Recipe For A Perfect Day At The Maker Faire
by Lee H Goldberg
- Take one part hacker convention, one part avant-garde art show, one part street fair, add a touch of Burning Man Festival (minus the nudity), mix thoroughly, spread across a few acres of open fairground, and set aside;
- While the mixture is settling, assemble a rough cross-section of Bay Area underground culture, being sure to include old-school techno-freaks, new-wave multimedia mavens, hard-core hardware nuts, extreme crafts enthusiasts, and whatever samples of fringe activity groups you find in the back of your fridge;
- Sprinkle the rich assemblage of weird and creative people across the fairgrounds, garnish with lots of strange home-made vehicles, blazing fire sculptures, and a touch of tye-dye. Add performance artists, spectators, food vendors, lots of happy kids, and serve under a clear Spring sky.
Serves 50,000
Forget DesignCon, OFC, or even CES -- the most exciting technical conference I've attended this year is the Maker Faire which just wrapped up its second year at the San Mateo, CA, fairgrounds. Trying to give you a comprehensive picture of this confluence of engineers, artists, social activists and eccentrics would be nearly impossible, but the recipe provided above should provide good context for the random slices of the day I'll share here.
My sojourn at Maker Faire started at the Tech Shop's pavilion where I met up with a few readers who'd asked to tour the Faire with me. As my earlier article on the Tech Shop explained, it's a co-operative machine/electronics/wood shop whose mission is to give people the tools and skills they need to tinker. They brought out an impressive array of equipment for the general public to play with, including basic machine shop tools, an aluminum foundry, and a laser cutter that would turn a visitor's CAD drawing into neatly-cut, ready-to assemble pieces of plastic or plywood.
 Several Tech Shop members had their projects on display, including Blake Tacklind, who is in the process of developing a laser pointing device that will help severely handicapped people with the affairs of daily living. The 15-year-old inventor put his creative skills to work when a family friend mentioned that their quadriplegic son had difficulty developing a rapport with the specially-trained dog that had been brought in to help him do some of the things his arms and legs could not. After a little study revealed that dogs tend to bond with humans who feed them, Blake modified a commercial doggie treat dispenser to be activated by a low-power laser beam and built a prototype head-mounted laser pointer that could be easily aimed. He used the Tech Shop's 3-D printer to translate his CAD drawings directly into a useable prototype housing for the laser which was on display at the exhibit (my apologies for the blurry photo). He is also working on a series of other laser-activated devices such as a table lamp and a TV remote control.
Once outside the Tech Shop, things took a turn for the weird as I hit the midway and wandered straight into the Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, a traveling pedal-powered carnival assembled and run by a San Francisco-based club that describes its membership as consisting of alter-bike mechanics, mariachi-punk musicians and psychotic clowns who love bikes, beer and building stuff. The Cyclecide midway buzzed with activity as kids whizzed, spun, and tumbled on a half-dozen pedal-powered rides and tested their athletic ability navigating various skill courses on a herd of radically-modified bicycles.
Moving onward, I visited several of the other pavilions which housed everything from a section devoted to hacking computerized sewing machines to a very scary set of dueling Tesla coils. The eight-foot-high home-made contraptions were tucked away behind the robot combat arena and drew huge crowds for the spectacular spark displays they put on every hour.
 Another area of the pavilion catered to the computer-aided manufacturing hobbyist community, with tons of home-brew CNC milling equipment and home-made 2-D and 3-D plotters whirring away at various tasks. One of the most exciting exhibits in this area was the Fab@Home project which produces a low-cost, open-source, hacker-friendly personal rapid-prototyping machine kit that can render your 3-D design in epoxy, silicone, conductive paste, EZ-Cheese, or anything else that can be dispensed by its computerized syringes.
Further down the aisle, I bumped into the Free Radio Berkeley club which advocates community-based pirate radio. They offer workshops and support groups to help social and political activists build and operate their own low-power radio stations to deliver news, cultural programming and other information uncensored by corporate or government interests. On display were several very nice transmitters that could be built from simple kits and scrounged parts for as little as $50.
 Wandering outside again, I spent a good bit of time inspecting the dazzling assortment of vehicles that lined many of the roads and walkways of the fairgrounds. But amid the electric bikes, artistically-altered cars and trucks and other UFO-like conveyances, the granddaddy of all art cars beckoned me. Dubbed the Neverwas Haul, the steam-powered three-story Victorian-style home on wheels stood out amid the other strange vehicles like the Colossus of Rhodes at the entrance of Mandraki harbor. Envisioned as the home of the Traveling Academy of Unnatural Science, an imaginary explorer's club, the Neverwas Haul was designed to transport its members to their next adventure in comfort and style. Capable of about 7 mph and steered by a large ship's wheel mounted in the forward solarium, it was easy to imagine the gingerbread-laden, multi-turreted architectural wonder gliding silently across the African Veldt or an Antarctic ice field while its inhabitants sipped sherry and played another round of snooker.
That's enough for now. Tune in for part II where our intrepid explorer watches 3rd-graders learn to solder, looks at electric bicycles, learns how to hack hybrids, and barely escapes death at the hands of a flame-spewing jet-powered combat hovercraft.
Comments? Questions? Other tales of DIY derring-do you'd like to share with your fellow readers? Write me at: lhg at en-genius.net
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