This Saturday and Sunday is World Maker Faire New York 2016. Every Faire brings a new collection of jaw-dropping projects made from a diverse collection of makers. Here are few reasons you won’t want to miss the show this weekend.
The Orion Fredericks Experience:
Orion is an incredible artist who works with metal and fire. He’ll be bringing Gilly, a green-flame-spewing metallic sculpture roughly the size of a large horse. It’s loud, it’s beautiful, and it’s awesome.
Green Bronx Machine:
This group will be building and featuring an onsite vertical pop-up farm — 3 towers featuring over 100 edible plants. Founder Stephen Ritz will also be speaking, and wrote a piece in the latest issue of Make: magazine about food, making, and community.
Power Racing Series:
Always an attendee favorite, this sanctioned racing league features high-speed action using hot-rodded ride-on-top kids’ toys. The creativity and engineering has stepped up greatly; this year brings the biggest collection of race entries yet. Don’t miss the newest course obstacle: an axle-busting launch ramp. And their autonomous division (yes, DIY autonomous racing) is moving up by leaps and bounds since last year’s debut.
Aerials Sports League:
Each Maker Faire, the ASL helps raise the bar of drone competition. Racing and combat using innovative courses, clever designs, and crazy-fast speeds make this a must-see.
Orbital Rendersphere 3.0:
An oversized, curved, spinning apparatus equipped with over 500 multicolor LEDs. When activated, it spins at 450RPM, the LEDs quickly changing in sequence to the movement, to give the effect of a large spherical LED display. Remember the scene in where the Rebels projected the hologram of the Death Star? This is like that.
One-Day Brick Pizza Oven:
I’m excited about this one because I’m building it. This one-day brick oven is one of the projects in the latest issue of Make:, and I’ll show you how to build it yourself. It works great; the photo is the oven in my own back yard and I use it all the time.
Grilled Cheese Dispensing Robots:
Mr. Goodwich is a vending machine for hot grilled cheese sandwiches. It is controlled via a web application and allows people to order a sandwich, check their place in the queue and notify them when their sandwich is ready for pickup.
It uses pneumatics, steppers, electric griddles and is beaglebone black controlled. The sandwiches are moved around with pushers, cooked and packaged inside the machine. All food contact surfaces are cleanable and are constructed of food safe materials.
Building Microscopes with BioBus:
People love coming to Maker Faire because we let you learn hands-on by building cool projects at the event. BioBus, a traveling science education laboratory, invites you to come aboard at the Faire and make a microscope.
HONK NYC!
At the end of the first day of last year’s Faire, I heard a distant, rhythmic beating. From the gates of the show, a group of drummers slowly appeared, marching their way, step by step, through the main promenade. As they passed, attendees instinctively gathered behind, marching through the NYSCI grounds, out the back gate, and to the incredible and humungous Unisphere, where, awaiting them was…
Diet Coke & Mentos Show:
Building from last year’s Unisphere shows, the EepyBird duo will be presenting at the landmark site at 530pm on both Saturday and Sunday. Don’t miss this.
MakerHealth:
Some of the most inspiring innovation coming out of the maker community is in the health arena. MakerHealth and MakerNurse will be showing off four kits at Maker Faire for health providers to prototype equipment specifically suited to their very own needs.
TrotBot:
Just look at this thing! A horse-inspired, galloping wooden beast.
Cirque Amongus:
Unique cycles for patrons of the Faire to try out, including party bikes that multiple people ride on all facing each other and dicycles — large wheels with a recumbant swing in the middle.
Interactive Art Collective — ITP Inspired Experiments:
NYU’s ITP program hosts some incredibly talented technology-focused artists, and they’ll be bringing a group of them to the Faire to show off their creations this weekend. Shown here:
The Rube Telephone, a Rube Goldberg machine that tangibly processes and translates conversation between two people, creating a dynamic multi-sensory experience using various old and new technologies and producing unexpected outcomes.
Wildgrid:
This group is creating a family of gadgets that harvests energy from your everyday life to take your mobile devices off-the-grid. They currently have three device prototypes that harvest electricity from different sources: a kinetic charger that harvests electricity from motion (closing/opening doors, riding a bike, etc), a microbial charger that harvests electricity from bacteria that decomposes organic matter (bacteria in houseplants, compost, gardens, etc), and a solar charger that generates electricity from the sun.
Tesla Instrument Family:
Remote controlled traditional musical instruments fitted with mechanical devices and various interfaces. Interfaces include motion sensors, vibration activation, servo control, and various buttons.
Grant Imahara:
One of my favorite guys will be at the Faire; watch his presentation on Saturday at 11:30am. Secret location!
Making and the Bio Frontier:
One of our many awesome presentations, this is an interesting subject that we’ll be exploring more in the upcoming year, presented by a great group of panelists.
RadioShack’s Drone-Building Workshop:
Build your own drone with Radio Shack. This free activity requires pre-registration, so jump on it before it fills up.
Wazer:
You know you want a benchtop waterjet cutter. Wazer will be showing their prototype, on Kickstarter now, at the Faire. I’ve seen it in person and can attest that it’s very, very attractive.
Cyberknitics:
A wearable that turns knitting into music.
Sprite Spacecraft-on-a-Chip:
Sprite is a cheap and entirely open-sourced spacecraft designed to facilitate dramatically improved access, participation, and collaboration in space. Each 3.5 x 3.5 cm Sprite features four solar panels, a CC430 microcontroller and radio, gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, temperature sensor, two sun sensors, and a set of torque coils.
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