Antipasto Hardware Blog: Maker Faire NYC Debrief

I now live in Boston. I used to live in New York. Which made it all the more ironic when it came time to travel down to NYC to attend Maker Faire with Justin, Francis, Will and Mike. As it turns out, the night before we all headed down there, the construction crews decided to tear up a portion of I-95, which naturally meant some lane closures.

Nothing pumps up the DIY hacker spirit like sitting in traffic for 5 hours staring at this picture from the Main Street Danbury blog:

Hmmm, hmmm... I feel like that red card is a lot like the feeling I get when the bootloader doesn't load on the flash ram chip on the topside of the BeagleBoard OMAP, and I have to solder in my own debug cables to test the signal pins to make sure they work. And that truck is like the weight in my arm after 2 hours of solid soldering... and the right hand lane is the re-routing schematic of envy... yes.

But once we got to Maker Faire, the situation changed dramatically (it did take about a 30 minute detoxing whereby we desensitized to the intense traffic around Brooklyn and Manhattan). And here we were, to the right, and next to Nate from Sparkfun... Here's Mike and Will getting swamped with questions :-)

I like to try to construct a pyramid of TouchShield Slide boxes just for kicks:

I walked around, and saw a few fun pictures. Like this one, which although looks fun to some, is not really my cup of spinning tea. The whole time I'd be thinking, I really hope those welding points worked on the central axis tower:

Here was a view from outside the master tent:

I try to show up with as many projects as possible, and here are a few using the BeagleBoard and BeagleTouch:

I want one of these so badly, it's not even funny. I imagine I could do home delivery of DIY kits throughout New England on something like this. Would it be more time intensive and more expensive than UPS or DHL? Yes. Would it be worth it to do spin out donuts in street and driveway on the way to hand delivering a package of Arduino and BeagleBoard modules? Absolutely.

It only occurred to me after that this is a picture of everyone systematically walking away from me. The three folks on the left actually turned around right after this and started walking away too. Must have been something I said...