The Maker Faire trip ended up being a big adventure! I don't know how to break up the trip so I'm just going to write until I get tired of writing.

Kris and I left Iowa Wednesday afternoon (Oct. 15th) to drive the 1100 miles to Austin, TX for Maker Faire! It just so happened that Locksley was playing that evening in Lawrence, KS. We took at 40 mile detour to Lawrence and caught their show for the second time that week (we saw them two days earlier in Des Moines).

From there we continued driving overnight to Austin. We got into Austin about 1:30 in the afternoon (Oct. 16th). After calling our Austin friend Mark, we found out that our evening was going to involve seeing him perform improv at the ColdTowne Theater. I don't remember the last time I laughed so hard. Even if you aren't familiar with or don't like improv, if you get the opportunity to see the group Parallelogramophonograph perform you really should.

After being up for 38 hours straight, we finally got some sleep! Friday afternoon we headed over to the Travis County Fair Grounds and Expo Center to get set up at Maker Faire!!

I have my bracelet and Maker badge!!

After setting up we took a little time to walk around. The life size mousetrap was back this year! And with a fresh coat of paint.

That evening they catered food for the makers and we got an opportunity to chat with the guys in the booth next to ours about their robots. Last year we had the Icreate robot (like the roomba vacuums) that painted. The guys next to us had robots that communicated with each other using speakers and face recognition cameras. The robots didn't recognize my face or Kris's face so they concluded we weren't human (but that didn't stop them from spending time with us). Here is a picture of a kid playing with the robots the guys next to us brought:

This photo was taken sometime Saturday.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

At the dinner on set up night, we met up with our friend Steve who wrote the article about us in Servo magazine for the project we brought last year. We met the men from the Dallas Robotics Club (that Steve is a part of) and ended up walking around with them a bit that evening. Unfortunately, not that many people had set up on Friday but we did meet a man named John P. Funk who will come into play more later.

Onto Saturday...
Maker Faire was open on Saturday from 10am to 10pm.

We had the most amazing booth neighbors - Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories!!!! They do some amazing projects and they are ridiculously nice people. While the show was going on, our booths were so busy that we didn't get as much time as I would have liked to talk to them. Hopefully we will run into them at another Make Faire and get more time to chat!

Across from us, they were making liquid nitrogen ice cream! Who doesn't love giant tanks of liquid nitrogen??

Those poor boys never stopped the whole weekend. There was always a line at their booth for ice cream. To be fair- they did have a remarkable array of things to add to the ice cream to design your own flavor.

Saturday night, we quit at about 7:30 and took some time to walk around and enjoy the fair. Unfortunately for us, most of the people who had booths had also quit for the night so we didn't get to talk to many people!

I was very excited to catch Arc Attack. It is music made with tesla coils. What is a tesla coil? If you had watched History Hackers, you would know that tesla coils were created in an attempt to have wireless electricity. That didn't work out (on a grand scale) but it does work in close range (if you wave a florescent light bulb near a tesla coil it will light up). Here is the wikipedia entry on tesla coils. Anyway, I took a short video of the tesla coil in action making music.

People upstairs from the tesla coils had to shut down their electrical projects while the tesla coils were on because the wireless electricity was making stuff go crazy.

This sign was on the barricade to ArcAttack:

Signs like this are why I love Maker Faire - if you do something to hurt yourself you are the only one responsible for your actions.

That's the end of Saturday night. I think I will end Part 1 here. Part 2 will come along soon.

xoxo,
Carly