Maker Faire 2012

A friend asked what got my attention at Maker Faire. My response:

Everything on the Make Live stage was amazing. Intel's futurist, Brian David Johnson, had a very interesting talk. The makerspace panel was absolutely stunning; life changing, even.

I was super impressed by the Rostock Max printer (www.SeeMeCNC.com). (re)Designed by a bunch of injection molding guys. They'll be shipping kits of the hard-to-print parts alongside their full kits. These guys had a really neat injection molded business card! I'll post pictures soon.

Trinity Labs (www.trinitylabs.com) is absolutely AMAZING. They have Mike Payson (maxbots), Triffid Hunter, and Arthur Wolf on the payroll. They're moving forward on the excellent Smoothieboard, and have a very sturdy MendelMax offering. Think: single linear motion extrusion on the y axis rather than a pair. Eric took a lot of time to talk to me; it was pretty cool to connect over our plans to build Rostocks.

Listened (and asked a lot of questions) to Edward P. Ryan (www.tb-iplaw.com), a patent attorney. He was great, and gave me a few good bits of information that I didn't know before. For example, if you create a PCB that, once populated, will infringe upon a patent, selling the bare PCB puts you at risk for a suit.

Qu-Bd (http://www.qu-bd.com/) gave me a few feet of their 'nanolinks' mini cable chain. At $3/foot, it's awesome and affordable!

I enjoyed seeing the DLP resin printers. Stunning resolution, but the cured plastic isn't very rigid. It's also best in one color - red - because they're using visible-color (blue?) curing plastic. I think I'll wait until someone's built a specialized UV projector.

iDigi gave me a business card with a bare XBee board. If I can find a BOM, I'm going to populate it ;)

The Shopbot tools on display were impressive - they had a CNC-lathe combo on display! I wouldn't want one for the house, but would definitely reccomend to otherse.

I glanced the Helios Robot (http://kick.st/Spjaw0). Looked like an interesting toy.

I enjoyed seeing the AeroQuad (www.AeroQuad.com) multicopters buzzing about all day. They also have very impressive business cards (as much as a paper business card can be impressive).

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