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.

Looking forward to seeing you in 2012!

So, as a quick reminder, remember to bring:

• Your paper tickets, if you’ve already registered (you can login to eventbrite at any time to print them) or cash, check or credit card to buy new tickets (onsite prices are $20 for adults, $15 for kids)
• Cash for the awesome food trucks and crafter shopping, as well as parking if you use one of the lots ($5)
• Clothing for the Swap-O-Rama-Rama screenprinting and textile hack zone
• Misbehaving small appliances for the FIXIT Clinic (you can take it to the Wreck Lab after if it doesn’t work out
• Handmade, homemade food stuffs for the Urban Homemade Food Swap
• Hat and/or sunscreen, as a lot of the event is outside
• Your bike!  Free bike valet by the East Bay Bicycle Coalition; come in style!

Remember, tons of exhibits run all day, but check the schedule for times of performances, workshops, and lectures. Doors open at 10 am and we kick everyone out to start clean up at 5 pm.

Most importantly, bring your curiosity and DIY attitude.  We can’t wait to see you soon!

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:

The Eggbot started in 1990 when Bruce Shapiro created the first one, just in time for Easter. He was interested in controlling stepper motors from his computer, and this led to the creation of this drawing robot.

The Eggbot has been used as a tool to teach about electronics and robotics. In 2009, Bruce, with some help, turned the Eggbot into a kit for “home assembly”. Now Eggbot will be at the Mini Maker Faire!

Who Makes up the Eggbot Team?
The Eggbot team consists of the core members Bruce Shapiro, Lenore Edman, Windell Oskay, Brian Schmalz, and Ben Trombley.
Bruce Shapiro is the main creator, and has done many other projects with “Motion Control”. For him, this means making art with motion controlled by a computer. Some of his other projects are interesting, like his Ribbon Dancer, a machine that waves long flowing ribbons in a dance.

Check them out at the Mini Maker Faire
See the Eggbot in action at their booth—and if you’re completely impressed, you can buy your own eggbot kit for $195.

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.

Customize with the Oakland Museum. How do we create symbols and logos that reflect our personal style? At the Faire, the Oakland Museum will  bring a project logo and then give you art supplies and a video camera to help you create a stop motion video  that completely changes the logo to reflect your vision.

Build New Circuits with the Lawrence Hall of Science Ingenuity Lab.  Design, build and test your own moving sculpture using hobby motors, batteries, wires, switches and common everyday objects. Learn about basic circuitry while modifying your design and building cool gadgets.  Just take a look at the wicked gleam in the eye of this kid making a pen-yogurt container-robot. Enough said.

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
• Kalman Spellitch as KALTEK
• Kimric Smythe & Shannon O’Hare of Neverwas Haul with their Parlor Car
• Kevin Binkert, home coffee roasting
• John Law onstage, being interviewed for being a culture maker
• Sabrina Merlo, EBMMF producer
• John Behrens with Omega Recoil & their Tesla Coil antics
• Jason McClean and his Salvage Lumber/Mobile Chicken Coop all-day making demo
• Kevin Mathieu and his Lego Jeep

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:
]]> https://ebmakerfaire.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/the-insidious-community-of-survival-research-labs/feed/ 0 sannmer Kevin Binkert's Flame Tornado 2 https://ebmakerfaire.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/fixit/ https://ebmakerfaire.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/fixit/#comments Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:19:11 +0000 rachelbneumann http://ebmakerfaire.wordpress.com/?p=1475 Continue reading →]]> It’s raining, the kids battery-operated robot isn’t working. You’d sit and make tea and toast but the toaster is broken, and so is the kettle for that matter.

Just plan a little ahead and bring all your almost-working or seriously-broken small appliances, electronics, toys, and gadgets to the East Bay Mini Maker Faire. Peter Mui and his lovely Fixit Clinic team will provide workspace, specialty tools, and guidance to help you disassemble and troubleshoot your item. You’ll be back in tea and toast in no time. And, if for some reason it can’t be fixed, at least you’ll know more about how it works and why it broke in the first place.

Of course, if all attempts fail—just take it down the hall to the Wreck Lab and give it its due!

Watch the Fix-It Clinic in action here:

If you like to craft you will likely spend a good chunk of your day in the Swap-O-Rama-Rama* with us.

In the Sewing Room ALL DAY:

Clothing Swap—Donate your old adult or kid clothes; Come pick through our piles of available freebies—hack them, mod them, print on them, cut ‘em up and use them for some other project. This is the spirit of the Swap!

No Sewing Necessary:
▪            Make a Cape—be a superhero, a bat, a wizard, a princess, whatever…Halloween is right around the corner folks;
▪            Make a Tutu/Mermaid Seaweed Skirt/Hawaiian Hula Skirt without touching a needle and thread;
▪            Mod your T-shirt –you can make those fringed, beaded shirts all the cool kids are sporting; use scissors, fabric pens, glue on some bling, add beads and more.

Some Sewing Required:
“Little pocket monsters” with brilliant artist Meredith MacLeod. She’ll help get you started and supervise some machine and hand-sewing monster making.  Go as simple or elaborate as you want; and if you feel the need to adopt or a Monster of hers, you may be in luck.

For More Sewing: We have sewing machines for you to use, with experienced sewers on hand to help troubleshoot, teach and inspire. Take full advantage. And if you want to really get your game on—stick around and maybe we’ll have a catwalk in the afternoon so you can strut in your new threads!

Screen Printing Room

Idiot or Genius These Portland based artists are designing a special one-off poster for our event! You can come and print the final color layer on the poster and take one home with you! They’ll also have their own work to show and sell, and can help you print on almost anything;

Rock, Paper Scissors Collective If you don’t know your hometown RPS from Art Murmur or from their admirable outreach work with teens, you should. These returning artists are coming with a cool new batch of silkscreens, as well as some of their member-crafted zines, shirts and paperie to sell.

Park Day Screening Zone Add some cool, original graphics to any fabric, paper or clothes you find in your visit—or even the shirt or hoodie off your back.

*Swap-O-Rama-Rama by Wendy Tremayne is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

David Calkins is the founder of Robogames,

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.