Maker Faire
DIY projects, how-tos, and inspiration from the workshops and minds of geeks, makers, and hackers @ Make: magazine
Updated: 3 weeks 3 days ago
Lumarca on Display at Eyebeam
Lumarca is a projection-based 3D volumetric display, which is collaboration between Albert Hwang, Matt Parker, and Elliot Woods. In 2010, they were the winners of Red Bull’s “Create the Future” contest at World Maker Faire New York. With a height of fifteen feet, the latest iteration of the Lumarca concept is the tallest yet and will be on display at Eyebeam in New York City starting tomorrow night.
Lumarca at Eyebeam
Thursday, January 12, 2012 – Saturday, February 4, 2012
Opening party Thursday, January 12, 6pm – 8pm
Eyebeam
540 West 21st Street, NYC
Categories: By the hour, Creative
An Aussie Maker Faire
Austrailia’s very first Maker Faire is happening next Saturday, January 14th, at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
The Melbourne Mini Maker Faire is being organized by Paul Szymkowiak, Andy Gelme, and the members of Melbourne’s Connected Community Hackerspace. CCH is a not-for-profit association of hardware hobbyists and software programmers. They have a variety of digital fabrication tools and meet regularly out of a garage. A number of them, like Jon Oxer and Marc Alexander from freetronics.com, will be individual makers at the Faire.
Who else will be showing and sharing? The CCH’s Maker Faire blogroll is brimming with recent profiles of participating makers, like Malcolm Faed, Peter Barratt, Maria Meza, and Andee Napiorkowski. CCH is planning on around 30 makers, and are still open to accepting some last-minute entries.
MAKE contributor and noise maker Brian McNamara
MAKE will be there too… Author Brian McNamara will be crewing the MAKE table, and showing off some of his great musical instrument projects.
NOTE: We are looking for more Melbourne makers who might have a completed MAKE magazine project to show who would be game to help Brian at the MAKE table. Leave a comment below and we’ll ping you back!
If you just want to attend, tickets are free of charge—however they need you to register online in advance as numbers are strictly limited.
Categories: By the hour, Creative
Open MAKE in 2012
Toy Take Apart at the Exploratorium Tinkering Studio's Open MAKE
Start 2012 by crossing your “Ts” with the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio. Twenty Twelve begins with four tantalizing T-themes for the Tinkering Studio’s series of Open MAKE events. The first “T,” on Saturday, January 21, is Toys, and will include a visit from Lego sculptor Nathan Sawaya and other Featured Makers. The Toys theme will be followed by Tools (February 18), Time (March 17), and Trash (April 21).
© Nathan Sawaya - The Art of the Brick
If you are a fan of Maker Faire, you won’t want to miss these tasty appetizers organized by our friends at the Exploratorium. Open MAKE runs from 10am to 2pm on the third Saturday of each month through April. Visitors are invited to explore their own creativity with makers from around the Bay Area, who will share their art, ingenuity, and techniques for making. In addition, Dale Dougherty, founder and editor of MAKE, will interview featured makers in the McBean Theater. This event is included in the price of the museum’s general admission and open to everyone.
Participants in the Young Makers program and those who have registered Maker Clubs will receive instructions for entry by email. Make sure you’ve signed up with us if you are a Young Maker.
Open MAKE is a collaboration between the Exploratorium, MAKE magazine, and Pixar Animation Studios.
Categories: By the hour, Creative
T-Shirt Responds to Pollution Levels
Sue Ngo and Nien Lam share their pollution shirt, created for a project during their studies at ITP. The merits of co-working and collaboration are also explored, as Nien talks about his positive experience with working at Collab.
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Categories: By the hour, Creative
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.
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Categories: By the hour, Creative
“A Deep Human Desire To Make, Mend And Recycle”
BBC – BBC Radio 4 Programmes – Four Thought, Series 2, Angela Saini. This show talks about reuse and repair of technology. Maker Faire gets a mention and the making / crafting movement is discussed as a counter to mass consumerism.
Science writer Angela Saini confesses that as a late adopter of new technology, she struggles to reconcile a deep human desire to make, mend and recycle with the throwaway culture on which the development of new computers, gadgets and phones seems to depend. Much of this is inherited from the thrifty traditions of her parents.
Four Thought is a series of talks which combine thought provoking ideas and engaging storytelling. Recorded live in front of an audience at the RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) in London, speakers air their latest thinking on the trends, ideas, interests and passions that affect our culture and society.
Thanks Richard!
