At The Faire

We had a “mini” Maker Faire this weekend here in Lisbon, and it was a resounding success.

I was (somewhat erratically) involved with it from the outset (doing the odd tweak to the online copy as well as designing some animations and videos to run on our digital signage solution) and ended up spending a day and a half there helping get things set up, but mostly taking a whole lot of photos that I’m still sorting through¹.

Speaking of which, after years gathering dust, I finally found a use for my original Eye-Fi card² – I set it up on my Canon S95, pointed my MacBook to a MEO Cloud folder, and bam! – live photo reporting, straight from my camera to our digital signage.

Not only did I have an absolutely great time (it was a welcome break from “regular” work, which remains rather uninspiring), I came back the next day as a “civillian” with my kids, who were ecstatic with all the robots (the 6-year-old insisted on fully assembling a LEGO NXT, and I think he’d have done it all by himself if I hadn’t sped things up a bit).

But that’s not all – I’ve been tinkering with a MicroPython board of late (largely because I needed something that would simultaneously help take my mind off work as well as engage the kids), and I finally caved in to the point of ordering a 3D printer kit that was on promotion during the event, which I expect to spend a fair while assembling with (or most likely, in spite of) the kids.

So who knows, maybe I’ll have something to show at next year’s event – stranger things have happened.