There is a set of bike pedals attached to each seat. The chain on each one drives a sprocket attached to the chair’s pivot point. Spinning the pedals tilts the chair and the entire frame reacts by rotating. They only had one set of pedals attached, but it was more than enough to spin the wheel at a pretty good clip. It did look like some damping on the chair pivots would help, since the chairs would swing pretty wildly. I’m sure adding two more chairs would help as well.

A Cyclecide creation [thanks Sasha]

Continue reading “MF2006: Human Powered Ferris Wheel” →

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.

Continue reading “MF2006: Engadget Coverage” →

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.

Continue reading “MF2006: Difference Engine” →

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.

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.

Continue reading “CCC Videos Now Available” →

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.

Continue reading “MF2006: The Electric Unicycle” →

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.

Continue reading “Maker Faire Tomorrow” →