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From Mare Island’s esplanade to Rome’s Gazometro, Happy Valley to the Orlando Fairgrounds, this fall share your world with the world at one of the dynamic Maker Faires featured below…and check our UPCOMING FAIRES page for smaller events across the world. This year is extra special. The first Maker Faire Bay Area took place in 2006 in San Mateo and we’re thrilled to celebrate two decades of ingenuity and creativity with makers like YOU. This is where it all started 20 years ago.

I was born in the early 1950s, and our first family home was in a rural area of Lehigh County in Pennsylvania. My dad, Karsten Albert, worked as a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company, but during WWII he served in the Merchant Marines as a Midshipman on the Liberty ships. At the start of WWII, the US did not have the capacity to ship goods and people at a level needed to support the war effort overseas.

I was born in the early 1950s, and our first family home was in a rural area of Lehigh County in Pennsylvania. My dad, Karson Albert, worked as a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company, but during WWII he served in the Merchant Marines as a Midshipman on the Liberty ships. At the start of WWII, […]

It’s lunchtime as I write this and my daughter Lizzy is making lasagna, not helping with lasagna but making it. Her brother Peter sulks nearby because it was supposed to be his turn at the stove this weekend, and these two now argue over who gets to cook the way other kids argue over the front seat. For years I was the best cook in this house, and that title is gone. I lost it on purpose, and it’s one of the better things I’ve done as a father.

After opening SketchUp go to Preferences and under Templates, choose 3D Printing — Millimeters. It’s important to use this template because it will start you out with the right units of measure. Now get to know the tools you will use in SketchUp: Select (Arrow cursor icon), Line (Pencil icon), Tape Measure, Circle, Push/Pull, Orbit, Pan (Hand icon), and Zoom (Magnifying glass icon).

When Kristin Berbawy arrived in Prague, she wasn’t expecting to find herself immediately at home. But a Maker Faire anywhere, feels a lot like home to a maker. Outside her hotel window, a giant laser sliced across the night sky from Prague’s iconic TV Tower as the city celebrated Liberation Day. It looked less like a historical commemoration and more like something you’d stumble across at Burning Man.

The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) runs a free program that allows creators to certify that their hardware complies with the community definition of open source hardware. Whenever you see the certification logo, you know that the certified hardware meets this standard. Currently the Certification database lists 3326 individual certifications! In May we added 16 new certifications, from robot arms to SAO’s and everything in between.

Kinetic art is a special kind of mesmerizing, and makers are understandably drawn to clocks. They offer possibilities in animation, explorations in user interaction, and are practical enough to be easy to justify. Having a whole collection of clocks might make justification a little bit harder, but it’s absolutely no reason not to build another. Moritz Von Sivers clearly has a thing for experimenting with unique mechanisms.

I’ve never had to pause a tool test on account of creepiness before. PolyCast5 is an open source multitool for controlling wireless devices. Created by Justin Atkins of RoboticWorx and powered by an ESP32-C5, it packs in five different types of control: WiFi, Bluetooth, LoRa, ESP-NOW, and IR. There’s also an optional AC relay that can be used to switch mains-powered devices on/off. If those aren’t enough controls, the I2C pins are accessible for adding DIY addon boards.

The ELM11 is a pretty nifty and useful Lua-based feather-type platform which, although new and evolving in terms of toolchains, already provided a surprisingly polished developer experience. Made by BrisbaneSilicon, ELM stands for Embedded Lua Machine. Lua support means it’s more efficient than Python, in the familiar feather form factor. Powered by a GOWIN FPGA, ELM11 allows low-level control with multiple hardware overlays (more on those later).