Singapore Mini Maker Faire, 2nd year

Well I should have written this earlier since the Singapore Mini Maker Faire 2013 (#SMMF13) has passed for weeks.

This is the second year of the event and the venue was relocated from the remote (to me) Science Center to Singapore’s busiest Orchard area. And it is free entry for all 😀

If anything would dominate the theme of the whole faire, that is 3D printer. This year we see less MakerBots, more self-built devices.

The huge printer “B.O.B” by romscraj (http://romscraj.com). Its gigantic metal frame makes every other printer looks like a toy. But it is not printing by the time I reach there. Printing huge object will take a long while, I guess…

An unfinished wooden 3D printer (mill? laser cutter?) silently sits beside a MakerBot Replactor 2, but certainly catches more attention. The wood framework is as sturdy as it looks. The booth is within the Sustainable Living Lab (SL2) platform, nobody was there at the moment, pity 🙁

This is the first time I saw the “Rostock Delta 3D” driving mechanism. Watching the three step motors running mad to keep the extrude platform flat == nerd porn.

Singapore Academy of Young Engineers & Scientists (SAYES, wonderful name) brought us ultrasonic water purifier. It (supposedly) uses high power ultrasonic wave to break dusts. The water in the photo may not look clear at the moment but half minute before a handful bunch of sands were just dropped in. BTW it effectively cleaned by glasses as well 😀

Mood indicator by Media Lab LASALLE. It aggregates twitter messages and trying to detect sender’s mood by indexing keywords. A map is then plotted showing the mood of the people around the world. Is Singapore the world’s unhappiest nation?

Temperature recorder by the same Lab. It has integrated temperature sensor (of course), a GPS module and a dial letting people to choose if they feel cold/cool/perfect/warm. The data are then aggregated to map the temperature across the island. Very practical crowd sourcing application.

This Soundscape application (available on Andriod Market) creates 3D sound effects. Its bigger speaker brother (to the left side, sorry for the truncating) further demonstrates highly directional capability, definitely great for public events so the neighbours can stop complaining. These young startups has a website http://www.immersivesoundscape.com/ Please do checkout their cool inventions.

You will never see shortage of Arduino on a Maker Faire. This Email prank thingy contains an Arduino and a WiFi shield. It sends out an automated email when the button is pressed. May I have email notification when my coffee is ready?

Talking about coffee, these two coffee machines brew super strong coffee without electricity or hot watermark. Everything back to nature (future?).

This piano staircase leads up to the stage. But the sound is too weak to attract much attentions. How about a 100W Class-D Amp next time?

For the Arduino community 3E gadgets has brought in the little lovely TinyDuino board. Within the tiny 20x20mm square a full Adruino Pro Mini (ATMega328P/8Mhz) equivalent circuit is setup. There are also bunch of tiny shields available so user will have no difficulty to deal with the miniature connector. Another good news to the Makers here in Singapore is that 3E Gadgets is now an official distributor of Adafruit Industries. That means we do not need to pay the $8 mailing fee and wait extended days to get hands onto Adafruit products!

This is the second year I met Mr Jolyon Caplin. He is demonstrating a remote controlled toy excavator. With his modification this $80 toy almost became a robot dancer!

And as usual his signature light rods. Talking about the circuit, it is powered by an old school PIC16F84 (still available in Simlim Tower :-o) Getting most out of a chip is definitely the art of electronics design.

If Ian of Dangerousprototypes is the celebrity last year, this year we have Bunnie Huang. He gave a talk “Singapore better than United States for hardware makers”. Full report of his talk is here.

I shall end this post by introducing this wonderful lady engineer Michelle and her projects at AIS CUBE.

With a team of 2 they managed to implement a BASIC virtual machine inside PIC32 micro controller, together will a full development platform named “Sonata”. This is a tremendous meaningful project that opens the door for kids to learn electronics. I would compare it with the Raspberry Pi project, but this is much more low level yet easier to hand on.

And yes I’m the lucky bastard who grabbed one of these tiny twik^2 dev boards. At first glance it contains a PIC32 MCU, a 3 axis accelerometer  and a tiny RGB OLED screen (which is nice!) Please expect more to come about this little board.

Final words:

The maker movement definitely increases the talent pool. It is true even in a crowded island like Singapore where everyone is busy making ends meet. I hope those who sitting high above can hear it. Instead of bring talent in, why not incubate own talents? (quote from Bennie)

PS: No Raspberry Pi this year, why?