Back in 2010, Ottawa hosted the very first Maker Faire in Canada. Since then they’ve been growing steadily, hoping for this year to be the biggest yet. If you’re in the area, you can attend the Mini Maker Faire this weekend at the Canada Science and Technology Museum. Anyone attending needs to brace themselves for some really cool sights and sounds.
Some attractions surely to draw a crowd this year include:
Rova3D
The Rova3D is a printer capable of printing in 5 different colors or materials all at once. They recently finished up a very successful round of crowdfunding.
R2-T54
R2-T54 is an Astromech! A droid from the movie series “Star Wars”! He was and still being build by hand from plastic and other materials. He has Arduino and PicAxe micro-controllers in him and was build all by hand with the help of the “R2 Builders ” community on the internet! He is still, like all great project, a work in progress!
Robotgrrrl
The Automatic Food Slicer Robot is an accessibility robot to help slice food for those who are unable to. It uses augmented reality to allow a user to “swipe to slice” their food. End-effectors are easily interchangeable. RoboBrrd and its robot friends will also be here. They are robot creatures brought to life through interaction!
Erin “RobotGrrl” Kennedy is an aspiring inventor. She was named an Intel Emerging Young Entrepreneur. Her first product RoboBrrd was funded on Indiegogo. She is now working on assistive robotics.
There are many other really cool projects that will be there, like the DIY pinball group, some BeagleBone powered Daft Punk Helmets, a martini making robot and more.
I talked shortly with Remco Volmer, one of the organizers about the event. When I asked what was new and exciting this year, he mentioned some new education related material.
This year we’ve also added a panel about Making in education. We are excited to have a large number of regional makerspaces participate, including those attached to the public library and the universities, as well as local startups such as 3DPrintler and PrintEarth (bioplastics).
They held a launch event recently for the Mini Maker Faire that looked like a pretty good time on its own! Here are a few pictures, but if you’d like to see the whole set you’ll have to head over to their facebook page.
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