10.04.10 – Maker Faire Wrap-Up

After taking a week to catch my breath (and do all the homework I’d been putting off), I’m recording the rest of Maker Faire NY and other news of the past week or so.

First off, Maker Faire was amazing. It was great to connect with so many talented, creative people. ITP (my alma mater) had a great showing, I was very proud. Besides having their own ‘ITP Cafe’ where different students and alumni gave talk on current projects, there were at least 15 other booths manned by ITP alums, including at least 3 editor’s choice awards: Windowfarms by Britta Riley, Open-Source Lion Tracking collars/Ground Lab (Benedetta Piantella and Justin Downs), and….SADbot! by Dustyn Roberts and yours truly.

Our Blue Ribbon for SADbot:

ITP Alum Matt Parker also won the ‘Create the Future’ Award (sponsored by Red Bull) for his amazing project Lumarca. Congrats Matt!

I had a chance to seek away to see a few talks – one on wearables/LilyPad Arduino by Leah Beuchley and Hannah Perner-Wilson of the High/Low Tech group at MIT media lab, and a really interesting talk by John Shimmel (of ITP) on assistive technology (specifically a modded-ps3 controller for an ms patient). I also caught a bit of Eric Rosenthal’s presentation of an Arduino-based CNC machine that ITP is planning to use for in-house circuit board etching. Color me jealous.

In other news, I’ve started breadboarding the 3d-geoboard, which I’ve now re-named the ‘UCube’. I’m using nearly all the inputs on an Arduino Mega (64 of them), so the breadboard is a mess. Took me 3 days to get this far:

Here’s a few more pics from Maker Faire:
Windowfarms:
ShopBot:
Arduino-Based CNC:
High-Low Tech:
Giant Claw Game: