Successful Trip to Maker Faire Detroit

Well, I'm back from my premeir at the Detroit Maker Faire! It's the first time I've ever exhibited at a Maker Faire and it was great, and terrible. Here are some things I learned for next time, in no particular order.

1. I went to the faire, and manned my booth by myself. This it turns out is far harder than I ever imagined it would be. Saturday I was "on stage" just short of ten hours. Sunday I packed up early to avoid the rush, and because I was exhasted, but it was still a seven hour day. It takes a lot of energy to project enthusiasium for that long. I was totally unprepared for that aspect.



2. Given the chance, knowing what I know now, I'd do it again in a second. Exhibiting at the faire was really rewarding in two distinct ways. One, when I could have a long conversation with another adult who "gets" what I'm doing and understands what I'm saying when I explain it. I don't get the opportunity for conversations like this often, and the faire was great in this way. Two, seeing kids' faces light up when they'd interact with one of my machines and be surprised by what it did. I would very often have to coax them into touching something, while at the same time reassuring their parents it was okay, and I'd get rewarded with a big smile and an involuntary breathless little "cooool".



3. Damn the rules, eat, drink, and go to the bathroom at every opportunity.



4. Be nice to the folks in the booths around you and they'll be nice back (Paul and Mary were great!) Go mad dog robotics!



5. Don't expect to see the rest of the faire. I only got the chance to see about five percent of what I did last year when I wasn’t a maker. I was planning to walk around a bit after packing up Sunday afternoon, but I was way too tired.



6. The crowd has great ideas, listen and learn. I brought about six projects to show. One was my drawbot, and one was my electronic organ. Several times people played the organ expecting it to somehow control what was happening on the drawbot. GAH – what a cool idea!



7. Sometimes lame is cool and cool is lame. I worked really hard before the faire on an enclosure for my electronic organ. It’s made from walnut, brass, and ash, is very precisely made and has a really swanky finish. I just didn’t get it working quite in time, so instead I brought the lego keyboard I had working. Turns out the organ was the biggest hit with the kids – mostly because it was made from legos.

Electric Organ Prototyped

A couple weeks back I bought an old programmable sound generator chip from BG Micro. I got a breadboarded circuit working this morning, using a 16f684 as a controller. My plan is to build a simple digital synthesizer, but right now it's just running a simple hard coded loop that sounds like a car alarm.

First Double Sided Board Lives!

Some time ago I purchased the Pulsar system for making printed circuit boards. Since then I've made a number of simple single sided boards then felt ready for something more complex. This is the result. Design wise it's a straightforward Charlieplex display for 9 outputs. The driver holds a 16F688 pic microcontroller. Currently the software is just running a simple test program, but it's implemented with a library that allows me to address individual pixels. I plan to use the 688's uart to stream animation to the display, along with playing animation from ram or eeprom.

Here's a still of the display and the driver unplugged - the driver is pretty light weight.

B.bro in action

Here's a video of B.bro drawing a very simple starburst pattern on posterboard.

B.bro Stills

Here's some quick shots of my robot B.bro - he's named after the character in the song "Baby Brother" by the White Stripes.

The brass tube is a holder for Sharpie pens so he can draw patterns on the floor. He's got a dead simple user interface (an LED and a pushbutton). When I turn him on he sits there and waits for me to push the button. Then he takes off and draws a simple pattern - stopping and lighting his LED when he's done. This allows me to pick him up and move him, or change pens to a different color. Then I push the button again and he takes off once more. In the near future I'll be posting some video of him in action, and technical stuff like schematics and source code. Hope you like him.

New Year - new projects

It's hard for me to believe it's been a year since I last posted anything here. Lots has happened which will go untold. Suffice it to say I've wakened from my tech involved slumber and have some cool stuff going on.

If you're looking for an update on the NetLogo project, I had to let that one go for now. My personal journal is still open on the subject but progress is quiet and reflective.

What I've got going on now is much closer to my roots as an engineer. I'm currently working three projects:

• Building a low cost cnc mill
• Developing a small robot
• Learning to hack on the road

I'll be writing about and posting pictures of each project as time allows, and as interesting things happen.

Stay tuned...