National Maker Faire 2015

Last weekend I was at the first annual National Maker Faire held at the University of the District of Columbia. It was a relatively large Maker Faire with a lot of interesting projects on display. In addition to individual makers, there were a number of organizations presenting their involvement in STEM education and creation of makerspaces. A number of hackerspaces and makerspaces were attending as well as universities and commercial companies.

Here are some projects I captured on camera:

Mini underwater glider that uses a large syringe as a buoyancy engine.

Submersible made from PVC pipes and simple hobby motors, waterproofed using small plastic canisters and wax.

OpenROV underwater exploration robot (www.openrov.com).

NIST presented a lego "Watt Balance", a weight measurement instrument built as part of educational outreach (arxiv.org/abs/1412.1699).

Louisville Hackerspace had a several-feet-long model rocket on display (www.lvl1.org).

Another group had drawing bots.

There was a continuous 3D printing setup that uses a plastic film as a conveyor belt. The system uses air suction to keep the film stationary during printing (mobiumsolutions.com).

A Benjamin Franklin sculpture assembled from pieces 3D-printed by different individuals (www.wethebuilders.com).

NIH 3D Print Exhange, a biomedical 3D model repository (3dprint.nih.gov).

Samsung ARTIK, a new IoT platform (www.artik.io).

A pick-an-place machine for assembly of surface mount electronic components.

An automated in-house plant growing system (www.growbox.io).

And there were Legos,

and an R2D2.

Here's a link to the official event page listing all makers.