Maker Faire Detroit: Cool projects

This heading may be overly broad, but we found an abundance of impressive things that didn’t seem to fit in the other categories.

These students at Melvindale High School (and their advisor, Randy Thomas) won third place in a robotics competition with this ROV they constructed.  They plan to continue improving it.  They told a story of how the ROV was used by local police, and discovered a corpse in a local body of water.  It was great to see these young fellows so engaged and knowledgeable about the system.

The stylin’, stylin’ ties on display from Cyberoptix Tie Lab were among the coolest things available in the merch booths.  They have loads of awesome colors and cool designs, and the folks at the booth were quite interested in discussing the designs, and weren’t pushing a hard sell.  I hope to order one or two once I can determine which ones best match my wardrobe.

Shapeways had a booth filled with neat designs demonstrating the different materials they had available.

Gregory Gage of Backyard Brains made neuroscience very interesting and accessible.  Here we find him explaining his Spikerbox neuron signal amplifier.  He proudly declared that there was no Arduino in his project to be found, and that he only needed pretty standard analog components to accomplish some impressive amplification.

You can see the leg of a cockroach pinned to the cork by the electrodes hooked up to the amplifier.  The device has a small built-in speaker, but also has an audio out jack.  The leg, in spite of being on its own, generated noticeable signals when stimulated by movement, or a breeze, or other very minor things.

These folks representing KeegoTech told us all about this fascinating MudWatt kit that would produce up to 200 microamps using just soil (and the bacteria already present in abundance within it) as a very basic kind of battery.  We expect things like this will find more and more application as the trend for devices that consume less power continues.

The Dymaxion House obviously isn’t a Faire project, but embodies many of the same notions (in all its Space Age awesomeness).  We enjoyed having the run of the Henry Ford Museum, certainly as a cool refuge and water refill station, but more so as a way to see a lot of the back story for the things that we are making now, to see the shoulders of the giants on which we are standing.

This fellow is building a TubeSat-style satellite called FRETS1 in order to test some theoretical improvements to an ion engine design.  Evidently, launching a device into orbit (using the services provided by Interorbital Launch Systems) can be lest costly (in dollars and in IP licensing constraints) than trying to get the conditions right (hard vacuum, etc.) for testing on earth.  I found this fellow to be knowledgeable in the extreme, and would have loved to hear more about this fascinating project, but was unable to stay.

Two days of hot sun had taken its toll, and by the end of the day Sunday, attendance had lightened considerably.  Seeing all the cool projects was great, but we found that the best part was getting to talk to the makers and ask questions and see inside the projects.  I would seriously recommend getting out to a similar event to anyone with the slightest interest in making anything, and I look forward to the next time I will be able to go.