Click here if you missed Maker Faire Trip Pt. 1

Sunday of Maker Faire, the faire was open from 10am to 6pm (luckily, a much shorter day than Saturday!). We had a chance to walk around before the open and see some of the other makers that we hadn't talked to on Friday or Saturday - most specifically we got a chance to talk to the Instructables people! They are seriously the nicest and most awesome people ever. If you get a chance to talk with Christy, she has the best stories I've ever heard about eating weird things and taxidermy.

After looking through my pictures, I realized just how little of Maker Faire Kris and I actually saw. So I will direct you to the pictures taken by Lenore (of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories) and Steve (of robots.net). Okay, so maybe I got lazy about taking pictures when we were walking around with Steve and that is why I don't have many pictures. He had a better camera than I did and I knew he would post them to his Flickr.

Anyway, here are the projects Kris and I brought. This year we decided to play with LEDs so I hacked a Monopoly board to light up when you play. If you land on the electric company the street lights turn on, if you land in jail red/blue flashing LEDs light up, Chance and Community Chest light up when you land on those spots, and I had a bucket light up with a blue LED if you landed on the water company. Here is a picture I took:

The following pictures I am stealing from Steve because, sadly, I didn't take pictures of all our stuff.

Kris's projects included a fiberoptic hedgehog:

A flower light (directions can be found here on the Instructables site):

A cosmic night light (directions can be found on here on the Instructables site and in this issue of Make Magazine):

And a Dino-rama (Dinosaur diorama). The stars are fiberoptic strands with LEDs at the end, there was a flashing red/green LED to make the volcano look like it was churning, and there was light reactive pigment around the volcano that glows:

Thanks, Steve, for taking all those pictures!

Late Sunday afternoon, we were awarded with an Editors Choice ribbon from Gareth Branwyn.

I wish we had found more time to talk with Gareth. Maybe at the next Maker Faire we will find the time! Gareth wrote the sweetest piece about our projects that was posted on MakeZine.com.

Sunday we were invited to the maker dinner.

Sunday afternoon, the guys who had the iCreate robots next to us left to get some things done before going back to Buffalo. They stopped to get ice cream and one of them got a spontaneous nose bleed (I believe it was caused by all the cold medicine he consumed that weekend). He bled (a lot!) all over his ice cream. Rather than doing something silly like going to the hospital, he grabbed his camera and started taking pictures of his bloody ice cream.

I told that story to tell this story. At the maker dinner, he got his camera out with all the pictures of his bloody ice cream. We passed that camera all around the table - while we were eating. Maker people aren't exactly normal, but I'm not sure it was healthy for us to be laughing that hard at bloody ice cream pictures in one hand while we were eating with the other hand. Shouldn't bloody ice cream be the sort of thing that makes you feel just sick enough to stop eating for at least a moment or two? Not us apparently. Christy from Instructables named it a 'Vampire Sundae' and told him to post an instructable on it. I searched the site but didn't come up with anything.

So that is the end of Maker Faire. The people at Maker Faire are some of the most amazing people on this planet and I can't wait to see them again (if not in San Mateo, again in Austin next year).

I'm going to end Pt. 2 here and I'll post about the rest of our trip in a day or two.
xoxo
Carly