Category Archives: Bay Area Maker Faire 2016

PinJig Soldering Clamp has Pins Seized by Airport Security

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There’s an old adage that when performing a live demo, previously working hacks will mysteriously go awry. In this case, the hardware demo was doomed before it ever arrived at the conference.

PinJig is an interesting take on though-hole soldering. As its name indicates, it’s a jig which holds through-hole components in place as the board is flipped on its side (or even upside down). This is accomplished by 2000 steel pins which are locked in place after being nestled around all of the board’s components. Unfortunately, carrying this prototype onto an international flight didn’t work out. [Niall Barrett] told …read more

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Mosaic Palette: Single Extruder Multi-Color and Multi-Material 3D Printing

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Lots of solutions have been proposed and enacted for multi-color and multi-material 3D printing, from color mixing in the nozzle to scripts requiring manual filament change. A solution proposed fairly early on was to manually splice the filament together, making a custom spool. The printer would print as normal, but the filament would change color. This worked pretty well, but it was tedious and it wasn’t entirely possible to control where the color change happened on the model.

You’ll find some examples of the more successful manual splicing hacks in the pictures below. Scroll down a bit further to find …read more

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Building a Swarm of Autonomous Ocean Boats

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There’s a gritty feel to the Hackerboat project. It doesn’t have slick and polished marketing, people lined up with bags of money to get in on the ground floor, or a flashy name (which I’ll get to in a bit). What it does have is a dedicated team of hackers who are building prototypes to solve some really big challenges. Operating on the ocean is tough on equipment, especially so with electronics. Time and tenacity has carried this team and their project far.

I first met [Pierce Nichols] at the paella dinner that caps Friday of Bay Area Maker Faire. …read more

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Ball Run Gets Custom Sound Effects

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Building a marble run has long been on my project list, but now I’m going to have to revise that plan. In addition to building an interesting track for the orbs to traverse, [Jack Atherton] added custom sound effects triggered by the marble.

I ran into [Jack] at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics booth at Maker Faire. That’s a mouthful, so they usually go with the acronym CCRMA. In addition to his project there were numerous others on display and all have a brief write-up for your enjoyment.

[Jack] calls his project Leap the Dips …read more

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The Hacker is The Future of the Prosthetic: Hackers Helping Those In Need

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In the show Full Metal Alchemist, there’s a city called Rush Valley whose main and only business are the high performance prostheses called Automail. Engineers roam the street in Rush Valley; the best have their own shop like that of the high-end clothiers in Saville Row. Of course; it’s all fantasy set in a slightly ridiculous Japanese cartoon, but while walking through this year’s Maker Faire I began to wonder if is a future that may come to be.

The problem with prosthetics is the sheer variety of injuries, body types, and solutions needed. If an injury is an inch …read more

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How Did Pocket NC Survive and Thrive?

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We had a chance to talk to Matthew Hertel of PocketNC at the Bay Area Maker Faire this year. During the conversation, he answered some questions I’d had about the project since I saw it on Kickstarter, and told a cool story while he was at it.

When the Pocket NC 5-axis Tabletop CNC Mill KickStarter came out, I immediately chocked it up as a failure out of the gate. I figured that there would never be a single delivered unit. It just seemed too impossible. The price was too low for a machine with that many large machined aluminum …read more

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Shaper Tools Will Blow Your Mind

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Have you ever wanted to own a full-sized ShopBot? What if some geniuses somewhere made a tool the size of a coffee maker that had the same capabilities? Does an augmented reality, real-time feedback, interactive, handheld CNC router that can make objects ranging in size from a pillbox to an entire conference room table sound like a thing that even exists? It didn’t to me at first, but then I visited the Shaper Tools office in San Francisco and they blew my mind with their flagship tool, Shaper Origin.

It’s impossible for me not to sound like a fan boy. …read more

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Meet Up with Hackaday this Saturday in San Mateo

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We’ll be at Bay Area Maker Faire and we want to have a beer with you on Saturday night.

Two years ago we headed off to the Bay Area Maker Faire and thought we’d invite friends and acquaintances to congregate at a bar on Saturday night. Anyone who’s been to the Faire (or been through a harrowing weekend of working a booth) knows that a bar stool and frothy beverage are a great way to recuperate. The turnout was amazing, we easily filled up O’Neill’s Irish Pub with that first meetup, and the Hackaday BAMF Meetup was born. Last year …read more

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