Just a quick post to direct you over to our 2012 Makers page, which is now up and updated with links to our over 100 makers. The list is still growing as we herd the maker cats, but this will give you a great idea of the range of makers showing next Sunday. Schedule of workshops, presentations and music coming next!
The 3rd annual East Bay Mini Maker Faire Call for Makers is now open!
Pranksters, makers, artists, closet creators, show-offs, storytellers, fiddlers and tinkerers, scientists and interdisciplinary hackers —this is your time to shine!
Our Call for Makers welcomes applications through September 12. Show what you make and share what you know….Check out our Call for Makers page for more details on the kinds of topics and exhibits we’re looking for. And get making—October 14 is not so very far away!
Thanks to Amanda Clark for the great panoramic pic!
Thanks so much for coming out to East Bay Mini Maker Faire Number Two!
The magic of Maker Faire is in the people: the spirit and generosity that Makers and event organizers express, and the curious and 0pen nature that attendees bring with them to the event. Thank you all for making the East Bay Mini Maker Faire a fantastic Maker Faire!
There are obviously way too many appreciations to offer up, but here’s some standouts:
Makers. You are it. There wouldn’t be anything to talk about if you didn’t make.
Park Day School staff, parents, teachers and community. This is an entirely volunteer-run event, and hands-down you all worked unbelievably hard to make it happen and run so smoothly. Thank you for being so game, for spending all of your time and energy, and for sharing Park’s incredible campus as a venue.
MAKE Magazine and O’Reilly Media for having the vision to share (and license) Maker Faire to community organizations. Read MAKE Magazine.
Several Individuals from outside the school community supported the East Bay Mini Maker Faire in a big way. So many deep props to Tricia McGillis for visual and web design; Scheffer Ely for serving as event operations lead; music stage manager Katy Bell; Karla Macedo for poster design.
And thanks again to our sponsors (see right)— especially latecomers Ranahan Production Services, for lending 30 radios and tons more gear, and Aidells Sausages and Semifreddis bakery for feeding our Makers.
It’s dangerous to start calling out names because it truly takes THIS VILLAGE.
But before we disperse until #3: please upload and share your photos and videos, and tag with #ebmakerfaire. Here’s mine, for a start. And spout your experiences here and via Twitter and Facebook.
Danny Scheible and his Tapigami crew are the first makers on site, beginning the involved process of installing Danny’s masking tape cityscape.
Tapigami is a 1500 square foot city, made out of 80,000 individual sculptures. Imagine a leviathan created from 4000 wire hangers each covered with different fabric from donated and recycled garments, about 200 connect sculptures that can be kicked thrown passed around. an 12 foot high tree created out of books (it’s Danny’s tree of knowledge).
We’re not sure how big this particular version of Tapigami will be, but from the looks of what’s going on in Grandma’s Attic, it looks like it’s going to be rad.
Guest of Tapigami are welcome, invited and encourage to make there own creations and add them to the walls of the exhibition space. Danny will provide materials and instruction for everyone and share his process and techniques. Scheible acts as a guide to this interaction between self and material, constantly creating and remaking the existing show. Find Danny and Tapigami in Grandma’s Attic.
Here’s some foreshadowing, pulled from a Juxtapoz magazine story on Danny:
At 3PM on Sunday on the Workshops stage, artist Jason Hadley will subject himself to the skilled ministrations of his own children, Ruby and Arlo, as they make an Alginate life-cast of his face. Jason has been making multimedia sculpture using life-casts of friends and family for years; now they get even. Dad won’t be able speak while they smother his face in that gooey, quick drying stuff that dentists use to make spookily accurate molds.
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Other workshops include hacking up your Gameboy so that it makes music (Making Music on Your Handheld Console with Little Piggy Tracker”); “PLARN” (learning to upcycle plastic shopping bags into yarn); and Bonsai with the past president of the East Bay Bonsai Society, Bill Castellon
All good stuff that can’t be learned fully at a booth in the midst of a crowd. Check the full lineup.
Kevin Binkert is a machinist, artist and inventor in San Francisco. One of his pieces is the Flame Tornado (right), a gorgeous kinetic sculpture that has “played” at the Venice Biennale, among other venues.