Categories: By the hour, Creative
Tokyo Maker Faire Photo Recap
Here’s a glimpse from last week’s Make: Tokyo Meeting #07 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Held over the December 3rd weekend, this Tokyo Maker Faire featured 260 makers, and hosted 12,800 visitors over the two days.
A workshop in the Craft zone.
Throngs of people inside the main building.
Inokuma, the roaming robot.
TELESCOPE & Battery Girl on stage.
A nixie tube clock.
Ultrafactory, another ambulatory robot.
DIY Drones quad copter.
Steam locomotive ride.
If you went to the Make: Tokyo Meeting, please share your stories (and pics) with us in comments.
For more, Dangerous Prototypes has a roundup of their Make Tokyo Meeting 07 coverage:
- Tokyo hackerspace table day 2 at Make Meeting 07
- Tokyo hackerspace at Make Tokyo Meeting day 1
- Tokyo hackerspace first visit
- Video: Goo instrument at Make Tokyo Meeting 07 #mtm07
- Video: ANIPOV bicycle POV at Make Tokyo Meeting 07
- Video: Remote control flying machines at #mtm07
- Electronics at Make Tokyo Meeting 07 #mtm07
- Blinken lights at Make Tokyo Meeting 07 #mtm07
- Music at Make Tokyo Meeting #mtm07
- Vehicles at Make Tokyo Meeting 07 #mtm07
- Leonard Pirate at Make Tokyo Meeting 07
- Weird and wonderful at Make Tokyo Meeting 07
- Setup at Make Tokyo Meeting 07 #mtm07
- #MTM07: Make Tokyo Meeting 07
Categories: By the hour, Creative
Army of Elmo Robots Cannot be Stopped
Adrianne Wortzel first saw Tickle-Me-Elmo-TMX during her residency in the Artificial Intelligence Lab in Zurich, Switzerland, and noticed something interesting about the robotic toy. It wasn’t long before she amassed an army of them. And what army is complete without synchronized maneuvers…
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Categories: By the hour, Creative
Zero to Maker: Explaining Yourself
David Lang, something of a reluctant maker, is on a journey, intensively immersing himself in maker culture and learning as many DIY skills as he can, through a generous arrangement with our pals at TechShop. He’s regularly chronicling his efforts in this column — what he’s learning, who he’s meeting, and what hurdles he’s clearing (um… or not). –Gareth
The holidays. There’s nothing like a little time with family to give you an honest assessment of yourself. My experience this past week was especially illuminating.
Having lived across the country from my family for many years, the holidays always involved a lot of explaining of what I was up to. This year, I had the unique challenge of trying to explain my quest to start making things. I realized the complexity of this when, in reference to the Zero to Maker column, my younger brother asked me, “So, David, how’s your writing going?”
“It’s going pretty well!” I replied, genuinely excited that he’d taken notice to what I was doing, “I’m really learning a lot and enjoying the process. Have you been reading the updates?”
“Yeah, they’re really good,” he replied. He had a pleasantly surprised and slightly impressed tone to his voice.
“Wow. Thanks, bro. Did you read the last one about the side project I was working on?” I asked. I was really curious. I don’t get that much feedback on it, especially from people outside the MAKE community, so I really wanted to take advantage of the opportunity.
“Uh… No I didn’t actually read that one, yet.” He replied.
The confidence drained from his voice. I sensed he may have been bluffing with his enthusiasm for my writing, so I pressed him, “I see. So which ones have you read?”
“Well… to be honest, I haven’t read them recently. I try to read them. It’s just that, well, sometimes you start getting all technical and you lose me.”
Interesting. Too technical? I hadn’t really thought about that. Of course, he could have just pulled that out as an excuse, but I thought it was valid enough to investigate further. I asked my mom what she thought and she, too, that there was too much maker jargon to follow along.
This was a bit of a blow. Not a huge one, though, as I’m getting fairly used to being the least informed person in the room, but I thought this might be something I could work on. As a new-maker who’s had the privilege of getting such an intensive, whirlwind tour of the maker world, I should be doing a better job of translating this experience to other new-makers.
I thought back to my journey over the past few months. I looked at my first post and then compared it with my most recent. My brother and mom were right. My tone and word choice had changed. Things that are obvious to me now – what “CAD” or “CNC” stand for or that I can vector-cut acrylic with a laser cutter but needed a water jet to cut metal – are the same things that the pre-maker me would have gotten tripped up over. I wondered how much of what I’d learned could be attributed to understanding more of the vocabulary.
