Last weekend was SoOnCon 2010, the Southern Ontario Hackerspaces Conference. People gathered from Diyode (Guelph), Hacklab.TO (Toronto) (most of our contingent is pictured to the right), Kwartzlab (Kitchener), Site 3 (Toronto), and ThinkHaus (Hamilton) for a weekend of fun and education. We hacked badges, talked to each other, had a talks, and generally shared our knowledge. I especially enjoyed the keynote by Kate Hartman, who has done so much with soft circuits and wearables. The Tamagotchi talk by Natalie was also exceptional - turns out reverse engineering those little toys is a lot of fun and allows some great hacks to happen :-). My talk was well received as well, I got lots of questions and hopefully have inspired a couple more people to think about wearable electronic senses as in the realm of possible, even at hobbyist level. SoOnCon 2010 Flickr Set.

The flickr set also includes some shots of the recent Toronto Wearables Meetup #5 featuring Sean Montgomery. He gave an excellent talk, including demo of all four of his cool wearable biometric thingies. I was most impressed by the EEG hat, which actually does give you some insight into what's going on in his brain. Basically, it monitors two areas of his brain (visual cortex and frontal lobe) and red means higher activity than normal, green average, and blue below average. You can really see it working too. It's kind of embarrassing for him when the hat goes blue while people are asking him a question though :-). Anyway, awesome!