Maker Faire Newcastle 2010

This two-day, family-friendly event celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset and features interactive exhibits organized by individual enthusiasts, hobbyist groups and clubs as well as student groups. It's for creative, resourceful folks who like to tinker and love to make things.

Arts and Crafts

In this section discover -

• The secret of print Gocco, how fabric scraps and thread can turn into works of art, original t-shirts and bags
• An interactive project involving the use of a wiimote, computer, projector and IR tracking with IR LEDs built into spraycans (and soon pens). FriiSpray, allows people to create digital, or virtual grafitti as an interactive media installation
• How the Makers walked from Ipswich to Newcastle - bringing a travelling band of curious technologies! Aided by a homemade sextant, an Arduino powered pedometer which dead reckons progress on the route, a device for calculating latitude from how a webcam registers the hours of daylight, an iPhone-based geographical misinformation system for psycho-geographical tourists, and more! Using low-tech location devices, you can pin-point your exact location. The Curiosity Collective will also bring some new curiosities including the forthcoming "dark show"
• Chipboard propose to build a live sculpture in Times Square - a labyrinth of different spaces of varying sizes, shapes and characteristics that exercises an innovative approach to making. The sculpture will be large enough to allow people to move freely through all the spaces once it is complete.
• The Newcastle Craft Mafia will organise a group project based on the badges you earn in the scouts. This time, big kids, young kids and older kids (everyone really) will learn to create badges to show off their skills
• Inspired by the Craft area of the San Mateo Maker Faire, SewWhat will enable people to design, cut, sew and overlock with scrap fabric and old clothes.
• Things you can eat, things you can wear and things that do both. At Crafty Geekery participants will be made to explore the stories behind food and eating behaviours as well as create wearable items inspired by edible objects.
• What happens when you combine the skills of a crafter (knitting, sewing, jewellery making) with a professional geek: programmable earrings that flash changing light patterns dependent on the ambient light level or sound level; a knitted hat with LED beads; a handbag that reacts to someone getting close and so on.

Electronics

No Maker Faire can be without Electronics or Robots, Maker Faire Newcastle is no exception!

• Power Tool Drag Racing
  
  Get your trigger finger at the ready for power tool drag racing – think belt sanders meets Formula 1! Have a go at racing power tools down a 30ft track and measure your reaction and performance times. In the power tool arena, you’ll also get a chance to see a chainsaw powered stretched mini Moto, and watch the professionals race their modified angle grinders, dremels and saws in a bid to be crowned Power Tool Drag Racing Champion!

Other exhibits include:

• The Mazzini project helping you to understand and control your energy usage. How would your life change if your electricity bill was itemised like your phone bill?
• Oomlout produces fun open source products, often using Arduino electronics and laser cutters - some examples of previous things they have made include: Twitter Monitoring Typewriter; Open Source Robotic Arm; Automatic Wire Stripper.
• Shadow challenges expectations of the relationship between light, movement and sound. This piece utilizes a variety of technologies but ultimately relies on the human body to dictate the visual and sound output. Sometimes beautiful music is made and sometimes horrible noise.
• The Percussion Machine II - A much scaled up version of the Percussion Machine that won the best hardware hack at Music Hackday. The aim is to make it play some real sounds but the emphasis is still fun and silly.
• Hybrid and PropGFX - Hybrid is a retro game development system based on the Parallax multicore microcontroller.
• BigDog Interactive will display several &faux vintage& electronic devices that they have built including the iPhonograph.
• Computkit UK 101 is 30 years old! Come and see it in its original form and modified, as well as the musical wheel which was featured on the Make blog in September.
• The Posc, a battery powered pocket-sized oscillator, is ideal for use with guitar amplifiers, effects pedals, PA systems, and can even be plugged directly into your computer or Hi-Fi audio inputs.
• Sparkletubes and Nixie Clocks - unique and beautiful clocks based on unusual old technology displays and plastic tubes housing different colour LED's
• The Webcycle is an exercise bike, with sensors on the pedals, connected via Arduino to a laptop running Ubuntu with wondershaper. The faster you pedal, the faster it lets your internet go.
• North of England Arduino Group will present: Crazy people; Junk Box Monome and much more.
• Dragonfly is a set of electronic building blocks that allows you to quickly invent, design and build small computing devices, such as digital cameras or MP3 players.
• Have a drink at the Twinkly Sparkly Cocktail Bar, built from recycled bits and pieces, with an embedded Evil Mad Scientist motion sensitive 800 LED circuit board.
• Sparkle, a tesselatable arduino-like, PCB prototype project that can be used to put together different arrangements of modules to construct various wearable objects such as bracelets, belts, badges and more.
• Artful Dodgems - Design and manufacture your own miniature dodgem car using simple electronics and nailbrushes.

