Tag Archives: makerfaire

The 2010 Open Hardware Summit

Picture 9

We are helping to sponsor the 2010 Open Hardware Summit, which is happening next month, Thursday September 23, at the New York Hall of Science. That’s two days before, and at the same location as, Maker Faire NY.

The summit agenda has just been posted: it’s a full day of talks and discussions about open source hardware, its meaning and its implications. I’ll be part of the panel discussing open hardware licenses and norms which will also be taking questions online– so you can participate even if you can’t make it to the event.

Tickets for the event are on sale now and include a 1-day pass to Maker Faire. We’ll hope to see you there!

Maker Faire Detroit Pictures and Highlights

Maker Faire Detroit

Maker Faire Detroit was a blast! It was held at The Henry Ford, which is a museum worth visiting in its own right. It is an amazing place we didn’t get to see nearly enough of and would love to go back and visit again.


Maker Faire Detroit


In addition to providing a history of American manufacturing and a showcase of amazing vehicles, they have Mold-A-Rama machines!

Maker Faire Detroit


As usual, one of the most exciting things about Maker Faire for us was meeting and talking with other makers. We got to talk to the participants in an aluminum casting demonstration, who were using foam that was carved onsite with a CNC router.

We also really enjoyed our neighbors at the faire with the Note Grinder, a machine that read player piano rolls optically and used door lock actuators to press the keys on a synth keyboard. We were impressed with how pleasant it was to listen to (even for two days straight!) especially with the rhythm accompaniment provided by the actuator motors.


Maker Faire Detroit


The fine folks at Context Furniture were passionate about the renaissance of craftsmanship in Detroit and had great stories of reclaimed buildings.


Maker Faire Detroit


We were tickled to see several Evil Mad Science kits integrated into Maker Faire projects: a Peggy 2 being used as a readerboard, Wes and Don‘s 3D POV display with a Peggy 2LE, and Matt Mets’ Meggy Jr Sr.


Maker Faire Detroit


Our Eggbots performed like champs, and we even tried out engraving on glass holiday ornaments during the faire. The engraver scratched away the paint on the surface, and as you can see in the top picture, they were beautiful when lit from within by an LED.

We didn’t come close to seeing everything, but we’ve put pictures of some of what we saw in a set on flickr.

We hope to see you at Maker Faire New York!

Evil Mad Science in Sacramento, Santa Clara and Detroit

Eggbot

Yes, we’re venturing out of the lab:


Saturday, July 17, we’ll be demonstrating Egg-Bot at the California State Fair in Sacramento. We’ll be in the Industrial & Technology Education building.


Sunday, July 18, we’ll be taking Tabletop Pong (and maybe Tennis for Two) to California Extreme in Santa Clara, CA. California Extreme is an event with a terribly vague name that is probably your only chance to play Gauntlet, Orbiter-1, and Hyperball on free-play!


July 31-August 1, we’ll be in Detroit, MI at Maker Faire with Bruce Shapiro and Egg-Bot.


We hope to see you there!

EggBot photo from San Mateo Maker Faire 2010 by madichan (licensed under cc by-nc).

Mini-Maker Faire Monday!

INFORUM is hosting Mark Frauenfelder (BoingBoinger and editor of Make Magazine) and Adam Savage (Mythbuster) on June 14th at 6:00pm and we’re making an appearance at the Mini Maker Faire afterwards. We’re bringing our updated tabletop Pong, so if you didn’t get to play it at Maker Faire, here’s your chance.

The event is being held at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. You can get more info and tickets here. Hope to see you there!

Improving Tabletop Pong

Tabletop Pong-- Updated - 04

This weekend we brought our updated Tabletop Pong game to Maker Faire, where it survived two hard days of play by hundreds and hundreds of attendees. We were amazed by the reactions to it– particularly that such young and old people alike enjoyed playing it so much.

Of course, our first version back in January was a bit more iffy, and might not have survived a couple of hours at the fair. Here, we discuss the upgrades in some detail, complete with video and– now that it is working well –design files.
Continue reading Improving Tabletop Pong

DIY Fever: Heading to Maker Faire

It’s a busy week at the labs here. We’re getting ready for Maker Faire this weekend in San Mateo, CA– the biggest, baddest, and most awesomest DIY festival of the year.

