Welcome to the Maker Faire Rome live blog! We will be taking pictures of cool things all weekend during this event, and uploading pictures and videos here on this blog post. Refresh this page frequently and we will put new stuff at the top! I you haven’t be following along, you’ll want to scroll down to the bottom to read from the beginning.
Ciao belli!
Booths for maker favorites Prusa Research and Raspberry Pi were packed all weekend long!
Drone drops and retrieves a water quality sampler for hard-to-reach areas.
Harmonograph drawing machine
Roof vents transformed to electrical generators
More cool projects from Politecnico di Torino: Re-creating a 1920s wooden seaplane with modern composites and motors; land speed record bicycle with electronic gear shifting. They also have a speed record for arm-powered vehicles!
Sapieinza University of Rome is all over this Faire with impressive projects. Here’s a rover bot from their aerospace students, cruising the fair grounds.
Roma Tre University with spectrographic analysis of paintings for historical reconstruction, restorations, and presumably detecting art forgery!
Teams from Università Iuav di Venezia showed off their dynamically balanced seismic retrofit structures (architecture) and utÈros redesigned vaginal speculum (medical devices).
Italy produced silk for 900 years before losing their industry to cheap imports in modern times. The Tecno Seta (Techno Silk) project seeks to reboot Italian silk production with new mulberry plantations for silkworms and new machines based on Arduino and Raspberry Pi for spinning threads and weaving fabrics.
Omniwheel bot from Politecnico di Torino, which had a fantastic presence with all kinds of engineering programs.
Planetary rover and sphero-bot from Politecnico di Torino
Shark blimp-bot from University of Salerno
Saw tons of cool robots today that we hadn’t found yet! Dog Challenge obstacle course is a small part of a big exhibit by I-RIM (Instituto di Robotica e Macchine Intelligenti).
Apogeo Space is building these modular satellite comms boards using 169MHz LoRa frequencies for 500 km range at less than1 milliamp power draw. Perfect for your pico-satellite project like this 1/3rd-unit Cubesat.
Haptic gloves for VR, built by Manuel Bottini – Bodynodes.
Sof-Up automated sofa lifter for Roombas and the elderly, controlled by Alexa, engineered by Claudio Cognazzi
Boards galore — and Aperol spritzes on tap — at the top of the four-story Gazometro tank tower. Elio IOT dev board; Cortex Neuron-1 CNC controller by Luca Cortelli; HexberryV.eu FPGA board.
Slunaz filament joiner for DIY filament makers! Recommended in Joshua Taylor’s Make: magazine article about DIY PET filament, “Pultruder Alert,” Make: Volume 88.
Capturing artworks and archaeological artifacts with 3D scanning and sharing them via 3D printing could be a national pastime here. Francesco Colasanti got an award from Italy’s president for his work on Archelogia del Domani (Archaeology of Tomorrow).
Lots of assistive tech projects on offer. Prosthetics include Together We Ride arm prosthetic for mountain biking (blogged earlier on Make), and E-nable Italy, with game controller rigs and prosthetics for kids, printed by a network of volunteers.
Add-Mate wheelchair assist motor senses the force the user is applying to the handrims and gives a directional boost.
Mattia Tacchetto shows off his lawnmower robots. He’s buddies with Federico with the 3D printed motorcycle yesterday!
Another impressive showing is in food and agriculture tech, also not a surprise for Italy! Yeastime is a fermentation accelerator by a group of PhD candidate buddies, that uses ultrasonic sound to stimulate yeast organisms for 30% faster ferment times. They’ve contracted with their first brewery, mounting transducers directly on the jacket of the fermentation tank.
Istituto Alberghiero Costa Smeralda is primarily known for training hotel and restaurant staff, but lately they’ve been exploring extruded and 3d-printed food. After discovering the ideal texture, they have begun creating all manner of intricate shapes and innovative forms, such as the deconstructed tiramisu shown in the first picture. Cheese, biscuits, and even meat can all be extruded once their appropriate consistency has been determined.
Cardboard sculptures by Sergio Gotti, inspired by the Italo Calvino novel Invisible Cities.
Circuit Canvas electronic layout software by Oyvind Dahl — kind of like Fritzing but web-based, with better schematics and tidier breadboard layouts. Generates vector art, and you can import Fritzing parts too. Web sharing lets you collaborate on projects or use it for teaching, and you can export to a variety of image formats. Nice work!
Yuji Tabata completed the Maker Faire trifecta — Tokyo, Bay Area, and now Rome — with his DIY split-flap displays, AfterAI Flaps.
Universo In Expansione — Shape-shifting hats by Rome/Venice artist Sabrina Baldacchini.
Selected pieces by various Italian design and fashion schools.
Multimedia artwork Tessellis by Angelo Bonello, music by Francesca Formisanoff. 18 animated LED panels represent animals and abscracts composed of tangram shapes, all arranged in in AfterEffects, with pixels driven by MadMapper, and GrandMA console to control strobes and backlighting.
It’s Italy, so design, art, and fashion make strong showings. 3D printed furniture and lamps (in plastic) and vases (in ceramic), in the exhibit Digital Fabrication Made in Italy.
Mark and Louis, aka Paz Aerospace, have created Angela, the double-haloed flying machine. Inspired by street luges, the team added an Arduino-controlled pair of fans with the aim of enabling bursts of — if not at some point sustained — flight. Power tool batteries allow quick changes and for the power source to be placed near the motors for efficency and balance.
Mario Behling is here repping FOSSASIA, Asia’s open source technology organization (Bunnie Huang is an adviser), and sharing a couple of their cool open source designs: an inexpensive programmable LED badge with Android app, and this ESP-based Pocket Science Lab board with wave generators, logic analyzers, variable power source, and sockets for UART, SPI, Grove, and I2C connections for adding all kinds of sensors. You can use it as an oscilloscope, multimeter, and lots more, with your Android phone or PC.
Medere, a platform for scanning the body and 3D printing orthotics, casts and splints, prosthetics, etc. With some cool experimental prints of variable-density TPU achieved by tweaking the fill settings. As in the USA, medical devices require specific materials and compliance with government regulations to insure safety.
GoalBeeper, engineered by Giovanni Massafra with a Raspberry Pi Pico inside, serves as your soccer match scoreboard but also keeps track of a goalie’s minutes to manage goalkeeper changes in amateur matches — evidently a source of some confusion and argument in Italy and other soccer-crazed nations of the world. Well played Giovanni!
Speaking of soccer crazed, here’s Keith’s favorite moment of the morning: the first goal scored by autonomous humanoid robots from RoboCup, in the 11am match between Team SPQR (love it!) versus Team HTWK before a very appreciative crowd!
Entirely 3D printed motorcycle by Federico Rodighiero, after nearly 10 years of development. Major frame elements are PLA, tires are TPU of course, and the seat and other high-touch areas are special COC filament (cyclic olefin copolymer) typically used for optical and medical applications.
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