Jamboree and Maker Faire

I've been on a couple of adventures in the last few months and wanted to catch up on postings. The first was a trip to San Mateo, CA for the ShopBot Jamboree and the Maker Faire. As usual I ended up missing much of the Jamboree while doing behind-the-scenes jobs...this year it was cutting a whole pile of rubber band racers to give out at the Maker Faire. My son came out for the Maker Faire as well so we also set up my ShopBot "Drawing Board" which was inspired by Hektor that uses stepper motors and the ShopBot Control software to draw pictures.

Showing off the Drawing Board

It was really fun showing the Drawing Board off to everyone since it's so simple but also kind of "sketchy", and drew a lot of pinstriping designs with it from the Vector Mega Clip Art collection to give out to kids. Since Steve Wozniak was one of the speakers at the Maker Faire I also had it draw a portrait of him from a photo on the web, but unfortunately he didn't stop by to autograph it!

Woz Portrait

The Maker Faire was amazing, with lots of cool machines, fascinating people, and general weirdness, but one of the best parts was meeting Bruce Shapiro of The Art of Motion Control, one of my heroes. He does amazing robotic art projects, many for museums, and it was great to get a chance to talk to him. I also got to met Rob Bell, a ShopBotter who's also a programmer and is doing some really neat work with generating ShopBot files from Sketchup called Zomadicam.

Rob showing me and Jimmy some Sketchup programming

The next Maker Faire will be in Austin, Texas on Oct 20-21 at the Travis County Fairgrounds. I'm already making plans to head down there...since the Fairgrounds has campsites I'm thinking about driving my camper...and we're looking into having some sort of ShopBot event(s) on the days before the Faire. I'll post here when we have something finalized so that you can put it on your calendars.


Although I flew to San Francisco for the Jamboree it certainly isn't my favorite way to travel and I've always wanted to take a long train trip. Figured this was my best opportunity so I decided to take the train all the way across the country to Virginia. Sounded like a good idea to Jimmy too so we got on the California Zephyr in Emeryville, CA and headed for Chicago. Although I was worried that it would be boring after a while, it turned out to be a lot of fun. A rockslide in Nevada held us up for almost 12 hours which made us miss our connection in Chicago, but Amtrak put us up in a nice hotel, gave us cash for cab rides and meals, and got us on the Capital Limited the next day headed to Washington, DC and then the Crescent to Charlottesville to pick up my truck to head home. I've posted some pictures on Flickr (sorry..they're not at all organized), but pictures don't do it justice. It was a great time.

The front of the train on a turn (taken from the back!)

Jimmy in the "Bubble Car"