Maker Faire 2010

Sadly Maker Faire is over for another year, but we had an awesome time and I think this is our best showing to date. We had 8 builders in attendance with their droids (and family), and we presented a builders panel for the first time at the faire.

Group Shot (Steve, Gerard, Johnathan, Chris, Matt, Grant)

Between Tammy and I we took over 500 photos/videos, so it was hard to pair it down to a handful to post here, but here goes.

As usual there are many more photos in the gallery.

Saturday started off hectic with booth setup, we had a nice big space with some new banners I had made, parts, plans and a slide show on the table.

Saturday Setup

For the faire open in earnest, I had big surprise for the builders. I’ve always liked the award tradition that Mike Senna started for R2LA, so I decided to start our tradition. Our first recipient of the Bay Area Builder of the Year went to Matt McCormick who has done an excellent job of helping fellow builders, hosting events and completing his droid. It’ll be up to him to make next year’s award and pick the recipient.

Matt - Bay Area Builder of the Year

Bay Area Builder of the Year Award

Not to leave everyone else out, I had Dana Powers make special medals say thank you to everyone else for being there this year. Thanks Dana!

Everyone got a commemorative medal

Everyone got a commemorative medal - include R2

One of the children from Friday’s Young Maker Day dropped of this thank you note.

Thank you letter from Friday's Young Maker Day

We jacked some of the sign posts with our own addition, and it even made some of the blogs and local papers.

R2 trying to find his way

There were a number of Star Wars related craft events, including Bonnie Burton and her friend Terri Hodges, who are there every year with a fun SW project. Matt, John and I took our droids over to say hi and to give Bonnie one of our commemorative medals. Here’s a link to some of Bonnie’s photos from Saturday.

Bonnie and Captain Akbar

Bonnie got a Builders Award too

Jackie Nuag also presented a workshop on how to make your own felt R2d2, and we were there to support the effort

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There were a lot of cool things to see and were able to stop by some of them

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One of the funniest things was that the Maker folks put up signs around Expo Hall to keep the droids out (they think our 2.4GHz radios kills their WiFi). Only a true web geek will get the joke I think

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/robots.txt sign

Throughout the weekend we were inundated with people at the booth, it was pretty much like this the entire weekend.

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I’m so glad we had stanchions again this year to keep the crowd at bay.

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Some people were more obviously SW fans than others. The lights even worked on this home made beanie hat.

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This guy had a little R2 he wanted to share

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Most children who came by and asked all sorts of great questions, and some took notes

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Matt did a great job of getting up close and explaining things

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It was very dark in the room, which was a concern at first during Friday’s Young Maker Day, but on Saturday Gerard brought in an awesome lighting rig and the mood created was perfect

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We were so busy people were taking photos in parallel at times

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Our panel was at the end of Sunday afternoon, but the faire was still going strong and we had a good showing. Matt did a great job of leading the discussion again.

Buildes Panel

Buildes Panel

After the panel was done, we hung out to chat further with some future builders

Buildes Panel

So that’s it for another year – each time we do the faire we get at least one new builder, so next year I can see we could have an even bigger presence.

Johnathan took some awesome pictures of the event too, here’s his blog post and I’ve copied them to my gallery here.

I’ll try and post some additional photos and video in the next week.

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Posted by Chris on May 28th, 2010 in General | 4 Comments

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4 Responses

  1. Johnathan remarks on

    This was mostly a great experience because of all your hard work Chris. What a wonderful start to my build and you all made me feel super welcome and not like an outsider. You took some great photos! This was such a blast and while I know the people think we were there for them…they probably don’t know just how much fun it was for us too! Hope to add my droid to the bunch next year.

  2. Chris remarks on

    You’re very welcome.

    A bunch of the photos were taken by Tammy, but you may have guessed that because I’m in most of them.
    Plus I have to say that before she reads your comment 😉

  3. Matt McCormick remarks on

    Great wrap up, Chris. That’s a lot of photos to go through. I still haven’t sorted my stuff out. Thanks for all your hard work, and I’m psyched about my special award. Lots of fun.

    Matt

  4. Chris remarks on

    Thanks Matt. I had a real hard time deciding what to include. I left out a ton of stuff but will try and come back and post some more in the next week. I have dozens of movie clips I want to try and piece together too.

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