World Maker Faire New York
Laser Cut Couture with Diana Eng
Designer Diana Eng shows us some samples from her Laser Lace collection. By using a laser etcher on fabric she creates intricate lace designs inspired by the cells of plants and flowers.
Kinect Robots & Gadgeteer: Microsoft at Maker Faire (video)
See what Microsoft had to offer in their tent at World Maker Faire New York 2011. Microsoft sponsors Maker Faire and we’re excited to see them embrace the maker movement. Since bringing their Gadgeteer prototyping platform to Maker Faire last year, they’ve seen makers start using their .NET-programmable modular devices, inspiring them to make the hardware more widely available. Microsoft also brought their Kinect robots built on the Robotics Developer Studio 4 platform. They’re running a competition for robot concepts ($10K prize) built on RDS4.
Make: Live 9/28/11 — 3D Modeling & Printing (video)
Make: Live episode 17 features 3D modeling and printing and was live from the MakerBot workshop in Brooklyn, NY. Learn about the software and hardware toolchain for realizing your imagination in 3D objects in this archived episode. In the clip above, MakerBot co-founder Bre Pettis talks about exciting developments in their extruder technology and fields 3D printing questions from the audience.
Paint Your Circuits with Bare Conductive
At World Maker Faire, I finally got to see paintable circuits in action. Matt Johnson spoke with me about the conductive paint that people were using and showed me a few projects that demonstrate the possibilities. The business cards they brought were printed with a swath of conductive paint suitable for some home experimenting.
Bare Conductive grew out of the founders’ graduate studies at the Innovation Design Engineering Course at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. The version of their conductive paints they had at Maker Faire is similar to the skin paint featured in a music video of a few years back.
The paints can be used to create traditional circuits, and for signalling with the Arduino. Since the company has just passed its’ regulatory approvals, we can expect to see many new experiments as the community of users grows.
Browser-Based 3D Modeling with Tinkercad
Back a few years ago, if you wanted to design a 3D object, there were only a few options. Not many of those options were free or easy. TinkerCAD appears to be one of the many new modeling options that promises both free and easy. At World Maker Faire, I had a chance to see the browser-based TinkerCAD in action. It does appear that it is easy to operate, and free, if you can get it to run in the browser on your computer. TinkerCAD requires Windows Vista or OS X 10.6, so that will work on one computer at my house and one in my classroom.
World Maker Faire Timelapse 2011 (video)
Maxwell Cohn has produced some mesmerizing time-lapse videos, and we’re glad he edited one together especially for World Maker Faire 2011. Pay special attention to the tilt-shift shots taken from above.
