 Thank you very much. It really is a bit of an honour to talk at EMF Camp. I've seen so many amazing speakers this week, and the work the organizers put in, considering it's all voluntary, is top notch. So thank you very much to the volunteers. OK, I'm going to be talking about making in Margate, Felly, yn y gallu bod yma, yma ymdweud y maen nhw'n gynghorwch. Felly, rydyn ni'n gynghorwch i'w ddiwylliant, i mi ddim yn y 80s, a'r ddweud yma fel ychydig i'w hwn, a'r ddweud o'r ddweud ymdweud, ymdweud, ac yn ymdweud ymdweud yn ymdweud, yn ymdweud, ac yn ymdweud. Yna'r ddweud yn ymdweud, yma'r ddweud yn ymdweud, .. thinner a strong movement across all ages. Really it's about the joy of tech, finding problems and coming up with your own solution. Or even just playing with the new tools coming out, modules and all of the information that is now at our fingertips through YouTube and webpages. It's an unprecedented time of accessibility to technology, tools, communities, it's a very exciting time. I see it as an extension of this DIY culture, something that's gone on with arts and crafts for centuries, millennia perhaps. Lasers are the new knitting needles, new tools that we need to learn how to use. And I think everyone should do that. A bit more specifically about Margate's maker movement, Margate has pottery painting. Augmented reality, sculpture, weaving, knitting, sewing, metalwork, the geekery, industrial laser cutting, motion graphics, cutting edge ink, greenhouses, wind farms, board games, screen printing, jewellery films, music, dance, modulus, synths, the micro museum, retro vinyl, killing Eve was filmed in Margate, digital art, Radio Ham is huge there, some renders filming a Hollywood film, very recently finished, furniture design, architecture, art schools, fancy sheds, cyanotopes, beauty products, avionics, renewable energy, pharmaceuticals, airfix scale electrics and hornby, fund factories, babies and sandcastles. I don't know if that is common to most towns but I think Margate is particularly special for its breadth of experiences and opportunities. So why am I here? Chiefly I volunteered or applied to give a talk so that I would be able, guaranteed to be able to buy a ticket because I was desperate to come here. This talk is part tourist information because I love Margate and I think you should do too. I want to tell people about my experiences as an engineer moving from London to Margate and how that has enriched my life really. So what is Margate? It's just an hour and a half on the train from St Pancras to Margate. It has been the leading seaside resort in the UK for 250 years. There is an argument, it was the first one but it's a bit contentious. The development started in the late 1700s. It peaked in the 20th century with the mods running rampant down the beaches but with the advent of cheap holidays to Spain. There was a bit of a rapid descent in Margate until its resurrection began around 2010 and continues to this day in a very exciting period. You can see that top picture there is a typical sunset of Margate. The famous Victorian artist Turner used to live there and he described the skies as the best in Europe. Also described on some graffiti on the harbour arm, the best thighs in Europe as well. That's a different story. The map there, the red marker shows where we are now and Margate is all the way down in the east of East Kent. You can't go much further east. Sometimes we can pick up French radio which is fantastic. Here's a little information tidbit if you use cash anymore and you find yourself with a £20 note. That Victorian artist Turner is featured on the back of the £20 note. That little transparency bit there shows Turner Contemporary Art Gallery which is in Margate and that tower is the lighthouse at the end of the harbour arm. That's an amazing bit of advertising for one of the best towns in England you should go. Every time you look at a £20 note think about me and Margate. Just to illustrate that rise, fall and rise again of Margate, here are some pictures of Dreamland. In the 1950s, the black and white photo on the left shows the wooden roller coaster and lots of other attractions. This was a nationally famous amusement ground very close to London. Back in the 90s, early 2000s, you can see what kind of state it found itself in. It suffered a bit of arsyn, a bit of decay. It was practically lost forever. Over recent years it's seen a lot of investment and a lot more interest from tourists flooding to Margate and a lot more regeneration and you can see Margate today being as vibrant as it used to be at its peak. Another feature of Margate was the Lido, and as you can see back in the 50s, it was a hugely popular outdoor swimming pool and entertainment space. There were ballrooms, there were restaurants going into the cliffs, there would be thousands of people there every day of the summer. Cut to today, the swimming pool has filled with sand, it's collapsing into the sea, and you can see that was this winter the roof of one of the buildings has collapsed. But the chimney that you can see just on that right hand picture is an icon of Margate. I think everyone who lives in Margate would be up in arms if we lost it, but as you can see the infrastructure is crumbling as it is in many towns. So the regeneration is happening, but there are many very expensive challenges to be had, maybe addressed in a different way than doing the same thing again. Big question mark there. Margate today is full of many communities. I mentioned Hornby recently, and Margate is the home of scale electrics, Hornby and Airfix, and there is a visitor centre where you can go and delve into that brilliant world. I don't think they make it there anymore, having moved the manufacturing abroad, but it's still a bit of a pilgrimage for railway model enthusiasts, scale electric fans, etc. On the left there, that big crowd is a community that is centred around an artist's community called Resort Studios, and I spent some time working with them getting to know the