Maker Faire Filled With Wild Systems

By Alex Handy

June 10, 2008 —  The Maker Faire is always a great place to see wild robots and crazy embedded systems. This year's faire, held in San Mateo on May 3 and 4 was no different. Between the life-sized recreation of the board game “Mousetrap” and the Steam Punk stage shows, there were numerous examples of interesting uses for computers, electricity and old equipment that others would think was obsolete.

Vox is a robotic head and arm designed to learn and function similar to humans. Instead of using a speaker to synthesize speech, Vox uses a tube and vibrating surface followed by a tongue and fully formed plastic lips to mimic the way humans produce vocal tones.

The Alameda County Computer Resource Center, is a non-profit computer and electronics recycling firm in Berkeley, Calif. At the Maker Faire, the group displayed its giant talking skull, made of wood, computer parts and open-source software. During the show, the skull, named “It,” read the works of Lewis Carroll and played open copyright movies rendered in ASCII.

R2-D2 made an appearance at the Maker Faire too. This fully functional remote-controlled robot came complete with all the relevant beeps, clicks and whistles. He was also equipped with moving switches, armatures and lights.

At last year's event, this robotically propelled bipedal chariot was molded into the visage of a Roman centurion. This year, the Governator took the reins.

A society of remote-controlled sea-borne combat enthusiasts held numerous skirmishes over the course of the Faire. Their boats were all equipped with real projectile turrets, pumps and rotating guns. Here, a sunken American ship is pulled out of the water after taking a beating from the Axis during an afternoon battle.


Related Search Term(s): Open-source software, storage hardware

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