Kevin is adept at managing flame & heat (you should see how dynamic that tornado is, moving from delicate tendril to violent, fat vortex!). Add that to his fluency with machines and you will not be surprised he is teaching “Helpful Hacks for Home Coffee Roasting” on the Homesteader Stage this Sunday at 12:30pm, sharing how to mod Hamilton Beach air poppers for home coffee roasting.
Kevin is also a longtime member/crew/collaborator of the seminal large-scale robotics performance group, Survival Research Laboratories (shorthand = SRL). SRL was founded in 1978 by Mark Pauline and ever since then has attracted an incredible band of talented engineers, carpenters, electricians, software & firmware developers, and artists. SRL continues to stage shows around the world – about once every year or so, and Mark continually builds machines to add to the family.
The extended community of SRL continues to manifest in an astonishing range of important Bay Area cultural cornerstones (e.g. The Exploratorium, DorkBot, SFMOMA, Burning Man, the Crucible, ZeroOne, Art and Technology Colloquium, and on and on—someone should make this diagram!).
To evidence, Mr. Binkert is not the only SRL alum at showing/teaching/making at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire. Check it out, how SRL represents this year:
Liisa Pine with her Laney High School welding class and their Wheelie Cars
SRL predates the Internet. And has been truly underground. To find out about a show meant you were connected to a physical web of people. To have seen a show you would either have to have been there, or have had to order a videotape through snail mail from Mark himself (or rented one from an alt video store). To join the team you had to navigate getting through the shop gate. All physical connections. Of course over the years the crew adopted a simple list serve to stay in touch. People have married (and divorced), and developed hundreds of projects and businesses. And they continue to come together as SRL—just last week at LAMOCA, for example.
SRL, Mark and all SRL makers don’t stop making. Truly, if you live in the Bay Area, you are likely already in their web—but it’s largely invisible, entertaining & stimulating, so it’s nothing to worry about. “Insidious” is just SRL humor—just glance at the chronology of show titles, or watch:
David Calkins is the founder ofRobogames, the “olympics of robots,” where operators and their creations compete in over 50 different events, from fire-fighters, LEGO bots, hockey bots, walking humanoids, soccer bots, sumo bots, and even androids that do kung-fu.
David and his crew are not only bringing combots for show at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire, but he’s also doing a workshop Sunday on “How to Make a Combat Robot.” David will cover all the basics of how robots move and control their speed, as well as how to build a basic bot using cheap parts, pitfalls to avoid, and all sorts of other tips.
The Piedmont Scotbots, a U.S. FIRST robotics team from Piedmont High, is bringing their combot arena and will be letting folks operate their robots. !!! The FIRST Tech Challenge is an exciting robotics competition designed for high school students. An accessible and affordable robotics kit is used to solve a different challenge each year. Thousands of teams from all fifty states compete in local contests to go to the annual world championship. Here’s one of their entries for Robogames last year:
Troy Mock is bringing his Rambunctious Combat Robots: Warpig, a 1 pound bot with a powerful lifter and ultra-strong titanium armor, and Attitude, a 3 pound bot with an 8 inch titanium saw blade, designed to cut, rip, and shred! Most recently, both these robots competed in the international 2011 Robogames. Out of nearly 60 battlebots total, Warpig and Attitude both took a well earned bronze medal. Check them in action:
More robots at EBmMF are coming from The Pioneers in Engineering (PiE) Robotics Competition for Bay Area high school students. This cool program offers UC Berkeley students to mentor local high school students as they design, construct, and program a mobile robot. A key feature of the competition is the $100 per team entrance fee, which ensures that finances are not a barrier to entry. You’ll be able to drive one of their robots as well.
The Miller Institute for Learning with Technology hosts a wide variety of hands-on workshops, including Program-A-Robot, Build-A-Computer, and Troubleshooting 101. Their East Bay Mini Maker Faire booth will illustrate several of the workshops, and they’ll also be providing hand-on examples of robots, computers, and music.
Let’s say you want to build a radio-controlled polystyrene airplane or mess around with fabrication robots. It can be messy, noisy, and even a bit dangerous to explore new technologies. The kitchen table is not an option.
AMT at last year's East Bay Mini Maker Faire
Ace Monster Toys is a hackspace in North Oakland. While they have advanced tools and organized classes, they are primarily a place where people come together to share a passion for making things. Members are provided with a workbench and unlimited access to the shop. Rather than being project or class based, the group encourages collaboration, experimentation, and community.
