Maker Faire Rhode Island

There was a Maker Faire in Rhode Island last week. We visited on the final Saturday. It was a pretty fall day and everyone was out showing off the things they’d made. For example, some students from Ponaganset High School brought this neat little T-Bucket hot rod they’d built.

That doesn’t look much like a normal motor because it’s a hydrogen fuel cell. They’re hoping to get it ready to drive down to Washington DC. They’ve already driven it to the Rhode Island State House.

Some people from Big Nazo were there showing how they make they’re cool costumes.

And here’s Peter checking out a submarine that Sean Bagge is building.

Of course there were some folks there from my group at the Media Lab and the Computer Clubhouse, along with some collaborators like Ed Baafi from the South-End Technology Center who was showing off a new way to program Arduinos called ModKit inspired by Scratch blocks. As an experienced Scratch programmer Peter thought that sounded like a good way to program his Arduino. He was also excited by the TouchShield Slide which would plug into his Arduino. It’s a really sweet touch sensitive OLED screen. So he could build his own hand held video game.

There were lots of cool things to see and do. Here’s Mike trying out a pair of Brain Machine glasses.

But the best part is that you could make things like the glasses yourself. They had kits with all the parts you needed and rows of tables with soldering irons set up where you could sit down and make something.

The boys were being kind of shy about it, so I decided that I was going to jump in myself. I decided to make a Trippy RGB Waves Kit. (Take a look at the second video on that page to see what they do).

Of course, once I got started Tom jumped in to build a little portable electronic game called Mignonette.

After he finished building it, Mitch Altman, the designer of these kits helped Tom program it.

And here are the finished projects:

The Mignonette game was a big hit at Tom’s book club tonight.