The nominations are now closed and the polls are open! Tell your friends, family, and hackerspace comrades. Vote to determine which of our sixteen nominees will receive a MAKE Magazine Industry Maker Award at Maker Faire New York (Sept 29 & 30).
For easy of repair and a design mindful of same, we nominate Epilog Laser for the 2012 Makey Awards in the Repair Friendly category.
There are a lot of reasons to love the Rancilio. It’s got a powerful pump to push water through densely packed, finely ground coffee. It’s made of chromed steel, and the boiler and portafilter are made of heavy marine-grade brass. And, for espresso hackers, the Silvia stands above other machines because it’s easy to modify. In many ways, it’s like a pre-1960 automobile. The electronics are simple, with no microchips, digital readouts, or transistors. The steel cover can be removed with an ordinary Phillips-head screwdriver. And once you take the cover off, you see that there’s plenty of room in there. It’s easy to access all the inner workings of the machine.
Founded in Shikuoza, Japan in 1946, Kabushiki gaisha Tamiya was originally a sawmill and architectural lumber company that made wooden ship models as a sideline. Their first plastic model, released in 1960, was a 1/800 scale battleship Yamato. Today, Tamiya manufactures R/C sea, air, and land vehicles, robots, educational materials, and a line of modeling tools, paints, and accessories in addition to their traditional scale model line.
Audio equipment company Mackie is best known for its PA speakers and mixers. Now they’re also known as a Makey Award Nominee, in the Best Documentation category.
Last year, when Phil wrote his widely-read Why Arduino Won column, searching “arduino” on the Atmel website didn’t return even a single hit. Since that time, Atmel has started taking notice, linking out to Arduino resources from their “Education” pages, issuing their own press releases to support important Arduino-related events, sponsoring Arduino-themed contests, and more. They joined us at BAMF 2012 and we are looking forward to seeing them, again, at World Maker Faire NY at the end of this month.
Intel has many charitable giving programs, but their “Intel Involved” Matching Grant Program (which awards employees’ volunteer hours at eligible organizations with matching funds) has had a special impact in the hackerspace community.
