This weekend we (the Brain family + Grandpa) went to the Maker Faire in Durham, NC. Compared to the big Maker Faires in San Francisco, this was a small event. But it still contained the essence of any Maker Faire – people with a DIY mindset showing off their work, often highly technical.

By far the most interesting thing to me was a guy demonstrating his Makerbot Cupcake. The Cupcake is a 3D printer that can print plastic parts. He had built his Cupcake himself for about $900. If you have never seen a Cupcake before, the following video shows a Makerbot Cupcake being used to print a replacement part for a lamp:

If you would like a much longer introduction to the whole Makerbot scene, this video is helpful:

He said it wasn’t necessarily easy to get the machine built and calibrated. He gave several examples of cases where the machine (before successful calibration) would overstep its boundaries (e.g. an optical sensor was not aligned right) and break something important like the extruder nozzle.

But, once he had it working, he set about making the plastic parts to build his next 3D printer – a bigger model called the RepRap, which can print anything that fits within a 7″ x 7″ x 7″ or so cube. You can learn about the RepRap here:

This video contains a nice view of both the triangle (Mendel) and cube (Darwin) models:

See also: RepRap.org

The majority of his Reprap (he built the triangular model) is made of threaded rods (available at a place like Home Depot) and plastic joints and connectors. All of the plastic parts for his Reprap were printed using his Cupcake. He said it took about 60 hours to print all the parts for the RepRap, but they were essentially free. And they were surprisingly lightweight and strong. While he was explaining all this, the Cupcake was busy printing trinkets that he gave to people who stopped at the booth.

This is a very nice video tour of the cube version of the RepRap:

There were lots of other people demonstrating cool things at other booths at the Maker Faire. Some owned companies and were trying to demo/sell products (e.g. ioBridge), but most seemed to be hobbyists (either alone or in clubs) demonstrating what they do. For example, there is a group of hobbyists in the area that focus on the Arduino microcontroller, and they had a booth. Here is the full list of exhibitors who were there. If you see a Maker Faire coming to your area, you should attend – it was inspiring.