We waited for this MakerFaire impatiently and finally it is happening!

More than 250 projects are being presented this weekend by makers and inventors from all over the world, and as usual we met many old friends and users and made new friends.

It was great to see how many people came to visit the Faire, families, adults, teenagers, children, educators, hobbyists etc…

The venue was full from the opening hour till the call till sunset. This really shows that the maker movement is a solid and genuine thing. People don’t get excited then go home and forget about it, the projects and products exhibited stimulate the creative and curious part inside us in an irresistible way. Some lives are even shaped by this spark of inspiration  forever.

Dale had this observation and tweeted it yesterday, we can only agree to it: There is no place in the world that can claim to be THE hub of the movement. This really belongs to us, tinkerers and explorers, any Makerfaire in the world will be full of old and young people with eyes wide open.

It also was with great pleasure that we discovered PCBs  made with our fab service at the BASTL-INSTRUMENTS stand. The guys use Fritzing to layout the boards and our fab service to prototype their products.

They now sell their MIDI-synthesizers as a kit or assembled, and we are sure they will have a huge success because everyone at their booth was having a blast making music.

Our friend and reseller Yuan from EXP-Tech dropped by for a very nice conversation about the german and the chinese maker scenes, and we exchanged a lot of our experiences about managing the bits part of a hardware business.

It was another great event, we had a lot of fun and we are going home with many great new projects and a lot of feedback, but mainly with so much more excitement and enthusiasm for keeping on doing what we do for the community, and start better products and services to empower inventors and makers everywhere.

BONUS: this is a “behind the scenes” photo of  us setting up the stand and building the Creator Kit examples. The handsome guy on the right is Tommaso our colleague at IXDS and one of the creators of Dandylight. We do look seriously busy :D

At Fritzing, we are looking for a committed, reliable person to take over the day-to-day management of our online kit shop and production services.

We are selling the Fritzing Creator Kit: the kit helps anyone to learn to work creatively with electronics. You will be responsible for production of these kits (together with our wonderful team of packers), and fulfilling sales orders through our different sales channels.

We are also offering a simple, high-quality PCB manufacturing service together with our fabrication partners (Fritzing Fab). You will be responsible for the handling and shipping to our customers.

As we intend to extend these offerings and make Fritzing an even better service for the community, you can also play an instrumental role in crafting the strategy and implementing it.

We are looking for someone who speaks German and English and who has work experience in offline/online retail, small scale production or warehouse management. This is a full time position, though we can talk about other models.

Send your application to [email protected] and join our exciting team in a great location in Berlin-Kreuzberg!

Our friends from the REMAKE Festival in Belgrade are organising it this year in Berlin and we are offering a workshop as part of the program for people who want to get started with electronics: Introduction to Interactive Electronics.

This workshop, aimed at beginners, shows the basics of ‘Physical Computing‘ with the Arduino microcontroller in the Fritzing framework. No prior knowledge is required, but it usually helps to know a little programming. If interested, please send your mini bio and motivational letter to: vedrana.boskovic@ gmail.com

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 5-15 COST PER PERSON: just daily or four-day Festival Ticket

MATERIAL NEEDED:

1. Laptop: ideally with the latest version of Arduino and Fritzing pre-installed. If you don‘t have one, don‘t worry, you can probably share with your workshop neighbor.

2. Fritzing Creator Kit which you can buy at the workshop for a discounted price of 89€.

3. Good mood and crea- tive ideas. Fritzing is an open-source initiative supporting designers, artists, researchers and hob- byists, aiming to take the step from physical prototyping to actual product.

Fritzing participated this year at the Open Hardware Summit for the first time! It was such a great event! We had the feeling everyone we knew, or once talked to or even heard of was there!

It was also so cool that the MIT hosted the event this year, the organisation was perfect and the venue very nice. The talks were very inspiring, but most of the exciting stuff and the interesting conversations happened in the corridor outside where the demos and posters were shown.

It’s so impressive to see how well people from the “scene” know each others, and how everyone shares very specific details on their designs and businesses so openly. In other industries this would be a well protected “trade secret” but not in here!

It was also very refreshing to have so many makers who want to go professional come to us and benefit from our experience in going from shipping 20 kits a month to more than a thousand. We showed on our poster the key elements of an ERP system and how to implement one. What to take care of and how to do it right.

We also had so many long time fritzing users pass by and give us some feedback.

We are still on the go in the US, expect a few follow-up posts in the next few days.

Unter den Label “The Interactive Festival of Creativity and Invention” verwandelte sich die kleine Stadt Brighton an der Küste Englands an diesem Wochenende zu einem Sci-Fi Spielplatz der besonderen Art. Um 10 Uhr morgens öffneten sich die Türen der altehrwürdigen Getreidemarkthalle “Corn Exchange” im Zentrum Brightons. Trat man in das Innere der dunklen Halle, offenbarte sich ein Maker-Paradies – eine Roboterstadt, in der die LED-Matrizen funkelten und DIY-Synthesizer den Takt angaben. Überraschenderweise gesellten sich unter die Maker, die größtenteils Männer mittleren Alters waren, auch einige Hausfrauen, die selbstbewusst in mitten von leuchtenden Glasfaserkabeln Ihre Strickkünste anpriesen.

Die Brighton Maker Fair zeichnete sich, wahrscheinlich wie keine andere Maker Fair davor,  durch ein inspirierendes  Nebeneinander von Hacking, Prototyping und traditionellen Handwerkskünsten aus. Die Integration der Disziplinen wurde eindrucksvoll von der Projektgruppe Knitting Robot unter Beweis gestellt: Am linken Seitenflügel der Halle konnte man eine weibliche Roboterfrau betrachten, die geduldig Schals strickte, die am Tisch nebenan von ihrem Schöpfer für 20£ verkauft wurden. Von Zeit zu Zeit, blickte die Roboterdamen vom Schal auf und warf den Besuchern einen gleichgültigen aber doch durchdringenden Blick zu. Diese kleine Utopie, am Rande der Maker-Fair war wohl das unscheinbarste, aber doch wohl eines der interessantesten Projekte der Fair.

Natürlich fand man auch high end Roboter, die- anhand eines komplizierten Algorithmus das Verhalten von Bakterien eindrucksvoll imitierten oder auch ein Geschwader von Unterwasserrobotern, welche die Horden von Kindern belustigen. Die Maker Fair Brighton stand ganz im Zeichen der Familie. Eltern mit Technik-verrückten Kids belagerten die Mitmach-Stationen und Bastelecken der Projektgruppen. Gegen 14 Uhr war die Halle überfüllt mit Besuchern, die an Gummibärchencontrollern, elektrischen Bananenpianos und Lötstationen die Self-Made Futures erprobten.

Eine Unzahl von Projektgruppen stellten ihre Projekte zur Schau und verkauften diese in professionell zusammengestellten Bastel-Kits. Vor allem die Anwendungsbeispiele  elektronisch leitfähiger Tinte zogen viele Besucher an: Auf der einen Seite Mütter, die begeistert über die Möglichkeit von LED-Integrationen in Weihnachtskarten schwärmten, auf der anderen Seite die Väter, die sich ganze Schaltkreise für die Haus-Beleuchtung ausmalten- und mittendrin- die eine Schar von Kindern, die noch vor Ort ihre Spielzeuge elektrifizierten.

Die Brighton Mini Maker Faire war ein gelungenes Event, das eindrucksvoll das kreative Nebeneinander von Technologie und Tradition mit einem besonderen Augenmerk auf Familienfreundlichkeit zur Schau stellte. [gallery ids=”714,716,717,718,719,720,721,722,723,724,715”]