Maker Faire 2012

On Saturday, Sak, Penga-Sis and I headed over to Maker Faire!  This year definitely didn't dissapoint, although Penga-Sis was upset that we didn't check the schedule beforehand...She wanted her Mythbuster shirt signed by Adam Savage, but he was only speaking on Sunday! Next year, next year!

As always though, there was just SO much going on, there's no way I could show everything we saw! But here's a small spattering of fun stuff!

Some custom made garden gnomes..army themed!

The Artoo club was well-represented again this year!

One of my original favorite scientists, Beaker!

This was pretty cool, a whole percussion section on your ceiling! Each instrument was hooked up to a servo, and it played island music on kettle drums and such!

An extremely well-made Dalek! Complete with voice box! He was quite polite for a Dalek, too.

Giant Connect 4 game.

How cool (and DIYable) is this? A chandelier made from clothes hangers!

Penga-Sis tried her hand at making a letterpress recipe card.

Giant egg-shaped dome.

Mega-bead curtain!

A fire breathing beastie.

Mushrooms! We bought a starter kit to grow some oyster mushrooms. Should be interesting! (These are the same fellows that have the mushroom store in the Ferry Building, btw.)

A robot petting zoo, haha! Cutest idea ever.  Inside you could press (pet?) the robots and they'd do different things.  One blew bubbles, so adorable.

Snail art.  Unique, definitely unique! Stack different colors of construction paper, corral some snails on top and watch as they eat through the layers and create art! They even poop colored bits of paper for..texture! Haha!

Some fun spin art.

Tesla coils! These are always such show-stoppers, I love it.  Nothing like dangerous amounts of electricity to energize a crowd. Pun intended.

This one was pretty cool.  A simple binary computer capable of basic math.  Only it's perfectly mechanical!

But the thing I had my eye on the most during this year's faire had to have been the 3d printers.  Oh, how fun would one of those be!

They use spools of plastic thread...

Heated up and extruded via a computer controlled applicator.

It builds the 3d object layer by layer, and the things you can make from it really are limitless!

Custom toys! *drool*

Each year the machines seem to get more and more accessible to regular ol' hobbyists; the one pictured above runs about $1.7k.  Definitely not cheap, but it's no $16k laser etcher either.  Someday!

We had a great time, eating fair-food garlic fries and paella, and lamenting the price of $6 lemonade (ridiculous!).  That's the one huge downside to conventions like this.  Everything is overpriced! I understand that people have to fund their hobbies, but things that do not cost the maker in terms of time/pricy materials don't need excessive convention mark-up just because he/she can, in my opinion.  Especially since there were a few really cute things I would have picked up otherwise. Maybe I'm just cheap. :P

Anyway, it's great to see so many people out there, tinkering and crafting, if for no other purpose than the fact that it is fun.  It was very inspiring, and I've come away with more than one project idea that I'd like to try someday.

Just us in the Makerbot photobooth... :)