We’ll be showcasing an updated version of our mechanical Pong game. We’ve added a curved playing field, new user-friendly knobs, and a host of other improvements that we’ll plan to write about at a later date. We hope you’ll come by and try it out–we’ll be on the west side of the Expo hall.

Tabletop Pong - 92
Some of the other projects that we’ve taken to Maker Faire in the last few years include our Interactive LED Dining Table, CandyFab, Bristlebots, Interactive LED Coffee Table, Peggy 2, and Meggy Jr RGB.

We’re also participating in the Open Source Hardware Panel, on Saturday at 1 pm at the Innovation Stage at the south end of the Expo Hall.

Eggbot kit - preview 1

We’ll have much more to say about this later, but we’re thrilled to announce our new collaboration with Bruce Shapiro, Ben Trombley, and Brian Schmalz. While we’re demonstrating the Tabletop-Pong game, Bruce and friends will be giving a sneak peek at the results of our collaboration: a fantastic new version of the Eggbot kit, which we are preparing for release as an open source kit sometime this summer.

Eggbot kit - preview 2

You can sign up here for more info about the kit, and you can try out the Eggbots– or just see them in action –in the center of the Expo Hall.

Lastly, to help get everyone else in the DIY mood, we’re having a DIY Fever sale over at the store, with 20% off of Evil Mad Science open-source kit favorites such as the Larson Scanner, Meggy Jr RGB and the Bulbdial Clock, and 10% off of everything else!

Happy hacking, and we’ll hope to see you all at the Faire!

Upcoming events: RoboGames and Maker Faire

Hey Guys!

Neat-o stuff to do in the San Francisco bay area:

Next weekend, go to RoboGames, Fri-Sun, Apr 23-25, 2010 at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. It’s the worlds largest robot competition, featuring combat robots, humanoid robots, art bots, soccer bots, sumo bots, and more. We’ll be there as exhibitors, with kits from our web store and other goodies like pager motors for making BristleBots!


In May, we’ll be heading back to the San Mateo Fairgrounds for the Bay Area Maker Faire 2010— our favorite event of the year. It’s the world’s biggest DIY festival, and well, there’s just too much to describe. You have to see it for yourself. We’ll be there showing off one of this year’s Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories blog projects, the Playable game of Tabletop Pong— you can come by and try it out.

Hope to see you there!

Young Makers at the Exploratorium

We’re thrilled to be heading back to the Exploratorium this Saturday for the first Young Makers event put on by Make, the Exploratorium, TechShop, and Pixar.

Here’s a little bit about the program from Make’s writeup: “It’s a first experiment in a new program we call Young Makers, in which we intend to create an infrastructure to nurture kids who want to learn by making, beyond what they can do with construction kits. We hope to fulfill a dire need: satisfying a little bit of what shop classes used to do before they, lamentably, started getting booted out of schools.”

We hope to see you there this Saturday between 11 am and 3 pm. There will be BristleBot building going on, as well as BlinkyBug building with our friend Ken Murphy. Ken also has an exhibit called A History of the Sky that is at the Exploratorium through the end of the month and is definitely worth seeing. If you can’t make it this weekend, they’ve got a great line-up of folks for the last Saturday of each month leading up to Maker Faire:


February 27th: Wearables & Soft Circuitry — Adrian Freed

March 27th: Make Your Own Kind of Music — Walter Kitundu and Krys Bobrowski

April 24th: Motors & Mechanisms — Brad Prether and Ernie Fosselius

Update: Dale Dougherty posted an article about the event here.

Fabbing at Maker Faire

MakerBot Tour


CandyFab managed to infiltrate a couple of the other 3D printing projects at Maker Faire this past weekend. That’s me above, at the MakerBot booth, in my brand-new MakerBot shirt, explaining MakerBot to some Maker Faire visitors. Below, Kenji’s Fab at Home sports a brand new CandyFab vinyl racing sticker. CandyFab itself performed like a champ, printing candy and raising blood sugar levels all weekend while we talked shop with all the other fabbers.


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