Maker Faire is the Greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth — a family-friendly festival of invention, creativity, and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the maker movement.
Part science fair, part county fair, and part something entirely new, Maker Faire is an all-ages gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, engineers, science clubs, authors, artists, students, and commercial exhibitors. All of these people come to Maker Faire to show what they have made and to share what they have learned.
Explore below to see the best of Maker Faire, and head to makerfaire.com for more information.
The second annual Tampa Bay Mini Maker Faire is coming right up in two weeks, on Saturday, March 23, in Hudson, Florida. They’ve got an interesting and diverse group of makers signed up already, and their call for makers is open until March 15. Seen above is an interactive installation from Urban Congo, a group […]
The Maker Education Initiative is looking for new Maker Corps recruits. The application deadline has been extended to March 8 at midnight so if you are a young adult with an interest in making and looking for summer employment in maker education and leadership, you’d better act quickly.
On this episode of DiResta, Jimmy makes a burly bulletin board from dumpster-dived wood and coat hooks he fabricated himself.
The last 12 months have been a busy time for Seb Lee-Delisle. With a buzzing schedule of speaking, creative coding workshops, exhibitions and public events, it looks like this is the year he’s found his feet as a digital artist.
His path has taken many turns. He started by dropping out of a computer science degree, then hopping around various creative digital disciplines, from desktop publishing to music production. In the early 2000s he began to carve out a career in multimedia production for the web. A growing client list led him to set up his own agency, Plug-in Media. But client work began to take its toll:
“We were doing probably the best work you could imagine, very creative, for high-profile clients, but the thing I realised was, even with the best clients, ” he said. “I only spent about 10 percent of my time doing the stuff I really wanted to do and the other 90 percent negotiating, in meetings, scheduling, budgeting, and team management – all this extra stuff, which I wasn’t that interested in doing. It was frustrating; I just wanted to do that 10 perent.”
When 13-year-old Tahoe native Logan LaPlante takes the stage for his TEDx talk at the University of Nevada, what follows are 11 minutes of eloquent, confident wisdom on his style of education, which he calls “hackschooling.” Here’s a sample: I’m not tied to one particular curriculum, and I’m not dedicated to one particular approach. I […]
Recently, we unveiled our Scout pre-order site to the world. Scout is a hassle-free, do-it-yourself home security system. You can check it out at www.scoutalarm.com. We took a gamble with the Scout project and “rolled our own” crowdfunding site. Similar to Lockitron, Scout would not be allowed on Kickstarter since our products haven’t been produced yet, so we had to forgo that avenue for fundraising and strike out on our own. Luckily, Lockitron made our path a little easier by open sourcing its project.
The Scout project is, thus far, not wildly oversubscribed like Lockitron, but we’re doing well for being two weeks in. What we’ve realized in the process is that there’s not a lot of information available on what it takes to roll your own crowdfunding site. We’re one of only a handful of companies that has taken a shot at it, so we want to pass along what we’re learning as we go. Hopefully, this post will make it a little easier for the next company that follows behind us.
Last year, at Maker Faire in San Mateo, we launched a global competition to find ways to reduce the cost of producing parts on a 3D printer that uses plastic filament as its feedstock.
3D printing holds great promise for prototyping and small-volume production, but it has the potential for high volume production as well. Over time, the software interfaces that control these machines will improve, the number of files available for printing will increase exponentially, and the precision of the machines will be indistinguishable from parts made on an injection molding machine. However, to become competitive with conventional manufacturing processes, the unit cost of each part produced by 3D printers must be reduced.
Low-cost 3D printing, including Up! Plus, Makerbot’s Replicator II, Cubify, Printrbot, Solidoodle, and the Ultimaker, range in price from $399-$2200. These machines require extruded plastic filament that costs about $40-$54 per kg. This is between 5-10 times the cost of the raw resin pellets.
