Economy Size Geek

MAKE: Blog: Maker Faire photos

On Saturday, I went up to Austin for the first Maker Faire in Texas. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I mean I’d been to some small maker events at other Oreilly conferences and although they had some interesting stuff - it didn’t seem like it was something that would take more than an hour to experience.

It turns out I was wrong. The event was spread over a huge area. It took me a while just to walk to everything. In the beginning I approached the whole thing like an exhibit floor at a convention. That was totally the wrong way to think about it. Although there were people selling stuff, most of the stuff was being demoed by the person responsible for its creation.

That ended up being the secret of the magic of the event. A number of times I fell into a 30 minute conversation about the creation before me. It turns out when you spend some time with someone who is passionate enough to create something and then show it off at the mother of all science faires you get access to a tremendous amount of information.

For example, I did a deep dive into the process of converting a normal car to an electric car with a guy who is setting up a business to do it in Austin. I might have been able to learn some of the stuff on the Internet - but it was so much straight forward having this one on one conversation with an expert on the subject. My take aways:

• It is about $10,000 to convert a car
• Manual transmissions work better after conversion
• The motor lasts forever - but things still go wrong
• Battery maintenance sounds like a Huge P-I-T-A
• It is a project best done by someone who already likes to work on cars

I even spent 20 minutes learning about Modern RC Naval Battles from the North Texas Battle Group. It was crazy how much work and design they put into the vessels only to have them shot at by other participants.

There ended up being a lot of that kind of thing at Maker Faire. People made things. In a lot of cases, they were making things to make other things (Hello CNC village).

I also walked away with a renewed interest in homebrew electronics (My Arduino should arrive next week).

So my advice, if a Maker Faire comes to a place near you - go see it - but make sure you spend times with the makers themselves - what they have created is cool but getting an all access pass to the people themselves is even cooler!