Musician Stephen Anderson, described as “by far the most amazingly talented composer to have ever lived,” by no less an authority than his mother, had a little time on his hands one Sunday afternoon, and turned his entire kitchen into a synthesizer, demonstrating that he’s more than just a Maker of music!
A couple of our Young Makers shared this great piece with us. Want to show the world what you’ve made? Apply to be part of the Tampa Bay Mini Maker Faire March 31! Got a cool video? Send it along!
Less shark tank and more koi pond, Walmart’s new inventor’s contest, Get on the Shelf, invites anyone in the U.S. to submit a video of a self-developed product between now and February 22 for a chance to “Get on the Shelf” , at Walmart – at least an online shelf , and in some select stores. Winners will be chosen by popular vote at the website starting March 7.
According to the Huffington Post, “The initiative is headed by @WalmartLabs, the company’s e-commerce and social development platform. “We know there are some great undiscovered products that have not yet reached our shelves,” Venky Harinarayan, senior VP of global e-commerce and co-head of @WalmartLabs, said in a statement. “We are removing these barriers by giving anyone a chance to launch their product at Walmart and reach millions of shoppers nationwide.”"
Want to be the next hot Walmart item? Get your “must have” creation on video and head over to http://www.getontheshelf.com/
Artstarkraft, Inc, a Sarasota company, just announced the launch of a new household safety device called “Doctor Door Stop,” developed by local inventor John Doyle, after his own 7 year old daughter was injured when a door slammed on her fingers.
“My daughter was screaming, I was crying, and so were the ER nurses. Her injury required nine painful stitches and weeks of recovery,” said Doyle, in a recent PRWeb news release about his product.
Billed as ”the only automatic door holder you just set and forget,” the device requires no installation. It’s simply placed anywhere on top of a door frame and “the safety arm automatically drops into place, holding the door open to your desired width. When you want the door closed, simply pull the cord and raise the arm. Re-open the door and the arm drops back into place. “
According to Doctor Door Stop, over 300,000 door related injuries require emergency room visits annually. This simple solution could potentially lower those numbers significantly.
Want to be a Maker at the Tampa Bay Mini Maker Faire? If you’re just demoing, it’s free! We welcome crafts, engineering, music, robots, workshop digital fabrication, energy, demonstrations, performances, projects and anything home made, innovative, instructive, artistic and interesting!
The first step to participating in our Mini Maker Faire is to submit an entry that tells us about yourself and your project. Entries can be submitted from individuals as well as from groups such as hobbyist clubs and schools. We’ll want a short description of what you make and what you will actually bring to Maker Faire, along with links to photographs or videos of what you make. We particularly encourage exhibits that are interactive and that highlight the process of making things. Here’s some of what we’re looking for:
Student Projects
Music Performance and Participation
3D Printers and CNC Mill
Textile Arts and Crafts
Home Energy Monitoring
RC Toys
Sustainability
Green Tech
Radios, Vintage Computers and Game Systems
Electronics
Electric Vehicles
Biology/Biotech and Chemistry Projects
Food and Beverage Makers
Robotics
Puppets
Kites
Bicycles
Shelter (Tents, Domes, etc.)
Unusual Tools or Machines
How to Fix Things or Take them Apart (Vacuums, Clocks, Washing Machines, etc.)
Types of Makers
Makers: Individuals, groups, schools and organizations that would like to demonstrate what they make and/or how it works in an interactive environment. For Maker groups, schools & organizations, we ask that you have one point person to coordinate your group efforts. Makers do not pay a fee to exhibit at Maker Faire for non-commercial exhibits.
Commercial Makers: Individuals who would like to sell products along with demonstrating what they make at their Mini-Maker exhibit. If you are a Maker with a product that you would like to sell at Tampa Bay Mini Maker Faire, please let us know us that you are a Commercial Maker on your application. There is a $75 fee for commercial makers.
Please note, companies or commercial entities do not qualify as Commercial Makers. If you are a company or commercial entity, please see our Sponsor page.
“In a nutshell, it is looking at waste as an opportunity, as a resource, looking at it beyond the fact that it’s waste,” Yeh told the Tampa Bay Times recently.
Yeh’s machine is called the NEW (nutrients, energy and water) generator, and uses microbes to break down human waste into all its usable components, producing not only energy in the process, but also fertilizer and water for irrigation.
“I keep going back to the fact there are 7 billion people on the planet,” said Yeh, in a USF interview. “It’s kind of a wake-up call.
