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Maker Faire Berlin 2015

davedarkodavedarko wrote 10/07/2015 at 22:42 • 4 min read • Like

[UPDATE] print is done :) Check the bottom of this page.


Still recovering from that weekend. My first maker faire, a "have to", because it was in Berlin, my hometown.

Friday night I was meeting with @WooDWorkeR, @Sophi Kravitz, @Elliot Williams and @al1 at the c-base. Shamefully I have to admit that this was my first trip to the space station based in Berlin, a meet-up place for computer friends, aliens, geeks and nerds and guys with no labels and categories. The tour offered some inspirations for new hacks and we've seen the #warpcore go crazy. Two notable projects that stuck in my head were the little speaker box, that made spherical noises when picking up magnetic fields (telephone amp by a company called micro-electric) and the 4 EL-Wire tube that looked like it was pulsing (no pictures were allowed to be taken, sry). We met other guys that wanted to check out the c-base before going to the maker faire and had a great time.

I think the speaker was based on something like this: http://www.jameco.com/jameco/workshop/diy/magnetic.html


Saturday I've met @al1 at the Ostbahnhof station near the Postbahnhof to go to the maker faire. Greeted by a fire throwing container robot we entered the first floor where some were still preparing their tables. I'm working through the flyers, they aren't in order.


MakerBeam

The first thing that got me interested was the MakerBeam starter kit. There was definitely a lot inside, different length of 1cm x 1cm extruded aluminum profiles with a threaded hole all the way through and multiple connectors to create presentable prototypes.

www.makerbeam.com - www.makerbeam.de

Seedstudio

they brought prototypes of their RePhone and Stickers and buttons and many staff.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/seeed/rephone-kit-worlds-first-open-source-and-modular-p

Hartmut Wendt

He brought a din rail case for the raspberry Pi, a mini arcade case and a lot of other little boards that we had a good chat about.

www.hwhardsoft.de

Inspirational projects

www.hacklace.info - a tiny orange 8x8 matrix driven by an atmega328, arduino compatible - everything in a necklace form factor. I was close to buying one but have so many displays in that size, that I would be angry with my self. Another interesting device was the word clock by www.kellys-finest.de that were designed with common ebay classics like a chead arduino clone, 2 8x8 matrices with max7219 controller and a DS1307 module. And there was this beauty:

Pimoroni

they brought a lot of hats (shields, stacking stuff) for the raspberry PI and they might have thought that I was writing for hackaday.com - I had to wear a HaD shirt. There was a lot of RGB stuff going on!

http://shop.pimoroni.com

Lasercutting and front plates

there were some service sellers that caught my eye. www.formulor.de and www.schaeffer-ag.de were there, and also http://pro.john-steel.com - beautiful interface and good pricing.


3D printing

http://i.materialise.com - first price test looks like prices of only 25% percent of shapeways for plastics. MeltWerk had some interesting prints as well, with prices around 75% of shapeways, tested with the same object. If you have a lot of LEGO parts, a browser and not so much time to wait for your 3D prints, you might want to take a look at www.brickify.it - there you can replace easy structures with LEGO parts to save time.

freie Maker

I'm printing myself right now - thanks to the guys from http://freie-maker.de - they brought a 3D scanner and scanned everyone who was interested - should have pulled in my belly :D After scanning a receipt with a link was printed and you have full control over the data. Awesome! We also met @Mario Lukas there and had a little chat.


After seeing the Siegessäule and the vintage computer festival, @al1 and I sank into the couches until the party started. We got our ESP8266 boards out, I brought my #zynthia - sequencer synthesizer and #USB cable tester - @al1 brought his #tiny7 displays. We had some great chats with a couple of guys that were drawn to us by my #RGB 16 Segment LED . We also met @Krzysztof Wrzalka and @Daniel Rojas who brought his two projects, the #Uranium Marble Ring Oscillator and the #Micro Word Clock

@antti.lukats brought some #DIPSY pcbs for everyone (that BGA stuff is tiny!) There was also a guy from the netherlands, who traded a devalued coin for one of my #Lithium Coin Cell charger boards.

I had a great time and exactly one club mate caipirinha too much - should have taken more photos.

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Discussions

Jasmine Brackett wrote 10/19/2015 at 01:02 point

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Andrew Starr wrote 10/11/2015 at 09:23 point

Well I know where _I'm_ going to be next October :)

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Sophi Kravitz wrote 10/09/2015 at 11:44 point

Great writeup! Awesome to see you as well.

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Stefan-Xp wrote 10/08/2015 at 20:11 point

Awesome writeup! I'm still sad, that i didn't make it to Berlin.

Perhaps next year is a better date ;)

BTW: The Hacklace was also on the Friedrichshafen Maker World ;-)

BTW: You just stole me around a 3/4h ;-P

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davedarko wrote 10/08/2015 at 20:52 point

Next time / next year! 

Glad you took the time, it took me the same amount to write it :)

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Alex wrote 10/08/2015 at 18:29 point

Nice article!

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davedarko wrote 10/08/2015 at 20:52 point

thanks! If you want a minime of yourself, write me a PN :)

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Mario Lukas wrote 10/08/2015 at 07:42 point

Thank you for visiting us! Hopefully we have some more time to chat next time...

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Daniel wrote 10/08/2015 at 05:55 point

I also want to try something with aluminium extrusion beams...

For cases where MakerBeam/OpenBeam are still too big: http://www.nanobeam.us/ looks interesting. Those screws are ridiculously tiny. But the groove is just the right width to hold a PCB! :-)

I should try it some time..

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davedarko wrote 10/08/2015 at 09:30 point

5mm sounds awesome!

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Mike Szczys wrote 10/07/2015 at 23:11 point

Nice pose for the 3D model! It will be fun to see the model once you're done printing.

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davedarko wrote 10/07/2015 at 23:56 point

hehe thanks :) I didn't want the "hands on the side" pose and I think this is printable without support. 

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Jasmine Brackett wrote 10/09/2015 at 20:14 point

Good planning :)

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