Maker Faire and New Stuff
Maker Faire 2008 was another extremely entertaining event. We got to catch up with lots of current customers (you guys rock) and met many new friends.
Maker Faire 2008 was another extremely entertaining event. We got to catch up with lots of current customers (you guys rock) and met many new friends.
This is how my Maker Faire started. We had a spring snow storm here in Boulder.
Chris is showing off the bottom of the SparkFun LED light table during setup at the Faire. Chris wired up 64 RGB matrices (a total of 4096 tri-color LEDs) and 4 OEM Atari Joysticks to create a 4-player cooperative pong game. Very awesome. It used something like 13 amps when everything was on.
This is a shot of one of the Crude Awakening pieces on display. They were beautiful pieces and fit nicely into the Maker layout.
Good bye cheese. That's a real safe - very very heavy safe. Another one of my favorites was the life size game of mouse trap. The size and amount of inertia behind this system was mind blowing. When the safe hit the ground, the earth shook and the crowd roared.
Yea SparkFun booth. Working hard or hardly working? Pong was very popular. High score was around 64. We also had the infamous Rotary Phone, Tetris, and some good blinky things to show off. No Nintendo Controller this year...
We finished off this years Maker Faire with a hike up to Coit Tower at night. San Francisco is great! What mystified us is the presence of the Christopher Columbus statue in front of the tower - he never made it anywhere near California!
Congratulations if you've made it this far! Here's the new stuff:
You've GOT to have a good pair of wire strippers. We couldn't find a good supplier, so we had our own made. These are great quality and go down to 30AWG for stripping wire wrap wire. And they're extremely affordable!
The AVR-GSM is a beast of a board. Olimex has combined a low-cost cellular GSM module with a creative Atmel platform for remote monitoring and sensing. Neat little board.
We added a 10mm snap to the LilyPad category. These smaller magnetic snaps are great for quick disconnects on batteries and wearable devices.
This is a very small GPS receiver call the GPS Stick. Design to enable GPS on laptops and small computing platforms, we just liked the small form factor and price. Great for hacking.
Added the Series 2.5 XBee module with Wire antenna. XBee is a great unit if you just need to get serial data from one point to many. It's low cost and easy to use.
We now carry replacement elements for our hot-air rework stations. These elements are the key to maintaining hot-air tools. It's like a hair-dryer, with more umph. Checkout the hot-air tutorials as well.
We added some example pictures of our laser module mount. This plastic device holds our low-cost laser solidly in place.
See you at Maker Faire Austin!
This is how my Maker Faire started. We had a spring snow storm here in Boulder.
Chris is showing off the bottom of the SparkFun LED light table during setup at the Faire. Chris wired up 64 RGB matrices (a total of 4096 tri-color LEDs) and 4 OEM Atari Joysticks to create a 4-player cooperative pong game. Very awesome. It used something like 13 amps when everything was on.
This is a shot of one of the Crude Awakening pieces on display. They were beautiful pieces and fit nicely into the Maker layout.
Good bye cheese. That's a real safe - very very heavy safe. Another one of my favorites was the life size game of mouse trap. The size and amount of inertia behind this system was mind blowing. When the safe hit the ground, the earth shook and the crowd roared.
Yea SparkFun booth. Working hard or hardly working? Pong was very popular. High score was around 64. We also had the infamous Rotary Phone, Tetris, and some good blinky things to show off. No Nintendo Controller this year...
We finished off this years Maker Faire with a hike up to Coit Tower at night. San Francisco is great! What mystified us is the presence of the Christopher Columbus statue in front of the tower - he never made it anywhere near California!
Congratulations if you've made it this far! Here's the new stuff:
You've GOT to have a good pair of wire strippers. We couldn't find a good supplier, so we had our own made. These are great quality and go down to 30AWG for stripping wire wrap wire. And they're extremely affordable!
The AVR-GSM is a beast of a board. Olimex has combined a low-cost cellular GSM module with a creative Atmel platform for remote monitoring and sensing. Neat little board.
We added a 10mm snap to the LilyPad category. These smaller magnetic snaps are great for quick disconnects on batteries and wearable devices.
This is a very small GPS receiver call the GPS Stick. Design to enable GPS on laptops and small computing platforms, we just liked the small form factor and price. Great for hacking.
Added the Series 2.5 XBee module with Wire antenna. XBee is a great unit if you just need to get serial data from one point to many. It's low cost and easy to use.
We now carry replacement elements for our hot-air rework stations. These elements are the key to maintaining hot-air tools. It's like a hair-dryer, with more umph. Checkout the hot-air tutorials as well.
We added some example pictures of our laser module mount. This plastic device holds our low-cost laser solidly in place.
See you at Maker Faire Austin!
