Maker Faire

I attended my first Maker Faire today. If you want to see some of the fun stuff I experienced, check out my photos and videos.

Some of my favorites:

Ever see two large Tesla coils in action? It’s pretty fun, and they’re my second favorite thing named after Nikola Tesla:

Monkey Lectric was letting people draw on bike wheels using LEDs. I drew this:

From Maker Faire 2009

After my design was scanned, it appeared on a spinning bike wheel:

From Maker Faire 2009

EepyBird was there too. They’re famous as the “Diet Coke and Mentos Guys.” They explained why they use that specific combination, since putting just about anything bumpy (like your finger) in a carbonated liquid will cause some amount of bubbles to appear in a process called nucleation. You can read more about it, but the basic takeaways are that mint-flavored Mentos are blasted with over 40 layers of sugar, and therefore especially bumpy. Diet soda is used for the performers’ sake, because it is sugarless and therefore healthier not sticky. Here’s a shot of them in action:

From Maker Faire 2009

And one of their more recent experiments, which has been seen by the inventor of Post-it notes:

I didn’t buy any crafts to bring home, but there was one that I wanted to:

From Maker Faire 2009

I’ll have to bring more cash next time.

Special thanks to Tiffany and Mohit for giving me a ride back to my (non-electric) car.