Tales of Maker Faire
| May 21st, 2007There were some amazing people at Maker Faire. I tend to associate their respective talents with their willingness to dig through piles looking for gems they can use in their projects, so I am certainly biased in some ways. But the folks that did show up and were mesmerized by the stuff really made the whole event worth while. Of course, the ACCRC got plenty of PR from all those happy stuff diggers…
This lady and man took the electron microscope we had on hand. She said she was going to use it to cut chips in her garage. So happy someone took it to put it to good use!
The actual stripping of the thing took a lot of work. Not sure why they took off the springs before moving it, but they really knew what they were doing here, so we got out of their way. We tend to default to listening to people who are familiar with whatever it is a machine does, because we usually have no clue ourselves. You wouldn’t believe the amazing things that show up on a daily basis, and we are never able to identify it all. A lot of the stuff we brought to day one of Maker Faire came from a bio lab, hence the microscope. Most of the bio equipment was savaged for its controller cards and motors.
The piles dwindled as the day went on, though we never ran out of junk for people to fish through. Leslie was stalwart in his ability to stay put and keep people cordial in the wire pit. Of course, the previous day his time was taken up with tattooing James’ neck. Later in the day, he did get to ride the scooter around for fun. Leslie is the fellow who did all the artwork at our booth, including the art for the T-shirts and the Goatse ad in the Onion. He also did the terrific background painting of Silicon Death Valley.
This lady here, talking to Leslie, was furiously pulling SCSI cables from out piles of junk. When I went over to ask her what she was going to do with all of this ancient, thick cables, she smiled and pointed to her lapel. In the larger version of this picture, you can see that she’s got a dragonfly broach on her shirt. She makes these, she said, by pulling the mesh shielding out of the SCSI cables, and then coloring it in with Sharpies. Truly a brilliant idea for reuse, and one that we all thought was highly unique. Thus, we gave her a bag and helped her gather as many SCSI cables as we could untangle.
The best spot at the show, however, had to be the play room. The things people did and made in there were breath taking. It’s rare that an event in the open air actually fosters creativity. These types of conferences and expos are rarely about actually building and doing, they’re more often about listening to people talk, then watching as a small subset of those in attendance attempt to do some sort of timed stunt, like coding a game in 24 hours, or some such triviality. My favorite sight in the play room was actually a very crude and simple little ramp that this kid made. He couldn’t have been more than 5 years old, and he was having a ball rolling a wooden dowel down this foam ramp, all the while unknowingly learning very important lessons about physics. Of course, 80% of the stuff used in the play room came from the ACCRC.
Second, here are some pictures from Maker Faire’s second day.
A savage torrent of cables and switches attacked and subdued poor Jamie. She showed up at Re-Make and built a phone-based microphon-stereo-bike mash up. I’ll cut the video into coherency some day.
On the second day, the ACCRC brought down a big gaylord of foam. This fellow constructed some sort of woven squid-like entity from it. Lots of it was used along with wooden cutouts from used models to build towers of sorts. All manner of interesting things were created in the play room, like the heli-pad below, and the fight scene on the left. Not sure where those little plastic figures came from originally, but I’m glad we brought them to donate for the play room!
V met an alien!
They had their photos taken for posterity.
And then… THEY DANCED!
The end of the day, Sunday came quickly, and everyone packed up their stuff and went home. Except for us, Cyclecide, Combots, Mousetrap, and the lovely Neverwas Haul. SRL took a while to unload too, but that was probably due to having to fill out paperwork on the fire that caught during their show.
Fortunately, lots of people came by to help us clean up and throw everything back into gaylords. The Play Room folks did a great job cleaning up their end of the bargain too, and we didn’t have to work too terribly hard to get everything ready. Instead, we had to wait on our trucks being emptied back at home base so we could make second trips. Meanwhile, Microsoft parked it’s 18-wheeler right in the way of everyone else…
And thus, in true ACCRC fashion, we adapted. Instead of sitting around and bitching, we took advantage of the best toy we brought. An electric scooter James, Alan, and Dave had whipped up in 20 minutes, Friday night before Maker Faire. They intentionally geared it low and slow so no one would be killed by riding it through the crowds of Makers.
So, this little wagon that did all of 5 MPH was my steed during the show. I made a lot of friends riding it slowly through the expo halls. We charged it all night, and the damn thing never once ran out of juice, even though it was running almost constantly for 8 hours. Probably even longer.
The secret to it’s ease of construction? Speaker wire, metal slot connectors, and a complete lack of anything between the batteries and the motor. Not sure where the motor came from, but the batteries were savaged from uninterrupted power supplies, like you use on a computer, of course. Plug in the two ends of the battery, and it goes forward. Swap the two leads back and forth, it goes in reverse.
We tooled around the entire San Mateo fairgrounds until the truck returned. It was a hoot! Anyway, the rest of our photos are in a 
Flickr set, so go have a look!
