After I finished my shift on Sunday at the retail location of Maker Faire, I decided I owed to the blogging community to document the first ever midwestern Maker Faire with my camera.
And it was pretty warm out there. So you owe me one.
Richard, on the left, is a weaver in the Village. Tim, on the right, is in charge of maintaining historical machinery. This particular loom was brought out for the Maker Faire, and after my shift on Sunday, I got to ask all the questions I wanted to of these two guys. The person on the left whom I so rudely chopped off with my camera, is Chris, Richard's wife, and another Village weaver. She was working on a nifty table-top loom, making beautiful, complex pieces.
There's a lot going on in this picture, but I like the fact that you can see the Museum bell tower in the background. I also like the two kids in the foreground. Maker Faire has tons of activities for kids. Hey, Captain, Connor and Liam would love it.
The lady with the blue hair was in the lead for this race, and you can see that the guy behind her was trying to stab her with his, um...mighty sword. Look close. He also has a cigarette hanging from his mouth.
There were several of these cruising the area, 5-7 riders/pedalers each. They don't have a horn to honk, so to get you to move, they yell, "AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!" in unison.
Another variation on the multi-person pedal-power ride. The seats on this one look quite comfortable.
The faster you pedal, the faster you go...I don't recall ever suffering from motion sickness on a bike, but I also don't recall ever riding around in circles for a very long time...
A pedal-powered windmill with guitars for vanes. I just thought it looked cool. Wasn't the sky beautiful? It got a little warm in the sun, but nothing awful.
You could silkscreen your own t-shirt. It was cool to see how the process works.
Or you could learn how to solder, which I already know how to do. I think of Making as a more mechanical process, but electronics is the new big thing, and probably a good set of skills to have.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office was there, answering questions about costs and procedures. There were also a few Universities with tables, as well as a large contingent of representatives from the armed services, who use robots to do dangerous jobs like searching for IEDs and disarming devices. A group from the University of Michigan was there with the robots they created to compete for a DoD contract...
The black-and-white pattern you can see is so the robots can recognize each other when there are several in the field. Each side of each robot has a different pattern, so not only can they identify which other robot they are looking at, they can tell which side of which robot they are looking at.
But, hey, not everything there was pie-in-the-sky, out there. There were some really practical ideas, too...
Like the Solar-powered, Twittering Doghouse, that sends out a Tweet whenever a dog enters.
And the car from Texas (of course) that was covered in singing fish and lobsters. It was billed as The Sashimi Tabernacle Choir. Here, they were singing Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. Really.
There was quite a bit more, and you can see the rest of my pictures on my Flickr page. One of the unusual things for me was that employees had to park at the old Ford Motor Company Engineering Laboratory, which is next to the Museum, and currently not being used for a regular workspace. The building is still beautiful, though, and so are some of the out-buildings. I took this picture as I was walking back to my car, and the sky looked so beautiful next to the blond brick stack, I wanted to share.
