Gadgetory

hey everyone this is steve from gamers nexus dotnet and today we're talking about something a little bit different it is the maker faire specifically the North Carolina Maker Faire that I attended this past weekend as we are based in North Carolina for those who don't do not know the Maker Faire is as the name implies all about making things it is a DIY festival and the show is sort of headlines by adam savage of mythbusters fame in the Bay Area in California that's where one of the bigger or the biggest maker faire events is held and there are other fairs as well they exist in New York they exist in Detroit in Austin and now in North Carolina and the event is all centered around DIY projects and workshops so a lot of it is educational or or tutorial like in nature so they at the the North Carolina one I went to they taught how to do electronic soldering and they taught things like lock picking there were exhibitors there who weren't actually selling anything they just had booth space to show off the cool stuff they made which often featured things like LED light panels and and PCBs and stuff like that and electronics and robotics so lots of cool stuff this sort of think of this as a bit of a review of the event if there's a maker faire near you a lot of this information will apply because it is a franchised event and it is owned by one organization so they are all effectively supplied in some capacity by the overhead group but the North Carolina one is growing pretty substantially last year it was there was a lot smaller they had a smaller space this year they expanded to the exhibition center at the fairgrounds and they doubled or rather they surpassed excuse me their attendance capacity Justin pre-sales alone over last year so Justin pre-sales for this year they surpassed last year's entire attendance from what I understand so it is growing quite a bit featured this year like I said there were two workshops in the form of lock-picking and soldering there were also was a little robotics hockey arena where is think of it like battle bots except with hockey and that was predominantly therefore for kids and for entertainment so the event in terms of demographic there are a lot of kids present so if you've got kids and it's probably a great type of event to take them to to teach them about doing things and making stuff but that said it's it's really for everyone there's there are a lot of experts there you can speak to in the realms of 3d printing or of animatronics or robotics or software development and engineering so if you are a professional or a hobbyist or an enthusiast in any of those areas of the industry this type of event is a great place to go to learn from the experts there are a lot of colleges present at least at the North Carolina one NC State is a major sponsor of that and they are of course one of the the better engineering schools in the country and one of the best on the East Coast so a pretty pretty cool event there were some issues we had with registration they were a little bit abrasive with press registration I imagine that's because they are small enough that they don't quite don't quite know the etiquette for registering press just yet but i believe they will grow out of that as the event kind of matures it's definitely a lot easier for us to get into things like CES which are more than 12 times the size so that kind of gives you perspective of what it takes to have a good press registration group but beyond that normal attendance tickets are like 10 bucks if you are within a few hours driving range it's well worth going and checking it out if you've got stuff to show off it's probably worth going to check out and like I said a lot of this applies to the Maker Faires and other states as well so generally personally if I were attending this as just a normal attendee not covering it I would probably drive a couple hours I'd maybe go about two hours three hours to see it and there's probably one to two hours of content to look at at this North Carolina Maker Faire it'd be a little bit more if you did the workshops like the soldering workshop or lock-picking workshop solder eNOS is some I already know for the website of course so not something I needed to do but pretty cool that they were teaching it and a great opportunity for people who want to learn so that is all I have to say about the maker faire this year check out the link in the description below for the full article and I will see you all next time