My #1 daughter Bronwen took me to the Maker Faire today as part of my birthday present. She's not an engineering type, but we both had a pretty good time for a couple of hours, which is about all it took to go round the grounds. It was at the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows, which (appropriately enough) is one of the few remaining buildings from the 1964 New York World's Fair.
There were a couple of hundred exhibitors, which I thought was pretty good going for a hobby show. Atmel, Autodesk, and some other biggish names were well represented. The Small Business Administration folks were there, taking about how to get a patent, how patents work, and how to finance a small business. Nobody was paying any attention to them when I was there.
The big noise at the fair, no surprise, was 3-D printing and other hobby and entry-level CNC tools, including the new Makerbot Replicator 2. The R2 looks like a pretty well-designed gizmo--nice thick steel, good speed, available with on-site service for folks who need to get stuff done on a schedule.
Another manly-looking tabletop RPS was the one from qu-bd.com, which has a larger work surface and can do NC milling as well as 3D printing. They claim it can even mill steel, if slowly.) The basic unit is a dual-nozzle extruder RPS at $1700. Spindles for NC machining cost about another $500, which is pretty decent if they can make it work for that. They weren't showing it running, which means that (a) it isn't ready for prime time, or (b) they broke the prototype the night before the show. (*Demo Karma*: a well-known problem that I've suffered from once or twice myself.) Given my druthers, I'd probably prefer a 3D printer plus a NC Sherline mill, but that would be 3 or 4 times the price.
My most interesting conversation was with Ian of Dangerous Prototypes, who was showing the ever-popular Bus Pirate, a new power supply board, and a few specials. The Bus Pirate is sort of a Swiss Army knife for serial protocols--I have a couple, and they're dead useful. The power supply was really a breakout board for the ubiquitous ATX power supply, with a Molex connector for input and binding posts for output, plus some
1.25 A polyfuses to keep people's protos from catching fire.The specials were serial-input Nixie tube displays (two tubes per board). They use HC595 shift registers and a Russian Nixie tube driver chip. I told him about the HP 5245L frequency counter, which uses cad selenide photoresistors to drive the digits, with neon bulbs shining on them for control. (I still have some of the digit plugins in my lab cupboard someplace--useless, but way too cool to throw away.)
There were a zillion Arduino shields, a whole bunch of fairly ordinary robots, and an amazing number of activities for kids, which was great. There were a fair number of tutorials and labs for aspiring hardware hackers, e.g. how to prototype, how to program Arduinos, and so on.
They advertised a steampunk section, but the only things there were some antique machines that didn't look as if they worked. Disappointing--I love real steampunk stuff.
So overall, a pretty good way to spend a few hours on a sunny Sunday, but not worth a whole weekend.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs