.

The capture interval was 5 seconds.  I used Quicktime Pro to stitch the images together at 15fps and iMovie to add titles and music (Turbo Outrun by FRP from remix.kwed.org.)

I wore my Halloween costume for most of the afternoon.  What am I?  Most people on the streets of San Francisco had no idea…

Safety first!

Stuart was the first to finish his kit:

Soldering the kits together to form the matrix:

Nine happy kit-builders with the 3×3 matrix they created with their finished kits:

And lastly, a video of the 3×3 matrix in action:

Three people had little to no soldering experience at the beginning of the afternoon.  Everyone who came went home with a working kit.  Success!