My traveling companion Will has posted his first Maker Faire post on Engadget. We’re continuing to add photos to the Hack-A-Day photostream on Flickr. If there’s anything you see there that you’d like more info on, just ask.
Uncategorized355 Articles
MF2006: Difference Engine
I was pleasantly surprised to find Tim Robinson’s difference engines at the Maker Faire. Both machines are based on Charles Babbage’s designs and built out of Meccano. A difference engine is a mechanical computer for tabulating polynomial functions. You can read more about the construction on his site. More photos: one, two.
MF2006: Monome
The people from the Monome project are out in full force at the Faire. They’ve got five of the 8×8 pads hooked up for people to play with. The first two pictured above actually work together as a 16 step loop system. There’s also one hooked up as a mixer and another as a drum machine. The fifth one is showing pixelated video from an iSight. The box is really well built. The $500 price point has shocked a lot of people, but it’s really unavoidable since they’re only doing a 200 device run. Something I hadn’t realized before is that the buttons are unique to the device, not off the shelf parts. The button is really a rubber cap that sits over the LED and has a conductive ring at the base. I hope they post a schematic for their 8×8 matrix controller so that anyone could build one. Here are a few more pictures: one, two, three.
CCC Videos Now Available
I know a lot of you can’t make the Faire this weekend, but there’s still hope. The videos from the CCC hacker con in Berlin last December are now available via bittorrent which should provide plenty of nerdtainment this weekend.
MF2006: The Electric Unicycle
The nice thing about Maker Faire is all of the fun projects you can try out for yourself. Trevor Blackwell brought his balancing scooter and electric unicycle for people to ride. We’ve got more photos from the Faire on Flickr.
Maker Faire Tomorrow
Will and I arrived safely in San Francisco and headed over to the Maker Faire to check out the setup. Well, we already found one thing we like FIRE. The venue is huge and we can’t wait to see everything tomorrow.
Hack Media: Monome
Stop. Watch the video. Monome is an 8×8 grid of backlit buttons for music control. That’s pretty much it. The demo video does an awesome job showing some of the possibilities and I’m sure there will be many interesting developments in the future. I’d love to see what adding a second color for feedback would do.
Will O’Brien from Engadget and I will be attending Make Faire next weekend, where you’ll be able to see and play with the Monome first-hand. We hope to see some of you there.
[via Create Digital Music and Music Thing]