“How are we going to make enough food? Where’s the energy going to come from? We have to stop having everything being a one-way street. We need to close the loop.”
Yeh is closing that loop with poop. And the potential is enormous. In a large scale test of the system, Yeh is using Gates grant money to help fund the construction of larger prototype to be installed at Learning Gate Community School, a Hillsborough County charter school with a sustainability focus.
In the meantime, Yeh continues to refine the small version of the NEWgenerator currently operating in his lab at the College of Engineering. The “waste” matter used for testing at this stage is actually dry cat food soaked in water which, according to Yeh, “mimics the properties of human waste” . That’s probably another story altogether, but check out the video below to learn more.
Agsort founder and veteran potato farmer Greg Jones, of St. Augustine, at one time laid claim to being the largest, daily-volume, chip potato shipper in North America, harvesting, washing, sorting, and loading as many as 4,600,000 pounds of potatoes per day, enough to fill 92 tractor-trailer loads.
These days he’s shipping out high-tech farming equipment, principally his potato sorting invention called the E-sorter, which he debuted at the 2012 Potato Expo in Orlando earlier this month (yes, farmers have expos, too!)
Jones created the E-Sorter, he told the trade magazine, The Packer, because he wanted to give growers a better option at a better price, noting that there many of the current high-tech sorting and grading machines are designed with the process in mind, but not the grower.
“If the growers can’t afford to buy the machine, it’s no good to anyone,” he told the Packer.
“I started working on this idea while I was still farming,” Jones said at his booth on the Potato Expo trade show floor. “I worked on it for three years then and another five after I got out of growing.”
According to the Agsorter website, “The core of the system is the scanner module. The sealed enclosure of this is approximately the size of a short file drawer and installs/uninstalls in the same way. Inside there is a clear plastic tube, fastened in a vertical position to the top and bottom of the enclosure, with matching holes to allowing the product to pass through, falling straight down from top to bottom. This is where the scanning takes place.”
The machine uses nearly 1,500 infra-red, red, green, and blue LEDs which flash on and off independently 100,000 times per second, enabling it to sort 8-9 potatoes per second per lane – about a large truckload every 30 minutes.
You can see the E-sorter in action in the rather mesmerizing video below.
Miami inventor, Ruddy Ugarte, with his partner Joaquin Antonio, has added a new level of usefulness to the plastic screen protector used to cover iPhone and similar products – a raised keyboard.
His invention, called Touch My Keys is a screen protector for the iPhone 4S that doubles as a transparent keyboard, that allows users to feel real buttons.
”Its both, the lack of a physical keyboard and that God forsaken autocorrect that at times causes those embarrassing or awkward text messages.” said Mr. Ugarte in his press release.
Touch My Keys features precision laser cuts of the iPhone’s QWERTY keyboard with just enough texture that users feel real buttons. Check it out in the video below.
On Wednesday, January 18, from 8am to 8pm EST, MAKE – and Tampa Bay Maker Faire – joins all of O’Reilly Media, Wikipedia, Reddit, Boing Boing, Tucows, Twitpic, and others in going “dark” to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills now before the House and Senate. Even Google is joining in , not going dark, but providing information about the bills and how they’ll affect the Internet.
[Well, we were *supposed* to go dark, but the WordPress code doesn't seem to be working and as with all things Internet, there are no guarantees - of stopping piracy or anything else - so I'll lodge my protest in the open, unless this site randomly disappears when the code decides to work! ] (It worked!)
MAKE and those listed here are not along in opposition to SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (H.R. 3261), and PIPA, “PROTECT IP Act” (S. 968), which MAKE deems “potentially poisonous to many of the things that we stand for. Not only has the internet had a hugely positive impact on our economy, our culture, and our ability to disseminate media and information, but it has allowed people from all walks of life and all areas of concern to become publishers, media producers, journalists, educators, doers, makers. We think that legislation like that being proposed would have a chilling effect on all of this.”
Additionally, Stop American Censorship is one of many organizations providing tools and letter writing campaigns to help interested individuals speak out.
But we’re inviting teams from FIRST and VEX and robotics hobbyists to join us for a special Robot Makers Round Up, at the Tampa Bay Mini Maker Faire on March 31.
If you can join us, email us at info@learningis4everyone.org by the end of January, and let us know! Robots ROCK! And there’s no better place than our Mini Maker Faire to show everyone why!
