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Seattle Mini Maker Faire 2013

I just returned home from a great weekend in Seattle to attend their Mini Maker Faire. While not quite as big as Vancouver’s, it was densely populated with some pretty cool makers and displays.

One of the people I really wanted to meet is Emmett. He’s the Seattle designer responsible for some of my favorite 3d printable objects that I use to blow people away when showing my 3d printer like this heart gear:

Big Love <3 - Heart Gears

He was showcasing some of his latest designs including this amazing blossoming lamp which I somehow missed and need to print:

Emmett's Blossoming Lamp
Emmett’s Blossoming Lamp

He was a great guy who genuinely loves making things and sharing them…the epitome of an awesome maker.

Johann, who designed the current rage in 3d printers, the deltabot Rostock, was also on hand to show off the latest iteration of it, the Kossel. He was printing with his personal Kossel Mini which also had a very cool self calibrating mechanism for determining the level of the print surface:

I pretty much decided on the spot that my next 3d printer build would be the Kossel Mini and may have picked up most of the parts for it at MakerFaire. It didn’t hurt that OpenBeam USA had a booth with various extrusions available onsite as well as a Kossel Pro which is currently their successful Kickstarter project.

I also saw the new Brainwave board, designed by Matthew who I previously met at Metrix’s 3D printing night a while ago. It’s a minimalist board for controlling a 3d printer.

Brainwave 3d printer controller
Brainwave 3d printer controller

It gets interesting when paired with a Raspberry Pi as the host running OctoPrint which gives you a web interface to control your 3d printer from any device or anywhere. It also supports a webcam that you can view a print in progress via the interface. I’ve just started playing with it and it’s pretty slick so far.

Screen Shot 2013-06-10 at 10.37.38 PM

Vancouver was also well represented with Dan showing off his drawing robots and the Tinkerines crew showing their Ditto and Litto printers:

After a not so quick trip to Fry’s, I finished up the night at Metrix, the local hackerspace that hosted a post MakerFaire party where I watched the lasercutter prepare more wooden coins for the next day’s MakerFaire:

Mesmerizing, isn’t it? I want one.

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