ETech: Maker's Fair

Last night the O'Reilly team held the Maker's Fair here at ETech, which celebrated the launch of O'Reilly's new Make magazine by showing off some of the cool projects that you can find the in inaugural issue of the magazine. The fair was billed as: "... a science fair with a beer in one hand." -- but even that doesn't quite capture the spirit of the event. The ambient noise level in the exhibit hall was a fair bit higher than the usual noise levels in the exhibit hall -- you could feel the excitement and enthusiasm in the air.

Each of the Makers had a table where they could lay out their projects and next to the table was a sign that gave a brief introduction of the project. Behind the tables, the Makers were enthusiastically talking about their projects -- the makers were sporting large smiles as they explained their gadgets/hacks -- not unlike the parents of newborns. Maker Billy Hoffman was animated and excited as he decoded and revealed the data stored on the magnetic strips on ATM cards, plane tickets and whatever other mag strips that attendees gave him. Saul Griffith handed off a mini-marshmallow blow gun to a few kids at the fair and touched off marshmallow battles that lasted the entire event. Andrew 'Bunny' Huang spread a collection of circuit boards, hacked up X-Boxes and random tools on his table and explained the basics of hardware hacking. Toward the end of the evening, Bunny even started giving soldering lessons to a group of attendees.

O'Reilly gave me the opportunity to show off "Mayhem's home water purification still" that I hacked up last year. I spent a good amount of time talking about my project, so I really only had a few minutes near the end the fair to check out all the cool creations from all the other makers. A few things that I saw very briefly:

• A PC hacked into an old Atari game console.
• A power generating bicylcle for use in rural india.
• A collection of crazy iPod hacks for recoding high quality audio
• Refurbished old audio amplifiers
• Feral robot dogs

The Maker's Fair was so much fun that I didn't notice that two and a half hours slipped past. Kudo's to the Make team for putting on this event -- can we please do this again soon?

Did you make it to the fair? What did you think?