Excerpt from the 1hr Make Faire special that was televised on 7/23 on KRON4

[more]

Interview with NBC Today for the 2011 MakerFaire

Youtube Link

Make:TV interview with Steve from last years Maker Faire.

 

We’ll be at Maker Faire again this year, and running up to the event they’re featuring makers on their blog. Check out my  interview here.

Maker Faire is May 21st and 22nd, at the San Mateo Fairegrounds. We should have a good showing again from local builders as well as a few friends from further afield. I can’t wait.

 

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This guy had a little R2 he wanted to share

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Related:

• Maker Faire 2010 – Young Makers Day
• Discovery Day – Washington Elementary School
• Maker Faire 2009
• Maker Faire : Intel Developer Forum
• R2 Maker Faire News Coverage
• Maker Faire – Dance Program
• Maker Faire Photos (2008)
• Maker Faire Award

Steve and I did our annual appearance at Maker Faire’s Education Day. This year it was called Young Makers Day and we had an awesome turn out as usual with lots of curious children in attendance.

One of the teachers was wearing the famous Haynes R2 Repair Manual t-shirt

After about 4 hours of being bombarded with questions, the official event was over and we went to explore some of the other exhibits being setup – including this awesome retro rocket ship.

This was one of many art exhibits being setup, very 3PO but made mostly of old typewritters

Our setup was right next to the Tesla Coils, and they added the Imperial March to the routine 🙂

Related:

• Discovery Day – Washington Elementary School
• Maker Faire 2009
• Maker Faire : Intel Developer Forum
• R2 Maker Faire News Coverage
• Maker Faire – Dance Program
• Maker Faire Photos (2008)
• Maker Faire Award

As a warm up for Maker Faire, the Dad’s Club at Washington Elementary School in Burlingame put on a Discovery Day for the children, hopefully  inspiring  them about science and engineering. I was asked by the folks at Make: to bring along my Artoo to be part of the fun this year.

Here’s some photos from the afternoon, and as always there’s more photos in the gallery.

The Bay Area Maker Faire is almost upon us, and we’ll be there in force with more droids and builders than ever before. Look for us in the Fiesta Hall. We’ll also be participating in Young Makers Day on the Friday, and hosting a builders panel at 4PM on Sunday on the main stage in the Expo Hall.