World Maker Faire was held last weekend, and I was beyond excited to attend – although I almost didn’t make it. The subway system had a series of malfunctions that aligned in such a way that I almost gave up and spent the day in Central Park! It’s a long story on my convoluted trek to Queens (that I won’t go into), but I finally made it there in time for a demo of the Raspberry Pi. Afterwards, I looked at several of the 3D printers, and then attended a really great talk by Ian Lesnet from Dangerous Prototypes entitled “Manufacturing Open Source Hardware”. He talked about the ways to go from a prototype to manufacturing. Very useful information! The last couple of hours of the first day were spent checking out the latest in Arduino and BeagleBone technologies and wandering through the dozens of booths setup inside the New York Hall of Science.
My second day at World Maker Faire started off much better with a very smooth subway ride to Queens – or at least one with no service changes! My first presentation of the day was a short announcement by Miquela Craytor from NYCEDC about their InventNYC competition launching this month. Immediately following, Catarina Mota from openMaterials gave a very interesting talk entitled “Smart Materials for DIY Projects”. In the talk, she showed video clips of various materials and how they can be used in projects. Very cool stuff! Aaron Trocola from Threeform demonstrated his skills in using “3D Scanning for Wearable Designs” and had several of his models there to show off some of his products. After a delicious ice cream cookie from Coolhaus (smile!), I watched the demonstration of the Life-Size Mousetrap (giant version of the board game) and then an amazing Coke Zero and Mentos demonstration by the guys from EepyBird. Unbelievable!
My last presentation of the day was by far my favorite. The title was “Kickstarted? Now What?” and had a four-member panel of speakers who had raised funds far beyond their goals on Kickstarter (David Lang at OpenROV, Taylor Levy and Che-Wei Wang with Pen Type-A, and Brook Drumm from Printrbot). They talked about the shock of raising so much money and how that shock turned into fear at having to ramp up production much quicker than expected. They also talked about the lessons they learned from the experience. It was a really great session, and I wish that they hadn’t run out of time as I would have loved to hear more of their stories!
