Keeping to the tradition and subtle arts of Rockbox Towers, but doing it with a twist to celebrate the place we have Rockbox devcon 2011, we decided to make a Rockbox bridge.

We started out by gathering all devices we had in the room that can run Rockbox and distributed them on the construction floor area. As the Android app runs fine on tablets now there’s actually a rather good way to get some solid base into the construction…

Once all material was known, the construction started with a large amount of eager engineers contributing with good and bad ideas and at times very shaky hands:

(wods, scorche, gevaerts and paumary)

The result, involving an iRiver beneath the bridge catching the digital flow, became what might be the longest Rockbox construction done so far:

After the bridge, the work started on the real stuff. Building the tallest Rockbox tower ever made. After a couple of accidents and crashes, the tireless team managed to break the previous 104 cm record and the new Rockbox tower record is now officially 117cm:

(Pictures in this post were all taken by Peter D’Hoye.)

This weekend, in Ghent Belgium, the annual Rockbox developers conference “devcon” is taking place. Unfortunately I’m not there myself this year, but I can get a little sense of the atmosphere by following the live stream. Click the image to get to it. Do note that the stream will only be alive during this weekend June 5-6 2010.

Here’s the team that was present at Devcon, picture from petur’s comment:

The Rockbox team that gathered in Ghent for this weekend of talk, hacking and socializing (drinking beer) is caught on this group picture. Click the image for a slightly larger version. Photo by Petur.

The people on the photo

The top line from the left: amiconn, markun, bertrik, gevaerts, GodEater, AlexP, Zagor, domonoky, Bagder (me!)

The lower line from the left: kugel, pixelma, scorche, petur

We did have a 2-hour discussion session on the saturday, and I expect to post an mp3 of it later on. The short and compressed outcome in plain text is found here. Petur was a great host. The facilities were nice, the hotel was great, the food arrangements worked out perfectly. A swell weekend!

As our tradition demands, we did bring out all our targets (portable music devices that can run Rockbox or at least have some code in the Rockbox repo) to be used as building bricks to create a Tower of Rockbox.

This first picture shows that we have a pretty wide selection of players in this room:

With all those “bricks” put in an imaginative order on top of each other, the result could look something like this:

you may enjoy comparing this building with last year’s creation.

More pictures from this year can be found in Petur’s collection and gevaerts’ collection.

In company facilities in the city of Ghent, Belgium, a fine crowd of Rockbox hackers have gathered to hack, chat, drink beer and design new stuff. Rockbox Devcon 2009 is in progress.

This year we’re entertaining the inhabitants of #rockbox and #rockbox-community with two webcam streams from ustream.tv. View both cams at once using rasher’s page.

As it has become somewhat of a little tradition of mine, I’ve put up a little summary of devcon 2008 page to round up the previous very intense weekend we spent in Berlin. And I just feel a need to include the tower picture here as well:

We had an almost two hour discussion today on Rockbox devcon, and we recorded the thing on ustream and you can enjoy it here.

Topics: release 3.0 about 55 minutes

Some little about gsoc2008

GPLv2 discussions about 1h:00 in

Rockbox steering board

Menu and button discussions

Pluginlib action and buttons in plugins in general

Plugin patches in the tracker

Update: Petur’s recording of the same meeting as 146MB MP3.