Before I started this column and my crash-course in making, I had still been paying attention. I had been to a few Maker Faire’s and read the MAKE website. So even then, I was starting to get comfortable with the lingo. I thought back to when I had first heard about Maker Faire in 2009 – to the specific conversation and recommendation to attend. I didn’t understand what “Maker” meant. I had to ask twice. And now I’m the one repeating, explaining what a Maker Faire is. No matter how many times I try, I’m never able to capture the magic of it. It’s still something I think you have to see to understand.
It turns out that “make” is the 69th most common word in the English language. The word means something completely different to me than it did in 2009. I need to do a better job of explaining that new definition to other.
So, my question to all of you is: How do you define “making?”
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Follow David’s Zero to Maker journey
Categories: By the hour, Creative
The Bay Lights: LED Installation to Animate Bay Bridge
Today, on the 75th anniversary of the opening of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, a consortium of San Francisco Bay Area arts organizations have announced a campaign to fund an enormous LED light installation that will run abstract, glittery animations across the vertical cables of the West Span of the bridge.
Proposed by artist Leo Villareal, The Bay Lights project will be a grid of 25,000 white LEDs spaced every foot on the suspension cables. “Each node will be individually addressable…each single pixel is controllable but working as a group to create an overall effect,” says Villareal.
Villareal has developed custom software and utilized Max/MSP/Jitter to get to a place of nuanced, three-layer control of the grid — something akin to video mixing. “It’s a long a process of making these discoveries, layering, refining; it becomes kind of like painting.
A graduate of ITP at NYIU, Villareal used to make his own LED boards and sequencers — when he was working with a microcontroller and 16 lights. Now Villareal leverages commercially available Phillips hardware, but is deep into designing custom enclosures that could secure and protect the Bay Lights grid over its two-year lifespan.
Villareal has authored other fairly massive LED projects (witness his permanent 200′ interior installation in DC at the National Gallery of Art, or his recent Tampa Museum building facade project), but the Bay Bridge project would be his largest public artwork yet. To give you an idea of scale: the Bay Lights are 7x the scale of the hugely successful light array that was installed on the Eiffel Tower.
In a video interview about The Bay Lights, Villareal speaks of his interest in seeing how the installation could transform the vast landscape of San Francisco Bay into a shared space. “I’m very interested in scale, of what happens in shrinking this whole space down by creating this focal point.”
Of course, a project of this size has a price tag: $7M for a two-year run. Interestingly, because of the energy-efficient nature of LEDs, only $11K of the budget is for electricity — and they’ve already covered that amount with a donation of solar credits by Clean Path. Most of the budget estimate is for installation: the project would take four to six months to install, and would have to be installed at night, involving lane closures—not to mention the crew flying in harnesses, hanging precision pieces of electronics in the wind.
The Bay Lights has been in discussion with Caltrans for over a year on permits, and the team’s goal is to have funding by March and to begin installation October of 2012. A campaign to secure the funding has been launched, and the project is looking to civic minded individuals and institutions to contribute towards turning on the lights.
Find out more about The Bay Lights—and participate—at their website.
Categories: By the hour, Creative
Best of Crafts in Maker Faire Video 2011
Today I thought I’d highlight some of my favorite crafty makers and the projects they’ve brought to Maker Faire through a special YouTube playlist. If you don’t know about Maker Faire, it’s the world’s largest DIY festival celebrating technology, making, and especially crafts, held annually in several locations around the United States. This year we’ve expanded our video offerings so I picked these videos from our growing Maker Faire channel to give you an idea of the crafty souls you can meet at Maker Faire. Enjoy the playlist, and don’t forget to subscribe to the Maker Faire Channel on YouTube.
The playlist includes:
- Shawna Peterson’s Neon Art Shop
- Paul Nosa’s Free Motion Embroidery
- Jordan Jin Stone’s illuminated sound-controlled Rainbow Shutter-Shades
- Bethany Shorb’s Cyberoptix TieLab
- Mark Krawczuk’s Secret Noodle Truck
- Andrew Salomone’s Machine Knit Cosby Sweater
- Science Class Hydroponics: STEM Garden
- Katherine Jolda’s Cyclocarder
- Xylocopa Design
- Josh Billions’ MapBag
- Pam Deluco’s Typefacebook
- Laura Bruland’s Yes and Yes Design
Subscribe to the CRAFT Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube.
Check out more videos from Maker Faire in the Bay Area, Detroit, and New York.
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Categories: By the hour, Creative
Dangerous Prototypes in Japan
I’ve been enjoying the blog posts by Ian Lesnet of Dangerous Prototypes as he visits Japan, including gotta-do-it stops at Tokyo Hackerspace and Akihabara Electric Town. He also attended Make: Tokyo Meeting 07, the Japanese equivalent of Maker Faire. Lots of cool stuff going on over there! (The project pictured is a DIY cotton candy maker!)