Engineering

• CamBam is an application to create CAM files (gcode) from CAD files or its own internal drawing editor for use in CNC routers, mills and laser cutters. CamBam has been put to many uses: RC modelling, model engineering, woodworking, jewellery making, robotics, signs, and mould making to name a few!
• A miniature working steam locomotive: the assembled frames, wheels and valve gear components of a miniature 5" gauge steam locomotive.
• Shapeways will be printing in 3D in a variety of materials.
• The KNEX challenge - Over the course of the day there will be several different challenges for you to work on as teams. Each team will be provided with a box of KNEX and then asked to build an object from its contents within a certain time period.
• Superpants will demonstrate the “foam machine” as well as showing a huge amount of projects including furniture built from aircraft parts; giant 'Kerplunk' and a giant ball maze (for kids to play with); 'Family Fortunes' quiz buzzers; a roving mobile electric barstool and much more.

Music

Listen to and play with the latest music innovations

• An autonomous outdoor sound object able to read from various sensors such as humidity and light which will generate and play back various sounds. It is able to play to the sunrise in an outdoor location, in the tradition (but not the style!) of a classic Indian morning raga.
• Ghostfire are the UK's premier steampunk band. Yes, a full band with a cracking live show. Not to be missed!
• The Subsonic Submarine is a retro hi tech sound playground. Vintage controls link to a laptop & analogue sound equipment, mixing & modifying an exclusive collection of multi track grooves, so participants can flick levers and Frankenstein switches, turn wheels, squeeze horn bulbs and more.

Science

• Help to design and build a mathematical sculpture using zometool and polydron to explore the ideas of symmetry in 2D and 3D with Building Mathematics
• Open Hardware for the Biotech Hobbyist - From basic to complex, there's never been a better time to do the experiment. DNA from kiwifruits using kitchen ingredients, glowing bacteria from fresh squid, checking the DNA identity of your food, could it contain GMO? Is it pig, fowl or beef? Arduino based biological apparatus, makerbot and shapeways printed parts, Labs from Fabs(IE) and LAB in a BOX(UK) present a table of accessible technology.

Robotics

• Not complicated robot technology but a lot of fun - three 'drunks' that sit on benches and interact with passers-by. Recently exhibited in a gallery in Shoreditch, they got a blinding review in The Times which describes creator Giles Walker as “a master sculptor and genius”. Come and discover them for yourself!
• Lego Mindstorm Robots - using a Bluetooth connection, participants can incrementally control the robots in a realistic scenario similar to NASA controlling the Mars robot.

Green

• The OpenEnergyMonitor project aims to develop and build open source energy monitoring and analysis tools for increased energy efficiency and distributed renewable microgeneration. A DIY wind turbine will be displayed.
• The Hexayurts are a new kind of sheltering solution unfortunately much in demand at the moment due to the Haiti catastrophy.

AV

• A 3D virtual reality exhibit provides a completely immersive experience - a personal Imax - in a space where games and business virtual reality can come together.
• At the Culture Lab booth, researchers and students will present digital media and interactivity projects for your enjoyment.
• Surround Video & Sound will turn a living room sized space into an immersive audio visual experience using surround sound, a fish-eye lens to capture video and a convex mirror to project the image.

Hacks

• Back and even bigger than last year, now 15 stations! Learn to solder and “make your own”: TV-B-Gone; brain machine; Trippy RGB Waves Kit and much more
• Find the freedom to hack things better with Sugru.

Presentations and Workshops

Although most of Maker Faire is suitable for everyone, there’ll also be some special adult presentations and workshops. Learn about microcontrollers with Mitch Altman – most (in)famous for inventing a keychain that makes it fun to turn off TVs in public places. Workshops include SketchTag – a chance to create animations and drawings, created from the code up! Details on more workshops taking place over the weekend to follow soon