Maker’s Faire 2016

It was time for Maker’s Faire 2016, I was pretty excited to go. I missed last year, so I didn’t really know what to expect. All I knew was that the news was reporting that there would be 130,000 people over the weekend. So I tried to make sure I found the right spot to park at, and got there early so I could make sure we could all get to all the fun things.

 

This year some of my friends from church came along, it ended up being around 8 of us. Pedro, Jenny, Albert, Suzanna, Kelvin, Chosen, Sherri and I.  The weather was really interesting today, it was gloomy in the morning and started pouring on us while we were in line. One of the nice things I saw that Maker’s Faire was doing was how they were allowing everyone to get through the gates and just wait inside behind a paper line. This helped get more people into the place before it opened at 10am.

 

 

We took a fun picture in front of the makerbot logo. Hahaha, look at how robotic they look.

One of the first things we did was do this lockpicking thing. There is a lockpicking club in SF and they put on a 30 minute lockpicking course. It was pretty cool seeing how we were going to pick a lock. The main idea is that because locks are handmade, they are not perfectly centered. So because all the latches inside the lock are not perfectly locked in. You can tell which lock you have to lift up next.

I ended up being able to do 3 holes, it was pretty tough getting the feel for it. The biggest thing I took from this thing was to never take a picture of your key, because someone can make a copy of your key from even an image.

This was a pretty cool, wind powered radio statue. It slowly moves around which allows it to powered a system.

Right behind is a huge tent that was holding drone racing. I found the drone racing to be really cool. It was really fast too, 3 minutes to do 10-15 laps.

Here is the cupcake machines that you can pay to ride in. I always want to try to do it, it just looks cool to be rolling around in a cupcake.

One of the next things that we did was make our maker’s faire pin. The blinking robot things.

So it is not being sponsored by Google, so we got google safety glasses too. I remember back in the day when it cost 1 dollar to buy your pin.

Since I had not been doing this for a while, I think we all ended up putting too much solder on the battery connection. So Sherri needed someone to use a knife to put it in. It was pretty interesting watching the girls learn how to solder. Then we just sat there trying to think what was in the solder.

[youtube] https://youtu.be/y_5PsToC4SA [/youtube]

Eventually we got to seeing the power racing series. It was filled with 50% fun cars, and 50% real racers. It is essentially teams making their own power wheels and racing them. They said it was being streamed on twitch http://www.powerracingseries.org/. I think everyone’’s favorite car was the Mr-Team car.  It was because the car had casters on it. So the guy driving it was doing mad drifting. Hahahahah, getting all the crowd into it because he would drift like it was a mario kart game. almost all his entire turns were drifts.

We had lunch in the main area, I ended up getting garlic noodles, then we went to see eepy birds and their soda mentos show. They have done the same show the past 10 years. It looks like they are slowly being phased out, I think I might see them for 1 more year, because they only had 3 shows this year.

I also miss arcattack, I loved it when they had their shows. 

They had their cool indoor dark room, it made me think of raves. Everything was just lights and darkness. They had the indoor floating garden, and the make sign is from the guy that makes everything from rolling toilet paper, or some type of paper together..

[youtube] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jwJ6T3cM7E&feature=youtu.be [/youtube]

 

I ended up buying a raspberry pi and beginner kit from here. I’ll figure out what to do with it later.

We ended the day looking at steampunks and then eating the free hagen daz ice cream.

How would I rate maker’s faire: I would say that this year there is much less robots than before. Everyone is working/showing off their drones and 3d printers. There were not as many r2-d2’s rolling around. I would say everything is going more towards apps and computer, less robotics. It will be interesting to see how maker’s faire evolves in 5 years. Then other thing that I notice there were more of, was stuff for little kids, and a whole area where high school kids show off their “first robotics” or whatever robot program is not there right now. It seems to be catching on more.

If someone were to ask me, should I go or not. I would say if you have never gone, it is a really fun experience. While if you have gone, I would only go again if you really like seeing what things change year to year. That is my recommendation.

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After that we all went home, while Sherri and I went on to my cousin’s birthday. It was ethan’s 6 birthday.

He really liked the toy I bought him. It was something that I would have made in robot class, but the toy is a car that just follows a line you draw. So whatever you draw, it will follow it.

Hahahaah, I left the code on there, so I don’t think I should show it. Someone is going to find this page and use that code for their doodle car track.