Today kwc, horizonlines and I went to the Maker Faire on the San Mateo Fairgrounds. I was surprised at the scale of the Maker Faire -- I had expected mostly booths, set up outdoors, showing off various home electronics kits, and a couple of higher profile do-it-yourself projects. Instead, what the Maker Faire featured was all manner of size and scope of do-it-yourself projects -- from needlepoint and sewing to a functional walking robotic giraffe. In some ways it felt like a science fair run by adults -- all manner of engineers and hobbyists showing off their projects.
We started off by test driving the Xebra from Zap, a 3-wheeled, 4-door electric car. Capable of reaching up to 40 miles per hour, we drove around the track. The interior decor of the Xebra is quite plain, and some of the controls seem antique, but it's still pretty cool that it's all electric. There's no noise starting up the vehicle, and aside from some of the squeeks and rattles as the prototype moved around the test track.
My personal favorite of the things I saw at Maker Faire was an art installation called Constellation, which used an iSight camera, a computer and an LCD projector to create a silouette of the camera image and create a night filled sky with stars, which were then movable.
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