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Maker Faire Orlando and More Maker Faire Rome

Maker Faire Orlando and More Maker Faire Rome

Makers span the globe!

Dale Dougherty
November 08, 2024

A middle school teacher showed off the T-shirt that she and her students were making today at Maker Faire Orlando

Maker Faire Orlando kicks off
More on Maker Faire Rome
- Highlights

Maker Faire Orlando kicks off

I’m in Orlando today at the Central Florida Fairgrounds for Maker Faire Orlando, organized by The Maker Effect Foundation. Today is the first time that they’ve invited schools to come on Friday and there are about 200 students. “Every kids gets to make their own T-shirt on a screen printer,” said Ian Cole, the longtime lead organizer of Maker Faire Orlando.

Volunteer showing a student how to apply the paint

Maker Faire Orlando is in its 12th year and it is the work of a dedicated crew of volunteers, including Candy Cole and Jessica King. Elise Spontarelli of Vector Space in Lynchburg, VA flew in this morning to volunteer and she was the first person I saw walking in the gate.

Harry Armstrong built a large-scale Skee-ball game in his garage and he had it set up today for the students.

Candy Cole tries her hand at Skee-Ball.

Maker Faire Orlando has a great poster.

Students were treated to a talk by four people who work at Universal Creative and they shared what they do. Below, an engineering director talked about developing the “Skull Island Reign of Kong” attraction. All of them hope that the kids found this kind of work interesting and said that many, different skill sets and disciplines needed to develop and manage theme parks and their attractions.

More on Maker Faire Rome

by Keith Hammond, Make: Editor in Chief

Last week, David Groom shared his highlights from Maker Faire Rome. This week, Keith Hammond shares his thoughts about Maker Faire Rome and the makers he saw. (There’s some overlap because David and Keith saw and like some of the same things.)

The Gazometro in Rome

The biggest Maker Faire in Europe was a delight to see for my first time. Make’s community editor David Groom and I attended Maker Faire Rome (The European Edition) as guests of the Italian Trade Commission, a government agency tasked with boosting Italian businesses and commerce, in this case particularly small tech startups, which had a big presence at the event. It was nearly as big as our mothership, Maker Faire Bay Area, but with some different flavors that make it unique.

Our big event in the USA has more homegrown hobbyist makers, and more spectacular performances and art pieces, like the Diet Coke and Mentos fountains show and wild art vehicles from Burning Man. The Italian version had a larger presence from tech companies, mostly Italian, including maker favorites like Arduino and STMicroelectronics, and also a really impressive university presence, with teams from all over Italy’s system of technical colleges and other universities. I also felt there was more food tech, agriculture, fashion and design innovation on display – not surprising in Italy! — and lots of assistive tech, which also makes sense as Italy has an aging population.

Similarities? A spectacular post-industrial venue (the Gazometro in Rome, the old Navy shipyards in Mare Island). Dozens of unique and creative makers sharing their inventions, food and brewing hacks, hands-on activities for kids, DIY drones, robot competitions, blazing LED artworks, 3D printed contraptions, DIY satellites, ham radio guys — and good friends like Raspberry Pi, DigiKey, and Prusa Research there supporting the maker community — this is definitely a proper Maker Faire!

But where Bay Area feels focused on a ground-up celebration of grassroots making, a gathering of the maker tribes, shoulder-to-shoulder with our favorite electronics and digital fabrication vendors, Rome feels more like an expression of national pride, promoting technology and creativity for the greater good of Italy and the planet.. It’s sponsored not only by the Italian government but by the Rome Chamber of Commerce.

(Arduino’s Massimo Banzi even explained to us how the Italian company Olivetti invented the first home computer, which may clash with our American mythology of Silicon Valley, but he has a point, Olivetti was on it from the very earliest days. In fact, STMicro began as a joint venture between Olivetti and Fairchild Semiconductor in the USA.)

Overall more tidy, less shaggy – like I said, different flavors, but a wonderful event overall.

Here are just a few highlights that we enjoyed seeing, there were hundreds. I want to thank all the makers, and the Italian Trade Commission team, who showed us around and graciously explained everything in English for us.

You can see more at our frantic live-blog post from the event, as we attempted to somehow see everything while also posting about it!

https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/live-maker-faire-rome-2024/

Highlights

Windsurfer/snowboarder Roberto designed the Smart Van Box, a DIY controller and monitor for your camper van’s electrical, water, solar, and other systems that you can access by phone or Wi-Fi.

Istituto Alberghiero Costa Smeralda is primarily known for training hotel and restaurant staff, but lately they’ve been exploring extruded and 3d-printed food. After discovering the ideal texture, they have begun creating all manner of intricate shapes and innovative forms, such as the deconstructed tiramisu shown in the first picture. Cheese, biscuits, and even meat can all be extruded once their appropriate consistency has been determined.

Cardboard sculptures by Sergio Gotti, inspired by the Italo Calvino novel Invisible Cities.

Immersive multimedia artwork Tessellis by Angelo Bonello filled one level of a Gazometro tower, with music by Francesca Formisanoff. 18 giant animated LED panels represent animals and abstracts composed of tangram shapes, all arranged in in AfterEffects, with pixels driven by MadMapper, and GrandMA console to control strobes and backlighting..

Entirely 3D printed motorcycle by Federico Rodighiero, after nearly 10 years of development. Major frame elements are PLA, tires are TPU of course, and the seat and other high-touch areas are special COC filament (cyclic olefin copolymer) typically used for optical and medical applications.

Mark and Louis, aka Paz Aerospace, have created Angela, the double-haloed flying machine. Inspired by street luges, the team added an Arduino-controlled pair of fans with the aim of enabling bursts of — if not at some point sustained — flight. Power tool batteries allow quick changes and for the power source to be placed near the motors for efficiency and balance.

Circuit Canvas electronic layout software by Oyvind Dahl — kind of like Fritzing but web-based, and aimed at producing better schematics and tidier breadboard layouts. Generates vector art, and you can import Fritzing parts too. Web sharing lets you collaborate on projects or use it for teaching, and you can export to a variety of image formats. Nice work!

Yeastime is a fermentation accelerator, invented by a group of PhD candidate buddies, that uses ultrasonic sound to stimulate yeast organisms for 30% faster ferment times. They’ve contracted with their first brewery, mounting transducers directly on the jacket of the fermentation tank.

My favorite moment of Friday morning: the first goal scored by autonomous humanoid robots from RoboCup, in the 11am match between Team SPQR (love it!) versus Team HTWK before a very appreciative crowd!’