Maker Faire: Technology on your time

Hello everyone, it's been a while since we've blogged huh? Kersten, Beth, George, Debbie, Ryan, Eric and myself headed out to the Maker Faire at the San Mateo Fairgrounds yesterday to see blinky bugs, egg plotters, a giant 18 foot walking robotic giraffe, a fire spitting machine and much much more. I loved it - a place where geekistry and artistry unite! Hopefully we can do more field trips like this in the future!

Kersten and I started off milling around in the main hall. After getting a real steal of a deal with a pile o' seriously strong permanent rare earth magnets (they make very good and somewhat painful earrings), we checked out Bruce Shapiro's nifty machines (www.taomc.com). Bruce Shapiro is an interaction designer / engineer / inventor who designs really neat pieces that fundamentally boil down to 'The Art of Motion Control' (TAOMC). Using old stepper motors off of ebay (stepper motors, unlike servo motors, are open loop motors that you can very accurately send to a specified angular position), he has built things like the eggplotter, which puts my easter egg decorations to shame, and the robotic ribbon dancer. My other favorite from his display was the etch-a-sketch mechanism - he figured out how to 'bit bang' out the parallel port of an old computer, which allows him to covert really amazing patterns and drawings from the computer to the stepper motors which turn the knobs that drive the etch-a-sketch. Soooo cool. I want to try this.



Then, we trotted across to see the blinkybug display (www.blinkybug.com) by ken Murphy, Chief Bugmaker. This would be a really easy and really fun project to do sometime. A blinkybug only needs two LEDs, a NiCad battery and holder, and some guitar strings (or music wire). If you look closely, when the guitar strings are blown by the wind, they close the circuit and ground the LED, making the LED come on! All the parts can be purchased from Digikey for like $10.00 a bug I bet.



There were several (muhahahahahah) potential sponsors for Gatorbotics there yesterday as well, including Metal Supermarkets, Surplus Center, and a Steve Wozniak playing Segway Polo. Kersten used her womanly charm to charm up a conversation with the dude at Metal Supermarkets (apparently they have a location in Redwood City somewhere). Given that aluminum goes for about $4.00 a pound right now, how cool would it be if they could donate, hmm . . . like 25 lbs or so of angle iron, plate, and square tubing? On that note, Beth and Kersten chatted up the people at the Crucible (www.thecrucible.org) with the loud noisemaking red fire engine about welding classes and such. Welding aluminum is a pain in the butt unless you're jimmy, but steel is a great thing to start with! Classes anyone? They're upwards of $300 each for 16-20 hours of instruction (can be done in a weekend). On that note, I'm not sure we can actually set up a welding area AT casti - and especially not in the woodworking shop, but here's an alternative: www.techshop.ws. I ran into this dude named Jim Newton, who wants to open a community prototyping shop in south bay. Once you learn how to use the tools and contribute a membership fee, you're covered to use any of the tools (mill, lathe, welding equipment etc.) there. This might be a great alternative since IDEO insurance unfortunately disallows non IDEO people to use the big tools.

My other favorite picks from the day included LUNAR (the Livermore Unit of the National Association of Rocketry). I have a soft spot for rockets and these guys have some serious stuff going on, like a two stage rocket that they hope to fly up 20 miles from ground. All their rockets are solid fuel (very dangerous since you can't stop the rocket once its started, unless you make it self destruct by blowing it up from inside). Nevertheless, apparently once or twice a year, this group congregates in Black Rock, Nevada to launch something on the order of 300 rockets, everything from Estes kit rockets to giant big momma custom made rockets. Eric and I were reminiscing on the days we spent making our own graphite nozzle and trying to figure out theoretically what the throat area and input and output angles should be. Ahhhh . . . mmmm . . . turning graphite on the lathe . . . (don't do it without someone holding a vacuum cleaner over you).

Final two memorable displays (although there were many more): d.tools and Bathsheba sculpture. D.tools is a Stanford computer science project that is supremely cool. Imagine if you're an interaction designer. You're building a new microwave and you're trying to figure out if it's better for the user to have three buttons and a display screen or five buttons and just two simple LED 7-segment displays. You know nothing about electronics, but you want to build a prototype so that you can invite your friends to try it out. D.tools is a plug and play system that allows you to plug in sensors and actuators and basically mock up a bad-ass prototype without knowing anything. My favorite example that came out of this was built by a dude named Nan (I ran into sooo many people I know, or should know but my name remembering mechanism sucks). Nan built a little prototype that allowed you to 'pour' paint from paint buckets onto a screen to 'mix' colors and then use that color. The 'paint' buckets had tilt sensors in them so that the computer knows when you're pouring, and the LCD screen was also plug and play. I want one of these kits!!! Bathsheba sculpture (www.bathsheba.com) finally, is a 3D sculpture company that takes advantage of modern technology to sculpt AMAZING things - like coral. Kersten and I talked about 3D printing and lots of TLA (three letter acronyms) like SLA (stereolithographic apparatus) and FDM (fuse deposition manufacturing). Imagine being able to squirt little bits of liquid plastic and 'print' a 3D shape from it!

And I haven't even started to talk about the neon sign making demonstration, the tesla coil and the jacob's ladder by John Dyer!

Next year's Maker Faire is definitely going to be on my calendar! See you there again!

Em