Fun at Maker Faire

I have not been posting as much as I would like. I’ll be returning to 3 posts a week (excluding holidays) to try to get back into the swing of things.

This last weekend my fiancé and I attended Maker Faire up in northern California along with some friends. It was an interesting time, and one that I would recommend anyone near a Maker Faire attend.

A picture of the Maker Shed from hackaday.com. All of the neat toys you might buy were sold here.

I think the most interesting of the many projects that we saw at the faire was a 4 player version of simon says. They used 16 dome lights, 4 in front of each player build into a square table. In the middle there were several clear tubes that had LEDs at the bottom of them. The tubes would light up a series of lights (and accompanying sound) that the players were supposed to mimic, just like the original electronic game. More colors would be added to the end of the sequence each round and the last player standing would win. Then the game would reset.

For me it was interesting because it was fun to play (or watch play, as Ash played it and not me), and because I’m pretty sure I could build it myself. The whole thing was powered by an arduino and the parts seemed pretty basic for a game like that.

That is what the Maker Faire is about in my opinion. Seeing cool stuff and thinking of how you could make it yourself or improve upon other people’s designs. Granted I wasn’t going to start building large musical tesla coils, but a Simon Says game with lights and buttons is an interesting project to handle.

One of my favorite parts of the whole event was probably the Makers Shed. It was a physical version of the online store. If I were rich, I would have filled my car up with the interesting kits, books, and parts that lay in that hall. Instead, I came home with a few kits and books, including a Minty Boost kit from Adafruit. After having bought a 10-pack of altoids gum, I worked through the kit and was rewarded with a portable usb charger.

Soldered this together a few nights ago from a kit I acquired from Maker Faire. Handy little device that keeps my fiancé's cell phone charged on the go.

So it was another step on my path to making things. I’ll probably make another (I have a lot of gum tins now) so that we can both have one.