This week on Maker Update:
trumpets that breathe fire, a pumpkin for typing,
ready to roll couches, and a picture that's worth a thousand balloons.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner,
I hope you're all doing great.
We've got a really special episode for you here today
because we are at Maker Faire Rochester.
This is an event that I'm on the production team of, I've been doing
and helping out with this show
for the past three or four years now, ever since I moved to western New York.
And this is a little bit of a different kind of maker faire,
because, well, as you can probably see, it's all indoors.
The reason for that is because we're in Rochester, New York, and it's November.
So it's a little chilly outside.
There are a few projects outside that will
Hopefully help keep us warm
and a ton of other makers that I can't wait to share with you.
So let's go check them out.
So my name is
Adam Foster, and I am a Rochester based maker.
And I have brought with me a couple of pieces
and one of them is the volcano you see down there.
The other ones are the royal trumpets up here.
The Royal Trumpets is a series of kinetic fire sculptures.
They're rendered after medieval trumpets.
Yeah, they shoot fire.
What we’re... what our end goal here is.
We're going to have them actually tonally correct.
And hooked up to a keyboard.
I'm a musician, so I've always enjoyed
making music and making art of all kinds.
And this project was kind of just a culmination
of everything coming together the music, fire, metal work, you know,
things that I've really been into since I was a pretty young kid.
So it's kind of the culmination of a lot of years of making really.
So here is a view of our controls for the system.
Runs on Allen Bradley's SLC 500 PLC controller.
Everything is plug and play here as far as our power,
our emergency stop, each sculpture has its own Ethernet cable
that we're running power and data for our linear actuators and our solenoids
that's all wired in here to our PLC.
And then the PLC I plug in by a USB to the programing software, and that's
how I'm able to actually write programs for it to actually automate it.
We have our wireless remote right here, which is the receivers on the back
with a series of relays that ties into the inputs on the Allen Bradley.
And then we have our outputs,
which is our linear actuators and our solenoid controls.
So it's a pretty, pretty straightforward setup, really rugged.
And the Pelican case, I mean, you know, this has fallen off of a trailer
before and, you know, dusted off, plug it in, it works.
So it's kind of like the predecessor to your Raspberry Pis
or your Arduinos. Classic controls.
and it works.
So people can find out more about what we do
at Foster's Cosmic Creations on our website or our Instagram.
It is adamfosterart.com icon or @adamfoster.art on Instagram
and yet feel free to reach out,
dropping emails and yeah,
check out the website.
Hi, I'm Elijah Horland.
I'm one of the Mythbusters from Mythbusters Jr and I'm also
the executive producer of the new Coney Island Maker Faire.
And I've come here to Rochester, Maker Faire, to show off the stuff
I built and promote my Coney Island Maker Faire.
This is a mechanical keyboard built into a pumpkin.
Well, it's not just any mechanical keyboard.
It's actually modeled after the Malling-Hansen and writing ball,
which is the first ever commercially produced typewriter.
So it has this weird layout.
It's not QWERTY because they didn't have QWERTY back then.
It's this weird z, r, x, z, c, h, w layout.
It's whatever the heck they came up with in 1861.
So this is actually on a hand
soldered PCB, which took me about 48 hours to do and a month of planning.
If you see this mess of wires.
Yeah,
this is whenever I take it apart and rebuild it because the pumpkin
only has about a month lifespan or a week lifespan.
I have to untangle all these wires.
It is fully functional, see:
A... E...
I... O... U... see, it works
and it works in any computer that you have the USB keyboard layout for it.
So this is a acoustic levitator.
It was originally designed by a guy named Asier Marzo.
He's very cool. He's very smart.
He invented this. I just built this version.
I did this voltage controller brought on to it.
And it's just an Arduino and a motor controller board controlling
two sides of high frequency speakers.
Fancy people call them
ultrasonic emitters, but it's just a fancy word for high frequency speakers.
So if you were to take a very small object and place it in here and it levitate
there, and it's very easy to explain why this is happening, but it's not fans.
These are actually speakers.
So for every speaker down here,
there's a speaker up here pointed at it and they're both emitting standing waves.
If we were just to take a set of two speakers
and draw it out onto a whiteboard, it would look like this.
So you have a speaker on the bottom and a speaker on the top,
and this speaker is emitting a wave that looks like this and this speakers
emitting a wave that looks like this.
See these spots where the waves intersect?
These are called nodes.
Now, sound is just wiggly air.
So it's moving all the air around the nodes.
But everywhere inside the node, the air is not moving.
So if you place something inside of it,
it will get trapped there by all the air moving around it kind of like this.
Imagine my hands are air and this egg is one of those dots.
It'll do this to all the dots.
So, yeah, that's how you can float things inside of here.
So ever since 2020, the global maker fairs Maker
Faire in New York and makers are a Bay Area have not been happening
and it's very unfortunate because people like me in New York City
have been left without a maker faire to go to and no inspiration to see.
The only reason I'm here is because someone at Maker Faire suggested
that I go on Twitter and that's how I met all of these great maker people.
That's how I kept on coming to these maker fairs.
And very unfortunate that no kid in
New York has that outlet anymore.
Now, Coney Island Maker Faire is going to be happening from October six
to October 8th of 2023, and I will be the executive producer of it.
So if you come down to New York City during those times,
come on over.
My name is Ryland Charron.
This is the
RIT Robotics Club here at Maker Faire, Rochester.
So RIT Robotics Club, also known as Multidisciplinary Robotics Club,
is a robotics club at the Rochester Institute of Technology
where high we take all the majors and we build all kinds of robots.
So we're primarily undergraduate students
and we have all different sorts of robotics projects to kind of highlight
everybody's different interests in the club.
So starting on this end, we've got our combat robots.
This is Larry 2.0.
So Larry 2.0 is our 3 lb. robot that just recently
went to the Norwalk Havoc Robotics League competition
where we competed against other Battlebots.
And coming down the line, we've got Cat Bot here.
This is a prototype design.
We're in our third semester, we've got about two semesters left.
We've got a leg and a shoulder of what will be a four legged walking robot
that uses both pneumatics and electronics to control,
trying to take advantage of some of that soft robotic stuff.
CouchBot is a favorite of the club, so CouchBot,
it was started way back at the club's founding in like 2002,
and it's literally a couch that's RC controlled with high power motors on it.
It can go really fast.
It's got lights, it's got music, and it drives around and gives people rides.
It's going to be driving around Maker Faire all day today.
It's a huge blast.
So you can check us out on our Instagram.
That's @RITMDRC right now.
@RITMDRC, if you're an RIT student, hit us up on campus groups
and you'll start not only register you for our weekly emails,
then you can start coming to our club meetings.
I'm Larry Moss.
I'm the creative director of Airigami.
And what we bring to Maker Faire is an opportunity for everybody
to participate in an art project that's larger than they are.
You know, how often do you get to do things?
How often do you get invited to make something that is bigger than you?
And when you get to work with on this mural, about 400 people participated.
You know, that's that's an
incredible experience to to be part of an art project that large.
So an Airigami bubble mural is a balloon creation
that you get to be part of.
We map everything out ahead of time.
It's a 2D balloon creation that's easier to follow
by following a grid and following the map that we provide.
And we have
steps that you can follow to to do it yourself.
We're here to guide and offer a little assistance.
But really the great thing about Maker Faire is that we're surrounded by
so many makers that it's fun to have the makers here
make things and just be able to sit back and just facilitate.
So what we bring is, is an art project
that everybody can learn to to create.
You can go to Airigami.com.
You can see a lot of our old projects, past bubble murals
as well as 3D sculptures that we've done everything from really
tiny things up through massive five story sculptures.
And we'd love to hear from you and let us know
that you'd like to be part of some future project that we do.
And especially let us know if you'd like us
to be part of a Maker Faire in your area.
All right.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
I hope you enjoyed it.
We've had a blast putting this maker Faire together over the past year,
and it's been so much fun being able to go around and interact
with makers in person again.
I hope you enjoyed some of the handful of makers
that we were able to share with you through the show.
If you did, let us know about it
down in the comments.
As always, huge thanks to Digi-Key for making this show possible
and to you for watching.
Take care. We'll see you soon.