Maker Faire 2010

RuBot II Robot
Hey everyone, so this week I’m going to be talking a bit about the Maker Faire 2010 & what I saw there. Here we have a robot called the RuBot II which is a hi-tech Rubik’s cube solving robot. It appears in the 2010 Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s fastest Rubik’s cube solving robot. I found this to be the most interesting thing at the Maker Faire because quite honest with you, I’d never seen anything like this in my life & thought it was a pretty awesome invention. I can image this would be great to rent out to parents for kids birthday parties as well. It encouraged interaction between the audience by having us take the Rubik’s cube & mis-match the colors. When finished, it was given to the Robot to organize the cube in color order again. It consisted of many electronic movable parts, too many to list. It basically looked like the Terminator. I really don’t know what software which was used, but obviously the program was made from scratch & had optical recognition to identify the Rubik’s cubes colors.

Above, here is a picture of The “MakerBot Thing-O-Matic Kit” Basically, it’s a homemade open source, 3D printer kit in which you can use to print anything from a 100 butterflies to an entire chess set. I thought it was very interesting & quite a useful invention. They encouraged the users interaction by allowing them to create a 3D design, print it & to play with their creation afterward. I thought it to be quite a nice prototyping machine & that it is accessible to anyone for a low cost. It is basically consisted of both hardware (many wires, outer casing & electronic parts) & software. (which was open source) It created objects that were made from some kind of MK5 plastruder.

Who needs books?
BYOB
In this particular Exhibit named “BYOB” Bring Your Own Books, the creator Celina Alvarado, has created an interactive exhibit that captures the motion of the books being thrown at the white board in which letters are projected being scattered after the book hits the screen. It gives the impression of letters coming out of the book. I like this exhibit because it allows the users to relieve stress by taking their frustrations out onto the books being thrown. I lot of people liked participating in this exhibit including me for this reason. This is why I felt it was successful. It got the audiences emotions involved in the exhibit so they are not just passively watching but are involved making for a more meaningful impacting impression on people. It uses motion capturing cameras & a projector for the hardware used.

Beat create headphones

Interactive electronic board