Hackers at Play at Maker Faire 2007
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The ultimate convention about do-it-yourself hacking is not DEFCON, it’s Maker Faire. A collaborative weekend event put on by the creators of
Make and
Craft magazines, it drew “makers” of all stripes to the Bay Area on May 20 and 21. To all accounts, you couldn’t turn around without discovering something new, amazing, funky, or just plain weird.
Let me give you a full disclosure: I didn’t make it to Maker Faire. Sadly, I probably won’t be able to go unless they bring it a lot closer to South Florida (I wouldn’t object to Orlando). Those of you in Texas can look forward to your own Maker Faire on Oct 20 and 21 this year at the Travis County Fairgrounds.
Of course, this doesn’t prevent me from reading as much as I can about it and giving you some idea of what went on. If you’d like to go to the source, here’s the main site for Maker Faire 2007. One press release aptly described it in its headline as “400 Makers, 40,000 Attendees, 200,000 Square Feet of DIY Mayhem.” Not bad for only the second year of an event “where hundreds of backyard inventors gather to share their fun projects, creative ideas and eye-popping creations.”
It’s impossible to read about some of these creations and not laugh with glee from their sheer inventiveness. The Kitchen of the Future featured musical MIDI-ready appliances, including a blender that played sound samples from the song “Tequila” while blending frozen margaritas. Then there was the theremin lounge band, Project Pimento. If you got tired of drinking that alcohol, you could learn how to drive with it – in your tank – as David Blume showed how to convert your car to run on alcohol, and how to make the moonshine to run it.
The list of highlights ran on forever in a press release written ten days before the fair: “The ‘King of Fling’ catapult competition, The Puppy Mover Monorail, Survival Research Labs (SRL), Five Foot Russian Submarine, Junkyard Jet, Bazaar Bizarre, Silicon Death Valley, RoboGames' Combat Robots, Power Tool Drag Races, Life-size Mousetrap, Walking Robotic Chariot, Build Your Own Blinkybug, The Electric Giraffe, The Disgusting Spectacle, Tomato-basket Dragons and Whales, Internet Crane Game, The Art of Motion Control, Model Rocket Video Camera, Chris Benton's Kite Aerial Photography, Electric Supercars, Roomba Hacking, Winners of the Most Spectacular Failures contest, and acres more.” Did the faire live up to the hype?
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