Our ace hacker Schazamp hit Maker Faire Detroit this weekend. We’ll be running his reports all day.
The Faire was filled with loads of awesome things, and to cover them all would be impossible, but here you can see some of the things that stood out to us.
We found many 3D printer designs, and having the opportunity to compare them was too good to pass up.
These fellows were representing the Michigan RepRap User Group, and had on display a number of RepRap builds. They weren’t selling anything but the idea, and their enthusiasm really shone through. We enjoyed having a look at what a home-brew 3D printer might look like, without the polish of a commercial unit.
These folks from TechZoneCommunications had a few RepRap-based kits available. They had developed an improved extruder that was smaller and appeared to run much faster than many of the other 3D printers we looked at. Jade, the young man on the stool, answered all the questions we could throw at him in all the detail we could want. He gathers the parts for the kits and packages them. Most other 3D print shops were printing little toys or trinkets for demos, but these guys were printing more parts for the kits they were selling. Sorry about the photo, Jade, I caught you yawning, but it was the best one I had.
MakerBot Industries had a large booth with half a dozen Thing-O-Matic’s churning out trinkets which (I suppose) were to hand out as souvenirs (though I didn’t end up with anything). Here, Matt Mets (aka cibomahto) explains how the device works, while a tiny Dalek looks on. The colored LED internals of the Thing-O-Matic made for a cool looking display. Observe, in the lower right, a 3D printed (and assembled) remote-controlled Spiny Koopa Kart. Matt and the other fellow at the booth (whose name didn’t make it to my notes, unfortunately) gave a half-hour talk on the stage about Thingiverse and the culture that is developing around 3D printing technology.
MakerGear was also showing off their Mosaic model 3D printer. These had a small fan for cooling the material as it was extruded, a feature I did not see on any other 3D printers.
The Mosaic had a nice open-corner laser-cut design. You can see here the controller board, made up as a shield for the Arduino Mega.
Nice but much messy.