Come on down to the Cambridge Mini Maker Faire today!
You can meet up with other makers, get some project inspiration and talk to a MAKE magazine author or two. While you are there, stop by the MAKE booth to enter to win one of two pairs of weekend passes to World Maker Faire 2012.
Getting there: The Cambridge Mini Maker Faire is held at 449 Broadway, site of the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. The Cambridge Science Festival site has a map of the area with details on other events at the Carnival. Limited parking is available beneath the Cambridge Public Library, and under the tennis courts on Ellery Street.
ACRIS is a really neat LED controlling system developed by Joseph Colosimo, a student member of MITERS, the MIT making paradise. He will be displaying the device and components at Friday’s Cambridge Mini Maker Faire from 12-4pm.
Joseph had this to say about his project:
ACRIS is a high-power lighting system that reacts to its environment using high-power LED controllers and software that takes sensory input, like music, and generates beautiful output patterns. It’s also a generic framework that others can use for their own projects.
Getting there: The Cambridge Mini Maker Faire is held at 449 Broadway, site of the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. The Cambridge Science Festival site has a map of the area with details on other events at the Carnival. Limited parking is available beneath the Cambridge Public Library, and under the tennis courts on Ellery Street.
Katie Gradowski and Will Macfarlane operate Parts and Crafts, an awesome program for maker kids in Somerville, MA. They’re running a vacation camp this week. They’ve built into their planning having their campers organize and conduct a hands-on exhibit for kids at the Cambridge Mini Maker Faire this Friday from 12-4pm.
Will and Katie explain a bit of what they’re about:
We do a bunch of different kinds of projects, and we’ll be coming to the Cambridge Mini Maker Faire with some interesting things that we’ve made, at the moment, along with smaller things, this is looking like it should be a bike-cart built into some kind of space-ship shape, some backpack mounted pressurized water-guns, along with materials on how to make a couple of small interesting projects.
Getting there: The Cambridge Mini Maker Faire is held at 449 Broadway, site of the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. The Cambridge Science Festival site has a map of the area with details on other events at the Carnival. Limited parking is available beneath the Cambridge Public Library, and under the tennis courts on Ellery Street.
DIYbio is a group that meets in the Boston area to explore the biology you might have missed in school. Come see what happens when you hack protein so that it becomes green and florescent at this Friday’s Cambridge Mini Maker Faire from 12-4pm.
Getting there: The Cambridge Mini Maker Faire is held at 449 Broadway, site of the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. The Cambridge Science Festival site has a map of the area with details on other events at the Carnival. Limited parking is available beneath the Cambridge Public Library, and under the tennis courts on Ellery Street.
After producing the music video for OkGo’s song The Last Leaf, Nadeem and Ali had 3,000 pieces of toast and three laser cutters. Knowing that not everybody has access to rapid fabrication tools, they created danger!awesome, a laser cutting and fabrication workshop in Central Square, Cambridge. If you have an idea, and it doesn’t yet exist in this world, they might be able to help you make it real.
Ali says:
danger!awesome is a project of mine and Nadeem’s; our goal is to bring high-end fabrication equipment to the public for art, customization, and personal fabrication. Our laser cutters are left over from a project that we did with OkGo. We’re teaming up with artists and the generally clever to make interesting things. On Friday we’re planning on bringing business cards, samples of materials that we can work with, and a few geeky items.
Come meet them, see examples of projects made in their shop and find out how you could design some awesome of your own at this Friday’s Cambridge Mini Maker Faire from Noon to 4 pm.
For a bit more information on danger!awesome, you might check out this article in DigBoston, or this one behind the paywall at the Boston Herald.
Getting there: The Cambridge Mini Maker Faire is held at 449 Broadway, site of the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. The Cambridge Science Festival site has a map of the area with details on other events at the Carnival. Limited parking is available beneath the Cambridge Public Library, and under the tennis courts on Ellery Street.
Where would you go if you wanted to work with some of the most amazing tools and incredibly talented makers creating unbelievable projects? Why Artisan’s Asylum, of course!
They have a typically busy weekend ahead. Gui writes:
As part of the Cambridge Science Festival, Artisan’s Asylum will be hosting an Open House this Saturday from 1PM to 5PM. Explore exciting fabrication technology, get up close and personal with the work of our resident engineers, inventors, artists and craftspeople, see examples of things you can make and learn to make here, and mingle with our members, instructors and staff! This event is free and open to the public, with light refreshments available.