Categories: By the hour, Creative
Young Makers: Kickoff Next Wed. — New Season and Playbook
May will be here before you know it. Now’s the time to start putting together a Maker Club. Get the kids you know to stretch their making skills to the limit, build something amazing, and show off their projects at Maker Faire just over five months from now. We expect that there will be more Young Makers than ever this year at Maker Faire Bay Area, and we hope to hear about more Maker Clubs sprouting up around the world for Maker Faires and Mini Maker Faires far and wide.
Please join us for an organizational meeting to kick off the 2012 offering of the Young Makers program:
- …if you want to start or continue a Maker Club in your area.
- …if you are interested in mentoring a Young Maker.
- …if you’re the parent (or teacher) of a Young Maker who wants to connect with other adults-helping-kids-make.
Young Makers Organizational Kickoff
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
from 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM
at the Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon Street, San Francisco, CA 94123
Although we will focus on the program whose regional meetings will happen at the Exploratorium, we welcome participants who would like to start clubs and hubs everywhere and anywhere. Whether or not you can come, we encourage you to review the current draft of the playbook we’ve been developing to help clubs get up and running.
The meeting is intended for adults only. It should run about an hour, after which, attendees are welcome to mingle with one another. (Please note that the museum will have closed at 5:00pm.)
For planning purposes, please RSVP for the Kickoff.
Whether or not you attend, and no matter where you’re making, be sure to sign up to get news about Young Makers. And if you’ve started a Maker Club already, tell us about it so we can add you to our list of club affiliates.
Other upcoming dates for Young Makers
If you love Maker Faire, you don’t have to wait to get your fix. The Exploratorium will host four Saturday events that serve up a tasty teaser of the main event in May. You don’t want to miss these! Open Make events include hands-on workshops on the floor of the museum, a panel of inspiring Makers interviewed by Dale Dougherty, and a sampling of the kinds of exhibits and demos you appreciate at Maker Faire. For those participating in a Maker Club in the Young Makers program, you’d also be welcome to the monthly regional meetings on the same Saturdays.
These will be held at the Exploratorium on the third Saturday of each month, 10am to 2pm.
- Saturday, Jan 21st
- Saturday, Feb 18th
- Saturday, March 17th
- Saturday, April 21st
Categories: By the hour, Creative
i3 Detroit: The Motor City’s Own Hackerspace
Founding members Nick Britsky, Russ Wolfe and Ted Hansen take us on a tour of i3, Detroit’s premier hackerspace. Although well appointed with extensive workspaces and every tool imaginable, i3 Detroit’s real strength is its members, its sense of community, and the collaboration that occurs when makers have a place to meet and work.
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Categories: By the hour, Creative
Maker Faire Tokyo #7 This Weekend
This Saturday and Sunday, somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 people will convene on the seventh Maker Faire Tokyo at the Tokyo Technology of Institute in the Meguro district.
The Japanese call their Maker Faires a “Make: Meeting,” and with 260 makers exhibiting, performing, and offering workshops, it is definitely a Meeting with a capital M!
MAKE Magazine has a Japanese edition and an online presence at jp.makezine.com. The first Make: Meeting Tokyo was in 2008, and with the exception of last Spring (because of the earthquake), these fairs have been occurring twice a year. This weekend marks number seven.
Check out their fantastic event program. They are planning a Dark Room along the lines of the flagship Faires in the US, a DIY music stage, and full-day lineups of both presentations and workshops. One of the headliners is Gianluca Martino, from the Arduino team, who is there to participate and lead some workshops. It’s also cool to see a DIY Energy room and a CRAFT section.
Watch Makezine.com this weekend and next week for more updates and reporting from the Make: Tokyo Meeting 07 team.
Categories: By the hour, Creative
Brother Nature Produce: Greg Willerer (video)
One short mile away from downtown Detroit is Brother Nature Produce, a community supported farm run by Greg Willerer. Greg shows us around the farm and discusses his composting venture, which aims to create a closed loop of urban food waste being turned back into food that is healthy and locally produced.
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Categories: By the hour, Creative
Workshop Weekend Registration
Our friends at Workshop Weekend have whipped up the little flyer below (PDF here) and a discount code for MAKE readers registering for their 2-day workshop event in Oakland, CA (Dec 10 and 11, 2011). To get 10% off tuition, enter code MAKEZINE2011 when you register. And you can get more details on the events and the workshop available on their website.
