Fab@Home:Maker Faire SF 2007

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1 Maker Faire: Bay Area 2007 - Dan Periard

Maker Faire: Bay Area 2007 - Dan Periard

Here are some pictures and links pertaining to Fab@Home's appearance at the Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can find the overall rundown at the Maker Faire website. Unfortunately, I didn't have much of a chance to walk around and check out the other exhibits. Fortunately, this was due to the fact that we had a pretty continual stream of people at our booth! Thus, some of the pictures you see are from my collection, and the others can be found on Flickr - I'll try to differentiate, so you can see how bad a photographer I am :).

We had an excellent turn-out: on Saturday, I handed out 300 posters, by 4PM, forcing us to jot the website URL on scrap papers to hand out. On Sunday, I went to Kinkos and got 500 more copies, at least 400 of which we handed out between roughly 11AM and 5PM. The server stats have been fantastic: between the NY Times article on May 7th and the Maker Faire, we've seen the most traffic since the Slashdotting in January.

If you have pictures of the Fab@Home from the Maker Faire, PLEASE post them!

Fab@Home Booth

Here are some pictures of the booth we had at the Maker Faire. Please note the "huge" crowd around the table! Even though we were located in the far-back corner of the building, we still got a good turnout, mainly thanks to the massive tesla coils! The coils would start up - you could hear them from quite a distance - then everybody would mill around after the lightning show, naturally gravitating to our cool-blue Fab@Home. The top four pictures are mine, and the other four came from Flickr (search "Maker Faire 2007 fab" minus the quotes to see the full-size versions).

			Our biggest draw: the Tesla Coil!
My lovely fiancee, she was a trooper.

Printed Objects

My fiancee, Claire, graciously manned the fabber during the show (hence why you'll see a lovely lady behind the table, as opposed to my mug), so I could answer questions. For day one, Saturday, we stuck to EZ cheese, as our frosting wasn't handling the heat/humidity very well. After a few smaller objects, we resurrected the cheese house, with much better results than before!

Courtesy of Flickr - Early Printed Objects

Midway through the cheese house.

Completed!

Beautiful, ain't it?

On Sunday, Claire and I decided to move away from EZ Cheese, and so we went to a local grocery store. After wondering the aisles for a little while, we opted for a couple tubs of whipped frosting, the results shown below.

Unfortunately, cheese doesn't stand the test of time well.	My attempt at a Maker Faire logo.	Frosting sun, combo of chocolate & vanilla.
A larger sun	Actually, this sun was supposed to be an octopus, but the computer lost the build midway.	San Fran logo & perfect frosting flower	Man, that flower is pretty!