This was the second year of the event held on the last weekend of July. While I was a visitor last year, I became a participant this year with my own maker booth entitled “Hobby Electronic Light Gadgets” where I displayed some of my DIY light gadgets. It was held at the Scape Warehouse.
This is my booth set-up. It was fun talking to people and explaining my exhibits. My booth wasn’t very popular though, which is fine. One young kid, around 3 or 4 years old, threw my arc reactor to the floor and I had to bring it home and repair it. Gah.
I love Iron man and he appeared! Together with War Machine and a mini-Iron man.
This is me trying out a $200 Jedi light saber. You can actually whack something with this sword since it has a shock resistant casing. Yup, you can actually spar with another “Jedi” with this toy. Really cool stuff. You can check out their website.
I was really impressed by this booth which is by Shapeways. You can use their 3D printing services to 3D print high resolution, coloured objects made of metal, ceramic, etc. The technology is amazing. Their booth showcased jewelry and all sorts of highly detailed sculptures.
I also really enjoyed this booth which showed props from anime or manga, made by a product design student from NTU. Really a labour of love. I was impressed at how they were made, using laser cutting and layering the cuts together.
This booth featured concept art spaceships which are the kind of models that movie makers would use to design the movie spaceships on the screen. Think Star Wars. These models are based on recycled plastic water bottles and other stuff found around the house. The maker of this booth was lamenting to me how kids nowadays have lost the interest to make their own toys or make stuff in general. Sad but true I guess.
And finally, the highlight of the maker faire for me was the chance to hear a talk given by Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, a cult figure in the maker community here. He is a brilliant hardware guy with a PhD from MIT. He makes his own ICs and circuits and has a number of start-ups under his belt. He gave a presentation explaining why Singapore is better than Silicon Valley for hardware start-ups. I heard a lot of good things about Singapore coming from him which made me happy.
lohjianhui 