community and giving them lots of cables that they didn't understand, for example HDMI cables. There's a shed, men in sheds, just down the road in broad stairs, which is a national organisation that looks after the mental health of chiefly men. I think it is aimed at men over 50, so I'm nearly eligible, not quite. That little diagram at the bottom there is the old Woolworth's building, and when I moved to Margate in 2017, that was a derelict Woolworth's building, almost 10 years since Woolworth's died, and it was a real moment of realisation, going to Margate and seeing the high street empty for so long, and these massive buildings just left to rot, left to the pigeons, but the Margate school took over that building and now offers master of arts degrees, there's a fab lab in there, there's dozens of workshop spaces for artists and makers, it's a very vibrant community that's growing around these places, and finally there's Luckamhamnode Computer, who maybe you saw him yesterday, a YouTube famous maker, and his museum is not obsolete, he's just down the road in Rumsgate as well, and finally the Geekery, which is my favourite place because I made it, is the biggest photo of course, right in the middle there, and I'll talk a little bit more about that and ask for your insights maybe as well. So my background is that I'm a professional engineer of about 27 years, I've worked across multiple industries, started off quite corporate in the defence industry, working in research and development on sea and land across domains, after being made redundant I took a breath and decided to go a bit more hands-on technical, I was lucky enough to work at music festivals doing AV on the big screens, and lots of different experiences, actually writing code, operating systems, rather than thinking about them in writing papers. That led me to live in central London where I met a girl, settled down, and we had Carmen, Carmen, shy Carmen, and because I had a young family we moved to Margate, it was quite accidental really, we thought we'd give it a year and we're still there and having a great time. So that's what led me to be in Margate and I want to talk a little bit about my experiences in Margate. I met artists and was introduced to Lee Berwick who's a sound artist, he crafts a space using sound so you can walk through it and feel the sound, it's quite remarkable, but I was involved with a project called The Space Below where we installed several media player boxes along the roof of Greenwich Foot Tunnel in London and each of those would play a sound clip of undersea creatures highlighting the impact of noise pollution on these creatures. Now each box had to play the sound clip in synchronisation so you could walk through the tunnel and experience that soundscape. So the summary of the technical details, there was an Arduino of course, the boxes were synchronised using HC-12 wireless which worked in that tunnel, it's quite a weird EMC space and the actual sound was played by a DF player, a tiny module often used in fire alarms and lifts, so I recommend those if you happen to be working on a similar project. This is a video of the sounds, I don't know if the sound will come through actually, I didn't ask, can you get, oh you can. I think it was better in the actual tunnel, but you can see the DF player, the wireless HC-12 module in the Arduino making all of those lights, I'm going to move on from that, hopefully. I think it's still playing, I'll talk over it. The other art project was by Umet Gunders, my gate residence called The World Is Yours and this was exploring the way people take photos of famous artworks and post them on Instagram or other social media feeds, effectively stealing their work and sending it out to the bigger world. So we created an augmented reality system that people arrived at the venue, they saw the markers on the wall, they would go to a website and that would turn on the augmented reality. I think the key thing was there was no app to download, it was just a web page that they went to and then pointed their camera at the markers and they would get a scrolling gallery of various famous artists scraped from Instagram looking for hashtag Damian Hurst or something. So it was a live updating feed of copyright stealing and that was the project. But a quote from Umet, which obviously I love is, what he loved about working with me was the freedom to think up whatever I wanted, no idea too big, that would just make it happen somehow. It's like finding a magic lamp. And I think you could say that about most of the people here and most of the things that I've seen. There's some incredible skills in the tech community that appear to be magic to people outside that community perhaps. This is the code, at least a fragment of the code that's behind that A frame thing and I put this up there just to point out it used libraries from Jerome Etienne. He's updated this recently to a new improved version which is the link at the bottom there. It's very, very easy to set up this web-based augmented reality. Not as scarily difficult as it sounds. And here's a video of that bit of art. Using this technology I worked with a local photographer actually and in the same way we had a marker on the wall and we had a rotating death mask in three dimensions rotating in front of the market. I don't talk about that today. But it's interesting working with non-technical people because there is a gap there. People are perhaps vaguely aware of the new tools. They've heard of laser cutting in 3D printing and many people are interested with that or maybe they think they need it but it intrigues and terrifies people. They want someone else to do it for them rather than investigate it and get into it themselves. For example that augmented reality thing watching a few YouTube videos and finding some libraries and there it was. I really do believe that anyone could do these things if they're given perhaps the confidence or a bit of guidance to be able to find out how to do these things and