Board member Christian Fernandez, puts it this way. “We have cool stuff, but really it’s about having these interesting, creative people, have them all in the same place at the same time, and see what comes out of that.”
Fernandez recently completed a decidedly low tech project, an Aleut baidarka, or skin boat. Of course he replaced the traditional seal skins with an advanced material. “It’s cool, you can see the waterline from inside the boat.” Other members are hard at work figuring out cool things to do with their new cutting laser.
Visit the Ace Monster Toys booth at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire for more information. If you decide you need more making in your life, they have a bench for you!
We are thrilled to announce a fantastic panel discussion at East Bay Mini Maker Faire: The 21st Century Shop Class: Developing the Creative and Critical Doers in Today’s Schools. David Clifford of the East Bay School for Boys will lead the discussion along with a variety of “shop teachers” from around the Bay Area to discuss why learning with one’s hands is critical in today’s complex world.
Shop class?! Surely you remember shop class: Bookcase projects? Cutting boards? You might not know this, but those classes and projects have gone the way of home phone service and the decline in manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Shop class is pretty much gone. Lathes, band saws and routers liquidated.
Maybe those bookcase projects were one-dimensional. But in the vacuum of any hands-on learning opportunities in school, there is rising recognition that shop class might have purpose after all. There are studies to prove it: many people show improved comprehension of science and math principles when they get to MAKE something instead of read it in a book.
Spanish class desks 8th graders designed and built at East Bay School for Boys
Clifford knows it from experience. He spent 13 years as a “shop teacher” at Lick Willmerding High School in San Francisco—part of that as the Director of the Technical Arts program (he is now Innovation and Outreach Director for the new East Bay School for Boys—check out the nice set of resources he has on design and building.)
Clifford and Lick’s approach to Technical Arts is interdisciplinary in the best way: ” Application objectives include cross-disciplinary and collaborative learning, skills for engineering, effective problem solving, creative expression, competency in the language of craft and design, and personal empowerment through self-confidence and self-esteem.”
Clifford will be making a presentation on his findings and curriculum objectives for this kind of class, and then will moderate a panel discussion amongst “shop” teachers from across the Bay Area, including:
Eric Temple, Head of School, Lick-Wilmerding High School (San Francisco)
Alex Vitturn, woodshop teacher, Aurora School (Oakland)
Liisa Pine, welding instructor at Laney College High School Machining and Welding Program (Oakland)
Casey Shea, math teacher and Project Make instructor at Analy High School (Sebastopol)
If you are a parent interested in bringing shop back to school, or if you are an educator working towards this, we encourage you to come participate in the discussion. Bring shop class back to school!
Jillian Northrup and Jeffrey McGrew are Because We Can, a full service design studio in Oakland that specializes in architecture, interiors and “fantastical things”. Even though they are a very small team, they are able to do digital design all the way through fabrication because they are leveraging a new class of affordable yet advanced tools like the ShopBot, a computer-controlled router for fabricating with wood, plastic, aluminum & more.
If you’re someone who loves visual design, but has never ventured into physical making because power tools are a tad bit intimidating, come to Jillian and Jeffrey’s workshop presentation at East Bay Mini Maker Faire, “Using Digital Fabrication to Change the World: Empowerment Through Automated Tools.” Jillian herself comes from a graphic design background, but found her way to making physical structures through output of digital files to these computer-controlled tools. Jillian and Jeffrey (the other half of Because We Can, an architect) will explain how this new class of mills, routers, lasercutters, and even 3D printers can empower you to change the world for the better, turn a hobby into a business, and make the world a more interesting place.
A good example of Because We Can’s process is this tail for The Serpent Twins, a 2011 Burning Man electric art car/sculpture. Jillian is holding a prototype she fabbed using their ShopBot in the first picture below; scroll down to see how it translated to full-scale in sheet metal.
Because We Can actually has a great post documenting in detail the process they went through for the Serpent Twins—check it out.
Keep watching ebmakerfaire.com for the full schedule of workshops and talks. Come to their presentation, and look for Because We Can’s “Big Trike” at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire on October 16th.
David Calkins is the founder of
