This open sauce was honestly pretty cool and its only downside was the price, which I found excessive ($220 for 2 days, an extra $100 to get in 1h early, and $1500 for industry and close to $1000 for VIP). All that said, itwas was quite enjoyable and I had enough for at least 1.5 days if you went to see a few talks, or a very full day if you saw no talks. To be honest though the talks were all panels and none were great, so it can be done in a full day if you ignore all the talks.

Lots of talks, of uneven quality:

Cool things outside:

Fun people:

Plenty of fun exhibits:

I need to get my realflight work again and fly RC again one day

I got to fly this self built B737 Sim, it wasn't perfect but pretty impressive for a self build

Jonny Five!

these guys recover single use vapes, get the lithium batteries and make powertool batteries with the

The AI video walls are always fun:

Battlebots, they got banned the 2nd day after a couple of lipo fires from battles:

even full size robots that can fight

Whoops, I just found a new monitoring system for my power use at home and bought it :)

Loads of Star Wars stuff:

More stuff outside in the sun:

And I got to see the release version of Wing, doing deliveries:

I remember the full sized one when I worked there for a short while

As well as this one used for early testing in Australia

they had big cats that needed care and cuddles :)

just like a cat, just bigger :)

next, was a bigger one :)

but still needs love and pets :)

and snacks :)

Last the baby tiger, it did have ADHD and was all over the place :)

also needed to be scratched and held :)

the handler showed that you can scratch it like a kitty :)

Quick video clips:

And turns out lions like scratches just like cats :)

But as I'm writing this blog entry, it's also pretty obvious that there is a question of what happens to all these small cubs when they aren't small anymore, and they can live 15 years or so....

Unforunately taking pictures of the main show, was not allowed, but I have a few of the pre-show:

And a small clip of the end, which they did allow filming:

Cool Parade:

This year didn't really have anything too exciting compared to last year, to the point that given the very remote location, I'm not sure I'll go back next year.

All that said, here are the pictures: i01*

The dark room was probably the most fun location for me :)

hi Erin :)

the cuttlefish crew made a new art car this year

bad ass helmet

One thing new this year was the Luminarium, which costs $7 extra. You were supposed to reserve timeslots, but the whole thing didn't seem efficient, and was apparently oversold, so it soon had a long line that didn't move much. Mmmhh....

I had plenty of spare time to see a few talks, not too many caught my eye, but those 3, did:

a talk on wearable LEDs

batteries are often the issue :)

nice one

the talk by Steve Wozniak was excellent

The magician that uses physic properties and adds magic on top, did a great job:

I had a chat with this guy, I was honestly worried about this "plane", given that it was meant to carry a human. The guy is a pilot and did his research. His goal was to fly in ground effect only, which will indeed limit the injuries if anything goes wrong, which it probably will a few times :) If he sticks to that, I wish him luck as long a no one tries to actually fly at altitude with that thing, since if any motor failure happens, this thing is going down and hard (glide ratio of a brick and no rudder to compensate for adverse yaw from a single motor failure):

Other random things:

make your own fireworks

the framework laptop I hope to own one day

Of course I wasn't the only person with costume:

big LED earings need a big battery :)

So there you go. Not sure when I'll go back, but here are the previous ones I went to if you're curious: