That was my day. It was all at makers faire, so here we go.
I have never been to Maker Faire, so I had no idea what to expect. So I was talking to my friend Jason, who has gone there 2 times, and invited me to go. But to sum it up, it is a place where people make a lot of robots and show it off, and a lot of DIY stuff there. But mostly robots, a lot of the simple things they show there were liker “learn how to solder”, and other basic electronics things that I did in college. So we didn’t learn too much basic things, but were there to see what cool things people did. So it was Jason, his 4 friends, and I that were there.
It was super packed there today. The line we were in stretched far into the parking lot in the morning. There must have been 600 people in line by 9:55am. We saw the above license plate on a car while we were in the parking lot. =)
One of the interesting things they have at the fair is all the people who are into astromech (aka R2D2). Saw a lot of them just rolling around with all the sound effects. These things were not autonomous, there was someone nearby with a wireless controller. However, the little kids didn’t know that, so they talked to the mechs like they were real and could understand them.
I love the tesla coils and music. So they had ArcAttack again this year (from what my friend said) and those guys play music with the tesla coil. I don’t remember the number of volts Jason told me, but it was at least 10k volts those things were putting out at low current. But you would still die if you got hit by one. =) I uploaded a video here on youtube.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un3ICfESLi0[/youtube]
I came by really late so I was in the back. They were half way through with their set when I was there.
I think my other kind of fun one to watch was the eepbirds with their mentos and coke show. Never knew that the reason for the explosion was physical property and not a chemical reaction for mentos in soda. They were saying how the soda fiz reacts to bumps, so a penny will make a small fizz. The reason the mentos is so powerful is because they are coated with 40 layers of sugar which creates thousands of small bumps.
There was also a mousetrap. Some guy spent 14 years building a human size replica of mousetrap. =) The thing was a huge Rube Goldberg machine, took them 15 minutes to set it up, while I was standing around. It was pretty cool, but I had a bad angle to see 1/4 of the stage, however I did have a good view of the end.
This thing was pretty interesting, they took the a picture of the sky from the same angle (spot), so here are 300 different monitors showing a different time of the same sky location in different times of their cycle.
Don’t know what it was but there was a lady leading it. And she saw my threadless t-shirt and said “That is one of my favorite threadless shirts”. =)
Steampunk Trailer
Swings attached to the crane.
Finally, there was one little area where all these kids were playing around for the exploratorium section. The thing was to wear these pillows and hide around and see how close you could sneak up to a person before they caught you. I was talking to my friends and I notice these two bushes getting kind of close. So I take a picture of it, and these two girls pop out, so I take a picture of them. =)
Finally, I bought this makershed pin, It is suppose to light up once I solder it. However, Jason and I didn’t feel like soldering and waiting in line so we just bought it and brought it back with us.
Actually here is the last thing, Jason and I were trying to find this pin, but failed. It would have been so cool if we saw it.
Picture courtesy of maker faire.
