A couple weeks ago DONOR-1 took a roadtrip to Milwaukee Makerfaire!

The excitement began with a very nice write-up of the project (as well as some other things we’ve worked on) in a Maker Spotlight post on the Make Magazine blog.

Friday night before the faire we headed to The Idea Studio to pick-up the machine. The Idea Studio was a great place to host DONOR-1 and the crew there was sad to see it go.

After figuring out how to fit three people, the control panel, a dolly and assorted other bits into our little Jeep, we strapped DONOR-1 to the trailer and headed home.

Saturday morning we hit the road early to make it to the fairgrounds before 8:00AM. This was my first experience driving around Milwaukee with a trailer and it wasn’t as bad as I expected. That said we still managed to get a little lost (Milwaukee likes to move their roads around) so we were a little bit late to the faire.

DONOR-1 was a stand-alone exhibit which means we got a chance to check-out the rest of the faire this year. That being the case we didn’t get to meet everyone who checked it out, but we grabbed a few snapshots and received some photos from friends who played it after the faire.

Sunday afternoon I headed back to the faire to pick-up DONOR-1 and was pleased to see it was not only operational, but there was even a line of people waiting to play! I waited about 45 minutes for a break in traffic to shut it down, but eventually I just had to get in line and wait my turn to switch it off and roll it out to the trailer.

Overall it looks like DONOR-1 got a work-out and thankfully survived the weekend. I would love to know how many games were played (this is a feature we wanted to add but it hasn’t been home long enough to get it implemented).

There were so many other cool things at the faire that it would take several posts to enumerate our favorites. We’re already looking forward to seeing what shows up next year.

Now that DONOR-1 is back home we’re planning to do a little maintenance and perhaps add a few features we didn’t have time to add before it hit the road. That said we’re looking to line-up DONOR-1’s next fundraiser so if you’d like to host the machine to raise funds for a charity let us know.