Maker Faire 2011 epilogue

Seeed took a group photo with everyone at the booth but I don’t have a copy yet. This is only part of the group: front (L to R) Eric (Seeed Studio founder), Jack (Gadget Factory, Logic Sniffer co-designer), Ian (me); back (L to R) Fan (Seeed store manager), Tully (Seeed project engineer) and Steve (Seeed RnD director).

Maker Faire was an incredible experience, thank you to Seeed Studio for sponsoring Maker Faire and making this all possible. Eric, Liao, Fan, Steve, and Tully came all the way from China to setup the booth, great work guys! Thank you to my fellow exhibitors who won the Seeed Studio booth an Editor’s Choice ribbon. Jack with a Papilio arcade demo, Al with the Magic Mirror, James with a Gameduino demo, Xu Cheng with a hacked marble run. These were all great interactive demos that got a ton of attention.

Thank you Derek, Gnewt, Noah, Eric, Michael, Rich, JBeal, and all the readers who stopped by or followed the event on the blog. Thank you to all the project owners who said hi, like Charley Jones at SMTBoards who used his Bus Pirate to debug a project at the Faire. I will write everyone who left a card, I’m also available via the contact form.

I met a bunch of people I’ve known for years, but have never seen face to face. Eric, Fan, and Liao, who handle our projects at Seeed. Jack, co-designer of the Logic Sniffer. Eric, Christy, and Laura from Instructables, one of the first places I posted a project. Stephan from Watterott Electronic, a Bus Pirate and Logic Sniffer distributor in Germany, and lucky Airbus A380 flyer. Nate from SparkFun, who also carries the Bus Pirate and the Logic Sniffer. Joe Garrison, designer of the Saleae Logic talked about the new 16bit hardware (hint, it does have a FPGA after all). Eric from Low Voltage Labs provided a few VideoOverlayShield PCBs to give away later this week.

Thanks to Sjaak, Jawi, rsdio, Jamz, sqkybeaver, Dukey, and everyone else who helped out in the forum. Thank you to the machinegeek and Lynn for keeping the blog running, and Skyler for photographing the event.

Several take-home points stand out. There’s lots of interest in DP’s relationship with Seeed, and how you can get your own ideas and projects turned into real-life hardware. Tutorials were already underway and will be up soon. Also, I’m going to more conventions, starting with CCC this summer in Berlin, and maybe Maker Faire in New York.  I’m a shy geeky guy, but I need to take a more active role as the face of Dangerous Prototypes. Also look for a weekly video of new projects in the lab.

Yup, this article is in first person instead of the editorial we specified in our style guide. This many thank-yous should be personal.