Maker Faire Tickets
We're headed to Maker Faire! Get a free ticket with each piece of SparkFun swag.
Maker Faire just keeps getting better! SparkFun will be there in full-force.
It's amazing what marketing is coming up with these days. It's huge! 800 square-feet of pure Maker Faire bliss! We're planning on teaching soldering and electronics all weekend long! Please stop by and say hi.
Need a Maker Faire ticket? We've got a deal for you! We get ~40 tickets for being a Maker Faire sponsor. Though we've given a few away, we'd rather you have one. Buy any swag $9.95 or more (T-shirt, hoodie, pint glass, poster, wrist belt) and we will include a free Maker Faire ticket! Only as long as they last! We won't know when they run out.
The idea for the Maker Faire booth this year was to have well thought-out kits, and more of them! We are bringing four kits: Simon SMD, ClockIt, Terror-Min, and Metro-Gnome. We hope to show people how easy soldering can be and that they leave with a widget that they can immediately begin to use. Pictured above is a quick pocket-cam shot of one of the kits we are bringing. It's an alarm clock! Based on the ATmega168 (of course).
We are debating whether to call this the Egg Theremin or Terror-min. It's a simple kit that makes noise based on how the user interacts with the light sensors. It's incredibly loud and awfully annoying. We are going to be the loudest, most atrocious booth at Maker Faire. We can't wait.
And for the more musically inclined - we have the Metro-Gnome. It's a basic digital metronome used to keep time. Easy and quick to put together! Perfect for a beginner.
Going camping and need to charge your iPod/iPhone? This is a really sweet tutorial a SparkFun user wrote on how to hookup one of our solar cells, LiPo chargers, and LiPo battery to an iPhone/iPod. Well done!
And for those of you who want to get your feet wet with conductive thread, here is a great tutorial on sewing LEDs into fabric with conductive thread. Created by Diana Eng, a Project Runway alumni.
I wish I had the time to got to make far, mark my words I will go some day. It's only like 300 miles away lol.
All the kits posted look like theyre PTH, but the SMD area looks to be much larger in size. Are you bringing out more SMD kits or are you sticking to the Simon and Flame kits from before?
Correction: the SMD workshop will have a schedule (3 classes on Saturday and 2 classes on Sunday). There's about an hour between each SMD workshop, so the instructors have a chance to take a break and clean up the area for the next workshop. But, of course if no one is interested in doing the Simon kit, we'll let the through-hole kits take over that space too. We'll see how it goes once we get there.
A week and 4 days... and counting...
Good attention to detail! We currently only offer the Simon in SMD. The SMD area increased to facilitate Simon soldering course that takes 2-3 hours. When SMD/Simon classes are not going on, the SMD area will be open for more general PTH soldering.
Thanks for posting my solar charger tutorial- hopefully I'll have something really good around Halloween!
Are the workshops free, I mean I know you have to pay to get into maker faire but will these cost extra?
The kits will have some sort of recommended donation ($10/15/20/25), and then all the cash will go to a local non-profit and local robot club. Akin to what we did in Austin.
What / Where is the new buying guide you mentioned?
The new wireless buying guide is here: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorial_info.php?tutorials_id=128. We'll do a formal homepage post on it soon!
Repeat of last year's request: Have somebody troll the stock room and grab one of every LED / display you sell. Hook them up so we can see them all glowing away (nothing fancy, proto-board is fine). It's hard to get sense of exact color and relative brightness from photos, it'd be great to see them live.
good idea. We'll see if we can get it in the photo que.
When will these kits be for sale on the site? I tried to search for them and came up empty...
Soon! You will likely see them in the next 2-4 weeks.