At the Cambridge Mini Maker Faire this Friday, Artisan’s Asylum is planning to have lots of information about the organization and projects that people are working on. They’ll have some of the makers in their vibrant community showing projects, including a motorized barber chair, robots and more.
Getting there: The Cambridge Mini Maker Faire is held at 449 Broadway, site of the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. The Cambridge Science Festival site has a map of the area with details on other events at the Carnival. Limited parking is available beneath the Cambridge Public Library, and under the tennis courts on Ellery Street.
Charles has an excellent collection of devices that he’s built and will be bringing some of them to Friday’s Cambridge Mini Maker Faire, including: Small quad copters, combat robots and the LandBearShark.
Charles is active in MITERS, the student run MIT club dedicated to providing a space and tool access for students to build personal projects.
Originally founded as a club to give MIT students free and open access to computers, MITERS now features a mill, lathe, band saws, welders, and other hands-on tools, in addition to a host of oscilliscopes, high-end soldering irons, and other EE prototyping tools. It’s a member-run creative haven and build-anything-you-want, if-you-break-it,-fix-it space.
Getting there: The Cambridge Mini Maker Faire is held at 449 Broadway, site of the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. The Cambridge Science Festival site has a map of the area with details on other events at the Carnival. Limited parking is available beneath the Cambridge Public Library, and under the tennis courts on Ellery Street.
Shane Colton is an MIT student with a fun collection of projects to show off at the Cambridge Mini Maker Faire, this Friday April 20 from noon to 4pm. Last year, Shane brought his Pneu Scooter and Twitch projects. If you’ve ever wondered about ideal components and designs for a quadcopter or an ultralight electric go kart, you might come this Friday to chat him up on the subject.
Shane will be showing his quadcopter 4PCB, which derives much of its structure from the circuit board controlling the device.
After helping out with a previous quadrotor build, I wanted to make a smaller one and combine the electronics and structure into a single board. The most important part to find was a surface-mountable brushless motor control IC. Luckily, the TB6588FG does the job nicely, taking the place of hobby ESCs and the associated wiring. It also has better dynamic performance than hobby ESCs, since it uses an analog speed command instead of RC-style 20ms PWM.
You can follow Shane’s work on his blog, which is worth visiting, if only to check out the well curated collection of links on the right rail.
Getting there:The Cambridge Mini Maker Faire is held at 449 Broadway, site of the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. The Cambridge Science Festival site has a map of the area with details on other events at the Carnival. Limited parking is available beneath the Cambridge Public Library, and under the tennis courts on Ellery Street.
Kelly Taylor makes books from stuff most people could find in their recycling bins. She will be showing her recent work at the Cambridge Mini Maker Faire this Friday.
Here’s a bit of what she says about her bookbinding work:
I make small usable blank books out of random cool stuff: old playing card packets, pictures from magazines, maps, dog food bags, potato chip packets, if it can be glued to cardboard and/or sewn to paper, I will make a book out of it. I use two different binding styles, depending on the materials I have available. I’ll have a number of books in various stages of completion along with samples of finished books and raw materials for experimentation.
Getting there: The Cambridge Mini Maker Faire is held at 449 Broadway, site of the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. The Cambridge Science Festival site has a map of the area with details on other events at the Carnival. Limited parking is available beneath the Cambridge Public Library, and under the tennis courts on Ellery Street.
Dug North will be showing his amazing automata at this Friday’s Cambridge Mini Maker Faire. You can meet Dug and speak with him about his work, including many of the mechanical pieces shown in the video above.
Dug North creates contemporary automata — sculptures made primarily of wood that employ a hand-cranked mechanism to animate a scene or creature. His work centers around themes that are whimsical or fanciful. Dug particularly enjoys animating quirky wooden monsters and creating magic-themed automata that perform illusions. He is regularly sought out for commissions and provides creative services and expert advice on all aspects of automata to a wide range of interested parties. In addition to founding one of the largest and longest-running blogs on automata, he writes extensively on the subject for other outlets such as the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre blog and Applied Kinetic Arts. His work and writing also appear in print for MAKE, Woodcraft, other magazines, and books. Most recently he was featured in a documentary on the history of automata included on the Blu-ray release of the movie Hugo.
Getting there: The Cambridge Mini Maker Faire is held at 449 Broadway, site of the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, and Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. The Cambridge Science Festival site has a map of the area with details on other events at the Carnival. Limited parking is available beneath the Cambridge Public Library, and under the tennis courts on Ellery Street.
Cambridge Mini Maker Faire 