Maker Faire - updated

Entry posted by SpiceWare October 21, 2007

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Met up with some friends in Austin on Saturday to attend Maker Faire. We had a blast. I took a few photos that you can find here. The photos were taken with my iPhone, the quality is much better than I was expecting(my old phone took crappy photos).

Ok - now that I've slept, more about Maker Faire

Maker Faire is a giant Craft Fair, Science Fair, Hacker Fair and Art Show all rolled into one. I should have taken more photos, but was so wrapped up in everything I didn't think to pull out the iPhone very often. It's been held twice before in the Bay Area, the Austin event was the first time it was held outside of California. We plan to return next year if they bring it back to Austin.

I did take photos of two performances - the Life Size Mouse Trap, which is based on the children's game, and the Diet Coke w/Mentos fountain show. They did have a hiccup with Mouse Trap, a bowling ball jumped the track at one point so the MC said "Let's pretend that didn't happen, la la la la la" while the helpers reset the portion of the trap prior to the snafu. Even with that, it was impressive to see in action. I'm sure you've seen Diet Coke w/Mentos on You Tube before - seeing it live was much more impressive, the smell of Diet Coke just permeates. As you can see in the photos, the kids went nuts playing in the coke fountain! I'm sure their parents had a fun drive home :lol: To create each fountain they use a 2 liter bottle of Diet Coke and 6 Mentos in a custom dropping mechansim that sits over the top of the bottle. Using strings they release the Mentos and a stream up to 20 feet tall erupts out of the bottle. They said it took about 3 hours to set up, for a show that lasted about 3 minutes. They also said regular Coke works as well, but the Diet Coke is less sticky and was the deciding factor as they get drenched doing the show.

There were a lot of neat tools demoed at the show, I just added a photo of a piece of wood that was laser etched. The machine ran a laser beam back and forth over the wood at a resolution of 600 DPI. The laser strength could be varied, enabling it to etch different depths, including all the way thru the wood(the original piece of wood was solid, no cut out sections). There were also computer controlled wood working machines, 3D printers and so on.

One section had a number of do-it-yourself kits, including video game systems, solar powered toys, LED clocks, and craft kits. Even saw a game kit from Joe Grand's Grand Idea Studio. All the kits are available online. I picked up a kit for one of my nephews for Xmas. Would have picked up more, but they didn't take American Express and I don't use other credit cards anymore(since doing this my balances have finally been dropping, the AMEX bill must be paid in full each month). They had a bunch of work areas set up so you could build your kits after purchasing them. Sony had a displayin this section for their eBook. The display on it is very impressive, but no Mac software yet.

The haker section had some pretty fun stuff on display. I liked the bike tire LED displays. The interactive demo with Theremin "guitars" sounded really good. There was even an Atari heavy-sixer in one project. The guy hacked it up and merged it with an old Realistic(Radio Shack brand) keyboard synthesizer where the control switches and paddle controllers interacted with the sound generated by the keyboard.

They had a few Art Cars on display, but that's nothing new to somebody from Houston.