Simon de la Rouviere

Stellenbosch is growing as a tech hub of South Africa (and Africa). We have great engineering and computer science talent from Stellenbosch University, a social-networking giant and free wifi for the whole town (almost done) amongst others.

To further promote Stellenbosch as a tech area and to get the hackers and makers to demo their stuff, #hackstb was launched. The idea: 

#hackstb is a social event and a monthly demo day for geeks, hackers and inventors in Stellenbosch. It’s a platform to showcase cool tech built in our town.

The first one was a month ago and as a start had 3 demos. Joe (from TrustFabric/Mxit/GustPay) demoed an augemented reality for AfrikaBurn. See a demo of it in action here:

He also demoed GustPay. The final demo was Carel showing how to do Van Eck Phreaking (which was awesome to see).

This week we had 4 demos.

- Arcade cabinet

- 3D Multi-touch input

- Laptop stiffy stand

- Using a normal picture frame as a video playback device

The arcade cabinet that was built by Leon and Francois.

Photo via @hedleyroos.

The AR app is going to be used in conjunction with Stellenbosch 360 to create a map of destinations in Stellenbosch so tourists can easily find their way to interesting waypoints!

So that’s that. The next meetup will be somewhere in June and already have demos lined up! Join if you are in the area. Find us on Meetup.com (our homebase) or Twitter.