Ovidiu Predescu's Weblog

Maker Faire 2009 - the best festival so far

I finally had some time to go through the pictures from this year's Maker Faire. By far this was the best one so far! Lots of people participated with very interesting projects, and the variety was huge.

What was striking this year was the quality of the projects and how much time people put in them. The list of projects, sorted by type can be found at the Maker Faire's web site.

Here are some of the cool projects I liked:

• Bike wheel display. Uses LEDs controlled by a small computer to show images on a moving wheel. By Monkeylectric.
  
• Bill Buzbee's Magic-1 computer. The CPU is built entirely from 74 series TTL chips. Bill now works at Google on the Android team.
  
• Kinetic sculptures. These were incredibly detailed mechanical assemblies custom made from metal by few talented artists. Though artist in this context is an understatement: these guys have knowledge of mechanics, electronics, and are very good at building things.
  

There were a lot more interesting projects that I won't talk about in this post. Check out the Maker Fair's website for a list of participants. Also check out my Picasa album containing more pictures from the event.