do them. So we need to turn these magic lamps into a way that everyone can joyfully engage with these new tools that are so readily available to be able to access all of the information at our fingertips. So the joy of tech for all is really what I'm talking about. So in order to try and do that because my gate is awash with artists and I was working in the resort studios community at the time they were very encouraging in getting me into the art world just as I want to encourage other people into the tech world. And I decided to try and show people what engineers do other than fixing washing machines and cars. So for Margate Now Art Festival I spent a week in the Margate School in the old Woolies building in my dome where I put my workshop and attempted to make a self-playing ukulele. I chose that because it would be the software, electronics, control. I didn't make a self-playing ukulele. I spent most of the week talking to people about engineering and what's that. But the highlight for me was having half a dozen young children sat cross-legged around my 3D printer in awe at watching this thing make an object. It was like they were sat around a campfire having never seen fire. It sends a shiver down my spine now thinking about that moment. That was followed by an exhibition in a local gallery, the pie factory. And I was actually paid to be an artist. I can't believe that even now. An engineer paid to do art. That's a pinnacle of my life. My gravestone, Matt Mapleson, he was once paid to do art. Just the ones. That was using IDefzero, which is a fairly old engineering notation that engineers use to design airports, complex system-like airports, for example. You'd break it down into a number of functions and put that in a box. Then it would frame your thoughts to identify the inputs that are transformed into the outputs using some mechanisms and resources but controlled by laws, technical guidance and standards, ways of doing things. Positive and negative control. Having identified lots of functions, you can attach them all together. The output of one function is the input of another. Then you can apply graph theory to that and different techniques to optimise this big system. I took this and applied that to Margate. I would sit down with individuals in Margate and guide them through the process of making one of these diagrams, talking about themselves and their activity. Each one was a fantastic hour in time. I got them to draw the diagrams themselves. Each one is so illustrative of their personality. The jewellery design in making, just on the left in the middle, she chose the colours that she was going to use and planned out exactly how she was going to write it in advance before she made a single mark. Whereas the picture in top row, second one along in pencil, is just a spidery writing and illustrates his mind jumped around and somehow constructed some order from that chaos. Each one of these really gave me a deeper understanding of what these people did and why. I've had people burst into tears when they realised something about why they were doing it. It's a quite powerful psychological moment for both of us, really. My intention is to build up more of these diagrams, build up a data set, turn it into dot notation and maybe apply a graph theory to model Margate. But I think that would be a long time coming. The last thing I want to talk about is the geekery and how to make a geekery. Hopefully, as I show you this, you'll figure out what a geekery is and tell me because I'm not quite sure yet. You make a geekery by leasing a small industrial unit in Margate Old Town. You put down an insulated floor and you add 42 power sockets, which still isn't enough. And then you put up a giant French cleat wall that you can hang lots of machines and tools on. Then you fill it with stuff. Woodworking bench, power tools, snap maker 2, CNC, laser cutting, 3D printing machine, prusa, 3D printers, lots of drawers and lots of storage and a mini maplin, or as I call it, the wall of joy. You use the geekery to build a community. I have a monthly meet-up called Thanet Technology that I've been doing for a few years. Started to meet other geeks like me in a new town, but it's still going. We have speakers each month and we have a hybrid meeting in person at the geekery and via Zoom. So if anyone wants to give a technical talk to the wonderful technical community in Thanet, which is the district Margate's Inn, drop me a line. We also run a tech club on one Saturday each month and we're trained at children, getting them to play with tech, software, micro bits, creative digital art, whatever people can do. We're hoping to extend that into a summer holiday club as well. There's a bunch of us experimenting to see what sticks with the kids and what we can do to help them experience that joy of tech. Finally, the geekery is definitely my workshop. It's my safe space. It's my happy place. Not sure what else that can be, but I would like it to be filled with like-minded people. I would like it to be of the place. Margate's a coastal town. It's a tourist town. How can the geekery plug into that? How can I make the tools and experience of that community accessible to the people who are vaguely aware of the new technology, maybe there are hurdles that stop them getting into it? How can we share our skills with the non-technical to let everyone enjoy that technology? The favourite thing that happened in the geekery is my daughter kicking off when I said, no, you can't do electronics again just yet. We have to go somewhere else. She kicked off because you can do electronics at the age of five and that makes me so proud. Thank you, Carmen. So that is the end of my talk. I don't think we have the ability to ask for questions and I'm running a bit short of time, but I'll be very interested if you've seen something similar to the geekery or if you're interested in the regeneration of seaside towns if you basically want to help me. Thank you very much for your time and I think I'm done. Yes.