I attended the National Maker Faire held over Father’s Day weekend at the University of the District of Columbia, and thought I’d share some observations and pictures. They’ve added the National Maker Faire to the list of flagship faires around the US, along with the original Bay Area and World Maker Faires. I’ve been to the World Maker Faire once, and from that and what I’ve heard of the Bay Area Faire, the National Faire is much smaller than either. You could certainly see it all in less than half a day. It’s also a bit random in its layout, as it makes use of several areas of campus buildings and grounds. Unlike the other two major faires, I would not travel from out of town to see this one. But for anyone on the greater DC area, I found it well worth my time.

It’s not new, but I hadn’t seen the Intel Arduino 101 board before. I’d have loved if it had WiFi but the built in real-time clock, bluetooth, accelerometer, and gyro make it quite interesting. Apparently the Curie system on a chip module it’s build around also has a 128-node neural network for machine-learning, but there is, at least as of now, no software released to access it.

Ability3D had a table promoting their planned 3d metal printer, with a kickstarter campaign planned for January 2017. They were showing a development prototype model (the final consumer product to be smaller). It prints with powdered metal. I believe they said they were targeting the several thousand dollar range for price, so not inexpensive for a home printer, but an order of magnitude cheaper than current metal powder printers.
Nova Labs, one of the local area makerspaces, was also there with some interesting demos and projects.

There was also a lock picking village put on by TOOOL, which was quite full when I went by. It was also nice to see a short waiting line for the “Learn to Solder” hands on booth. How often do you see people lining up to learn to solder? Unfortunately for some reason the drones only were being flown on Saturday, and there were no drone demos when I went on Sunday.

Below are a number of photos from the event:

Learn to Solder hands on exhibit

Ability3D’s booth. Developing a home metal powder 3D printer

Cardboard pinball kits, with options to add arduino, electronics, servo, etc. There’s going to be an upcoming kickstarter campaign.