Categories: By the hour, Creative
Makers Make The Economist
Image by Andrew Kelly
The latest print edition of The Economist has an article on makers, MAKE, Maker Faire, and the burgeoning maker movement. It’s so inspiring to see a head/subhead like this in any mainstream magazine, let alone one with such business world gravitas:
More than just digital quilting — Technology and society: The “maker” movement could change how science is taught and boost innovation. It may even herald a new industrial revolution.
The article, which has no byline on the online version, is very clear and lucidly written, a great introduction to maker culture and concerns for a wider audience.
The maker movement is both a response to and an outgrowth of digital culture, made possible by the convergence of several trends. New tools and electronic components let people integrate the physical and digital worlds simply and cheaply. Online services and design software make it easy to develop and share digital blueprints. And many people who spend all day manipulating bits on computer screens are rediscovering the pleasure of making physical objects and interacting with other enthusiasts in person, rather than online. Currently the preserve of hobbyists, the maker movement’s impact may be felt much farther afield.
More Than Just Digital Quilting
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Categories: By the hour, Creative
Lower East Side Girls Club Gets Airstream Trailer on the Second Floor
Early on a recent Friday morning, a crane hoisted an old Airstream trailer onto the second floor of a building under construction in the Alphabet City section of Manhattan. The shiny aluminum trailer (circa 1958) is destined to become a recording studio inside of the Lower East Side Girls Club, currently just a concrete shell on Avenue D between 7th and 8th Streets. There was not much clearance to slip the 23-foot long trailer onto the second floor –only 20 inches– so the chilly autumn air was fraught with anxiety as the 2,000 lb. trailer rose off a flatbed truck.
“I’ve been obsessing about this for quite some time,” said Dave Pentecost, a 20-year veteran of network television who serves as the Girls Club’s technology director. “It’s like tucking a Twinkie into a mail slot.”
The Airstream’s axle and tires had been taken off and replaced with huge casters that will enable one person to push the one ton trailer around while construction proceeds. A couple of nylon straps resembling fire hoses and rated to support six tons each, ran from a steel spreader bar that hung from the crane to a rectangular steel frame welded to the bottom of the trailer. It took a team of crane operators, mostly using hand signals, and a handful of construction workers wearing harnesses secured to the ceiling about 20 minutes to hoist the trailer up and in to its new home.
“That’s a relief,” Pentecost declared when the trailer was safely inside.
Photo credit: Aaron Fineman
“It’s not every day you put an Airstream inside of a building,” noted Bob Barry, construction manager for the building, which will include more than 70 apartments in addition to the 35,000 square feet Girls Club.
The new facility is expected to be completed some time next year. It will include a bakery, art studios, classrooms, and recreation center spread out over three floors. The Airstream trailer will be used for “Girls Out Loud,” an Internet Radio Station slated for the site.
The Girls Club has participated in both New York Maker Faires (This year they made Dogzilla, which moved on a motorized base, barked, and was charged in a solar dog house. Last year they made Girlzilla, an 18-foot girl sculpture with a glowing translucent eye and recycled wire for hair.) A DIY/maker focus will be a big part of the new building, including its planetarium, which will span two floors and be used by local public school kids as well as participants in an after school program. Lower East Side Girls will do 3D production and storytelling using the Unity 3D game engine. The girls are already having lessons with something called the Mini Dome Authoring System, which Pentecost describes as “the geekiest workstation ever. You sit with your laptop under a four and a half foot bowl (a re-purposed RV skylight) and you can preview what things are going to look like inside the planetarium’s 30-foot dome.”
The Lower East Side Girls Club was founded by Pentecost’s wife Lyn and a group of Lower East Side women in 1996 to deal with what they saw as a lack of services for girls and young women in the neighborhood. They were displeased that The Boys Club of New York opted out of the national merger of boys and girls clubs into the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. (The Lower East Side became the last neighborhood in the United States with a “boys-only” Club.) The mission of the club is to develop environmental, entrepreneurial and ethical leadership.
The new building has been a long time in coming but things started to progress in 2002 after Michael Bloomberg became mayor. The city agreed to provide six lots for the building and the Girls Club eventually put a deal together with a private developer to build apartments on top of the Girls Club space. The group’s director of development told the Wall Street Journal that it has raised some $18 million so far and needs another $2 million for furniture, fixtures, and equipment.
Categories: By the hour, Creative
Giant Bubbles Float Through Maker Faire
Sterling Johnson has childhood memories of being fascinated by blowing bubbles, even learning how to make them using only soap and his own hands. At Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 he uses a variety of simple devices to create both massive bubbles and swarms of smaller bubbles.
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video directly, or watch it on YouTube and Vimeo.
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Categories: By the hour, Creative