Austin Maker Faire 2007 Report

Posted 24 Oct 2007 at 20:00 UTC by steve

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Rog-a-matic and I are back from the Austin Maker Faire. It was really, really cool. If you missed it, you should plan on going next year. The preliminary date for next year's event is October 18-19, 2008. There were lots of robots to be seen as well as many other forms of art and technology. There were also lots of interesting people to see and meet. Interesting bands and performers played throughout the day on several stages, many on homebrew electronic instruments. There were talks and presentations on geeky subjects ranging from iPhone hacking to the cultural problems caused by the "intellectual property" mentality to flying cars. Our friends over at RobotsRule posted a transcript of the Maker Faire interview with Ugobe's CTO John Sosoka. These are the folks who make the Pleo. (incidentally, Lisa Abbott, Ugobe's Director of Marketing, showed me a one-of-kind Pleo mod - a white furry Pleo). For more, take at look at my photos of the event or the many other Austin Maker Faire 2007 photos on flickr. You can also find plenty of Austin Maker Faire 2007 video on YouTube.

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Pleo was a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb, ..., posted 24 Oct 2007 at 22:37 UTC by roschler » (Master)

I fell out of my chair laughing at the white furry Pleo picture. I wish someone had video! Julie Crabill at ShiftComm said that it was a fully functional Pleo; someone at Ugobe wanted to see if the hack would work. I'm assuming that means the capacitive touch sensors still worked and that it fidgeted when you petted it. Hilarious!

Stirling Engines, posted 24 Oct 2007 at 23:59 UTC by steve » (Master)

I forgot to mention that The Swirling Brain would have loved the Stirling Engines built by one of the Austin Robot Group members. They were showing off three or four nicely machined engines.

Stirling Engines, posted 25 Oct 2007 at 14:07 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

Hey, I was just about to say how cool it was of you to snag a few pics of the stirling engines for me! But, now I can't say it or you'll think I'm just saying it. Yep, I still think about stirling engines fondly. In fact last night I was trying to work out some new design in my swirling brain. Very cool pics! Did you and rog get along? :-) I wanted to go so bad!!! Maybe next year!

I missed Roger, posted 25 Oct 2007 at 14:50 UTC by steve » (Master)

There were a half dozen Dallas area robot people there. I only managed to run into about half of them. I think Roger was only there for a few hours on Saturday and I missed him. I did meet up with two other DPRG people though. And I talked to a few robot folks from other parts of the country who I hadn't seen since RoboNexus a couple of years ago.

Definitely plan on going next year. Put it on your calendar now. I'm hoping the DPRG can even have a booth or something there to show off some robots. Or maybe we should do a robots.net booth. :)

Music Machines, posted 25 Oct 2007 at 16:06 UTC by Rog-a-matic » (Master)

As a synth-a-holic, I was pleasantly surprised by the various music-making machines such as the synth-controlled gamma-ray detector (not analog but I'll forgive that), theremins, various noise boxes, and the incredible Tesla coil music.

I would describe the event as Scarborough faire meets Bill Nye.

Will probably go to the next one, and am considering a tattoo and nose ring to fit in better :)

Robots.net tattoos, posted 25 Oct 2007 at 17:47 UTC by steve » (Master)

Hey, maybe we should have some robots.net temporary tattoos printed. I have a friend who did that for her band. Might be cool.

Grunge, tattoos, & Mouse trap, posted 25 Oct 2007 at 22:37 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

Yep, not rating your picture taking ability or anything but the maker faire looked like a collection of dirty old junk! Actually, it sort of had a burning man type flair to it. Is that what they were trying to be?

Oct 18th is my mother's b-day! :-/ I'll have to sneak out.

The robots.net booth seems like a must! Hopefully it won't be a "musty" collection of old dirty junk, like everyone elses booth, tho! I'll have to dust off my dirty old robo-pumpkin (saw the dalek and their cheesy robo pumpkin) and bring it!

Man, I really need to get Emergent Behavior up and going again. I have an anime software I got recently so I could do both stills and animated cartoons, but I just keep running out of time. That would be cool to have on a corner of the table somewhere maybe underneath some stuff to be discovered by a 5 year old or the janitor.

Me wonders why we couldn't have something similar in Dallas? Not enough beatnicks in Dallas?

I loved the big mouse trap.

What I'd love to see is some sort of large scale robotic game. Where a bunch of kids could come up and control the robots somehow to play soccer or something.

I loved that one pepsi-kid-around where we had that big robot arm and the kids could control it on the computer to try and pick up a cup. It was harder than it looked! Kids were waiting in line to play with that thing! Wasn't there a toy like that back in the 70's called robotron or something like that? That would be cool to have out there again.

I'd really like to have some sort of mini robot kit for less than $10 or $20 that could be purchased and built by the kids and then let them do some sort of robo war with them! :-)

Instead of tattoos, I'd go for T-Shirts. Something you could keep a while. The T-shirt could have a simulated tattoo printed on the sleve and maybe a grunge look to fit in? :-) Long live Advertising! Or how about nose rings that have little robots.net signs that dangle from them! That would get attention and it could be a super nice souvenieer that you could take home! As a bonus, the little nose rings could have gps transponders in them so we could track their movements around the world!!!

Where's my Swirling Brain, posted 25 Oct 2007 at 23:04 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

Of course, we'd need some robots, and some rolling ball sculptures and some stirling engines too!

The Brain Swirls, posted 26 Oct 2007 at 14:45 UTC by Rog-a-matic » (Master)

SB, You're living up to your title Swirling Brain! Those are good ideas. I like the GPS nose ring :)

Maker faire wasn't all dirty junk, but there was some. Apparently rusted bicycles are an integral part of this scene too :)

It would be cool to make a giant robot arm controlled by a joystick that could stack blocks or something. A ring around 20' diameter with a fence. And of course mechanical stops so the robot couldn't snatch onlookers!

Fun with Robotic Arms!, posted 26 Oct 2007 at 16:05 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

I could see making a HUGE robot arm out of something really light like that RMAX foam core stuff. (You might have to reinforce with aluminum frame). You could carve the arm into some really interesting shape to make it look really cool. You could then make some really light blocks out of the RMAX foam core too that it could pick up. Probably those heavy duty big servos would be enough to lift it too. You could paint it something cool and have a big "robots.net" logo on the side of it. Run the thing from a laptop with some sort of dual - multi joystick interface to control all the joints in the arm. I like it!!! I would also say make more than one arm (three or four in a line) so you could have a competition of some sort (like who can stack the boxes the fastest). Maybe have a computer controlled one two that can do the towers of bable or hanoi thing really fast in real life. Like you could compete against the robot! Or how about a big chess board the the robot picks up the pieces and moves them? cool!