“Being able to express your enthusiasm for a project or subject is amazingly disarming to most geeks.”
How did you get started as a maker?
It’s hard to remember a time when I wasn’t a maker. My Dad worked in construction and was always doing something around the house, and my Mom was very crafty. I’ve been playing with LEGOS forever. When I was 3 years old, my Uncle gave my family a Commodore 64. It had everything: floppy drive, green monitor, joystick. There’s a picture somewhere of three-year-old me sitting in front of the thing. So I’ve always been futzing around on computers – writing code, building web pages, and being otherwise mischievous.
Besides having a personal computer at home, I was more advantaged than a lot of kids growing up. At LaGrange Elementary School, I was one of the first members of a computer club. We wrote the school’s first web page. In high school (at Oldham County), we had a tech lab course that taught us some basic technical skills such as how to use a pen-plotter and program a small computer numerical control (CNC) mill. Later, I had the opportunity to take an engineering course that covered some basic Computer Science/Electrical Engineering skills. It wasn’t a huge leap to continue in Electronics when I went to college.
As a professional maker, how important is LVL1 Hackerspace to you as a creative outlet?
LVL1 is a tremendously important part of my life. The ideas flying around, the knowledge and stuff that come through the door are an incredible help to my own creative energy. It’s great to have such a bank of ideas and resources, and is always really inspirational.
You’ve been able to contribute back to LVL1 by leading several workshops, including the very popular four session Summer Camp (Design, Etch, Solder, and Program your own microcontroller project). Any lessons learned that you would like to share (hopefully not, “never going to do that again”)?
Oh man, Summer Camp was a rush. I timed the whole thing poorly: it coincided with graduating, starting a new job, and moving into a new apartment. The main lesson learned is to be as prepared as possible. For the summer camp, I was completing designs and lessons the morning before I was to teach the class. I managed to (mostly) pull it off, but I don’t want to do that again.
Of course, I’m ignoring my own advice: I’ve scheduled a Solder Your Own Freeduino workshop for November 5. At the same time I’ve got a couple big projects due at work, and I haven’t even started on the class materials. We’ve done that workshop three or four times in the past, though, so I’m not as worried.
So do you still have any time to work on your own hacker projects?
I don’t have nearly as much time as I’d like, but I think that’s a pretty common complaint. Currently, I’m working on printing my own 3-D printer, designing a set of ultra-cheap electronics for the 3-D printer, and continuing to work whenever I can on the White Star Balloon project. Speedball-1 is on the shelf, ready to soar. Speedball-2 needs some more pink foam insulation, but is technically complete. We’re still in a holding pattern with Speedball-3. We have the ability to put her together in a very short period of time, though.
Tell me about MakerFaire. Last year, you had the opportunity to attend it in Detroit for its inaugural year, and you went back this year as well. How would you describe it to people who aren’t familiar with it and what surprised you the most both times?
MakerFaire is a ridiculous and bizarre carnival where the line between attendee and exhibitor is blurred as much as possible. Ask nicely, and you may end up riding around for half an hour as a giant muffin, or on top of a 40 foot long, fire-breathing dragon. Everyone there is excited, and wholly committed to what they do, and they definitely pass some of that off to the folks visiting.
What surprised me the most the first year was how incredible a venue the Henry Ford museum is. It’s definitely a location that canonizes the history of The Maker. The second year, I was surprised by how much fun I had as an exhibitor. It’s pretty easy to tell when someone is genuinely interested in what you’re trying to show off, and just holding their tongue versus when they’re just shuffling through. People can really relate to being incredible interested and enthused about something, so when you’re a geek about something, it makes it really easy to engage.
I feel like it was a lot more crowded this year too. That’s a really good thing. I was surprised at the number of people I talked to that hadn’t heard about anything like MakerFaire or the Maker movement. Tons of people just came in off the street to take in the sights. I think they really knocked it out of the park in 2010, and they did a really good job of maintaining the momentum and energy this year.
– Grace Simrall
Bio:
Masters in Engineering / Electrical Engineering, University of Louisville. Board Member of LVL1. Hacker-at-large exploring, inventing, learning and discovering one small electrical fire at a time.
Title:
Software Engineer at Honeywell
Age:
24
Location:
Deer Park
Contact:
@zuph
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