World Maker Faire 2015

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Great hall wall

We had a great time at the 2015 World Maker Faire. The Great Hall has reopened after renovations.

Robogamelan

Gamelatron was set up on the patio outside the hall and formed a meditative place of respite from the high energy of the rest of the faire.

Moat Boat Paddle Battle

Moat Boat Paddle Battle was hugely popular with their newly built raceway.

Flexible interactive animated arms

There were beautiful interactive flexible robot arms.

Power racing series under the Terrace on the Park

The Terrace on the Park formed a fabulous backdrop for the Power Racing Series.

Limor and 4 Paws Wearables

We caught up with Limor from Adafruit while learning about wearables for pets from Blythe of 4 Paws Wearables.

VEC9

We were completely wowed by the VEC9 vector arcade game. Every aspect of it showed obsessive attention to detail, and the tank controller felt amazing.

cookiebot

This cookiebot was made with the Fizzbit, a USB chargeable vibrobot platform by The Crafty Robot.

Rocket go-cart

The rocket powered go cart was one of the more impressively dangerous projects. There were many more wonders to see, and you can see our full set of pictures from the event in the flickr album.

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Linkdump: September 2015

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Clocks at Maker Faire NY

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Clocks at Maker Faire

The first day of Maker Faire New York was great fun. We’ve found a several great clock projects so far, including this one, featuring image processing running on a Raspberry Pi.

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Our friends at NYC Resistor brought a wonderful papercraft seven segment display clock.

Tom, Massimo and Ahmed

At the end of the day, while talking with Tom and Massimo from Arduino, we ran into another maker with a clock project. Welcome to the maker community, Ahmed!

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Thoughts on OSHW and OSHW certification

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OSHWA, the Open Source Hardware Association, recently released a proposal for what they are calling Open Source Hardware Certification.  With some paraphrasing and handwaving, their proposal boils down to this:

  1. OSHWA will create a new logo and trademark it.
  2. To license this new trademark, you would need to agree to a contract that says:
    1. We will only put this trademark on open source hardware (as defined in the open hardware definition).
    2. If we use the logo otherwise (and do not stop when OSHWA repeatedly asks to stop), we agree to pay a hefty fine.

OSHWA has not yet fleshed out the details — neither the new logo nor the exact contents of that license contract. It’s easy to be cynical about stuff like this. But instead, let’s please give them the benefit of the doubt and suppose that when those details arrive, it turns out that they’ve done a superb job: the contract ends up to be simple, well thought-out, straightforward and does just what it says.

Maybe the new trademarked logo would look something like this mock-up:

placeholder oshwa certified logo

Given all of that, would there be a good case for some people to use this certification process? I have mixed thoughts on it. But on the whole, I’m tending towards a “probably.”

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Photos from Portland Maker Faire

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We had a great time at the Portland Mini Maker Faire at OMSI this weekend.

R2 builders club

It was well attended by humans and robots alike.

There were some great activities including lapidary demonstrations.

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Our Three Fives kit made an appearance in a beautiful giant breadboard at the OSHPark booth.

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We got to see some of the workshop areas at OMSI.

Gravitram

It was great to see our old friend, the Gravitram. The full set of photos is on flickr.

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