Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Derpy (Derby) Mini Maker Faire and the Infinite Star Box

My Maker Pass
It's been ages since it happened but I figured I should write about it anyway.

In the run-up to DMMF, I was frantically trying to make my infinite star box. I bit off more than I could chew and by the end of Wednesday, I had... a mirrored perspex box and no lights. There was a bit of the magic blue smoke and I didn't have enough help or knowledge of my own of electronics to really do what i wanted to. I got horribly frustrated and sad and went home crying. It was a serious low point.

My friend Monty mentioned about just using a string of LED fairy lights instead, and my other friend Tom offered some of his lights (turned out to be broken so just stole some working ones that were hanging up around London Hackspace) so with about 8 hours of building the surrounding wooden box and putting it all together. It was exhausting, but at least it was done to some level of working. Just not quite to how I imagined and prototyped it.
More infinity

The setup on Saturday was pretty frantic. It was suppose to be a day for Makers to wander around and look at the other exhibits, but some of the people exhibiting were only exhibiting on the Sunday anyway.

The person checking us in and giving us passes exclaimed "... How many of you guys are from London Hackspace?!" Strangely, by about halfway on Sunday, it felt like the correct response to that was "Not nearly enough".

Sunday was so busy! Over 500 people came to see the faire. We learned that little kids are much better at destroying golf courses than a few semi-drunken adults are (which was the last place the golf courses saw any action).

We had a table set up with some leaflets, my star box and some mini-stylophone kits. We also had Wacky Inflatable Wavy Arm Man! I may have accidentally emotionally scarred a child for life by making Wacky Inflatable Wavy Arm Man lean towards her after she poked it a few times...

TARPMAN!

We had a podcast recording with Hack All The Spaces too. I managed to hack their Derby Mini Maker Faire stickers to say Derpy. The look of joy/horror on Dominic's face was amazing ;D Both "that's amazingly well done!" also "STOP CALLING IT DERPY!!" hehe!
The actual podcast recording finally

There's an insane amount of pictures on my flickr account:
Derpy Mini Maker Faire Photo Set

Next Mini-Maker Faire is up in Manchester. It's kind of far away so I'm still debating about going there. It's a bit costly train/hotel-wise. Derby was so exhausting too! Not sure if I can do that all again with the golf supervision.

Also I'd quite like to make another project but I'm not sure what yet. We'll see. It's at the end of July.

No comments:

Post a Comment