If you haven’t heard the news yet, Maker Faire Milwaukee is back for 2019, and this year there’s a new location… We’ll be at the Wisconsin Center in downtown Milwaukee! (In fact, you may have already seen some of the digital signage around the Wisconsin Center District promoting the event, thanks to our old buddy Makey the robot.)

The downtown venue will bring new challenges, but we hope it brings new surprises (the good kind) and a new audience who might not have visited us before. We took a tour of the venue this week and it looks really nice, and so far we have no big concerns about the new location.

The other cool thing to share is an interactive map showing where people come from to attend Maker Faire Milwaukee. This shows both makers and attendees for 2017 and 2018. Neat! Who knew there were so many makers around Wisconsin and neighboring states.

If you want to join us this year and help make the awesome, we still need Makers and Volunteers!

Milwaukee Makerspace is proud to be the co-host of Maker Faire Milwaukee. We don’t know of any other community makerspace that is a partner organization to such a large Maker Faire. Our members support the Faire by bringing awesome and amazing projects and providing a lot of hands-on opportunities to make. Here’s a quick look…

First of all, Milwaukee Makerspace will be there! (Duh!) and we’ll have a large booth containing various members and projects, including Kathy H., Larry, Jeff Throwing Clay, Tom’s Can Cuber, Mark with his Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D Printer and “The Spice Must Flow” SandBot, and we’ll even teach you How to use a Scroll Saw.

Over in the Dark Room you’ll find Adrian’s Jellyfish (Under the Sea) and Billy’s CD Chandelier Supreme, and Pete’s Giant LED Cube. The Dark Room will also be home to Colleen’s Wearable Art and Cosplay Fashion Show, which is not to be missed, and of course the old favorite, Jake’s Rook the Knight versus the Tesla Coils.

We’ve got a few makers who opted for their own booths, so they could promote their products, including Home Rooted Designs, Cerberus Tactical Robot, and Raven Lock.

Outside we’ve got Bay View Forgeworks with Ed and Richard, and right next to them is Dan D. doing an Aluminum casting demonstration and scratch tile workshop, and if you like dinosaur’s check out Isaac’s Arts!

Adrian is also once again running the Design & Build Derby, with the help of a lot of volunteers, they’ll help over 1500 kids build (and decorate) and race their own tiny wooden derby cars. Speaking of cars, the Milwaukee Makerspace Racing Team will be in the Back 40 racing their modified electric race cars. Exciting!

Need more? Well, there’s always Daleks… Dalek Asylum Milwaukee will be back, and joining them will be Megan’s Dalek, Frank’s Dalek, Tom’s Dalek, and Dalek Eclipse.

We hope you can join us at Maker Faire Milwaukee September 28-30, 2018 at State Fair Park. Get your tickets now (they are free) and check out the web site for more makers and a schedule of events.

Good News, Everyone! Maker Faire Milwaukee returns for its fifth year! Milwaukee Makerspace is once again proud to be the co-host of the event along with the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum. We’ll be at Wisconsin State Fair Park on the weekend of September 29th & 30th, 2018.

If you’re interested in learning more about the event, or being involved in some way (as a maker, a volunteer, etc.) consider joining us for the first planning meeting of the year. We’ll be holding the meeting at the new headquarters for Maker Faire Milwaukee, Brinn Labs, which is just a mile north of the space.

The Maker Faire Milwaukee Planning Meeting is set for February 8 at 6:30pm at 433 E Stewart St. in Bay View. We hope to see you there!

Sparks!  The VDG produces about 400 kV.

Then I found a plastic bucket and the fun really started.  We had kids and many adults who were definitely much too heavy, standing on the bucket and making their hair stand up with moms, dads, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, partners all taking pictures.   I had to move one gentleman who was breathing oxygen from a tank away from the machine.  Fortunately, no one fell off the bucket or caught on fire, and next year we’ll do it right and take a block of styrofoam for people to fall off of  to stand on.

Kylee was ready to join the Makerspace just for this… and with that shirt, she’d fit right in!

Blondes really do have more fun!

Even Gordon couldn’t resist!

Last year Son of MegaMax (a 3D printer built at the Milwaukee Makerspace) went to the Faire.  This year he had two companions to keep him company- an extra-beefy printer being built by Erich Zeimantz: MiniMax XY.  MMXY isn’t complete yet, but promises to be a super high quality, high speed printer.  He’ll be operational at next year’s Maker Faire.  SoM also brought his big brother, Ultra MegaMax Dominator, named that because he is ultra, mega, maximum, and he dominates.

MiniMax XY at Milwaukee Maker Faire

Ultra MegaMax Dominator and Son of MegaMax at the Milwaukee Maker Faire

UMMD and SoM rotated between the booth and the dark room where the both printers’ UV lighting and fluorescent filament was a big hit.

UMMD in the Dark Room at Milwaukee Maker Faire 2017

We had a few things besides 3D printers at the booth.  Tony brought in some Bismuth crystals to give away, and surprisingly, they didn’t all disappear in the first hour.  Tony thinks people left them because the Makerspace logo on the info board on which the crystals were sitting looked a lot like the skull and crossbones that usually indicates poison.  The crystals do have an other-worldly toxic look about them.  Oh well…

Bismuth Crystal

Marcin’s LED signs on the table at the booth and hanging above the entrance to the Dark Room were also very popular and hard to miss, though I managed not to take any pictures of either.  The one above the Dark Room was so bright that if you saw it, you’ve probably still got its image burned into your retinas.

Everyone involved had a great time and we’ll be there again next year with even more cool stuff!

For the last few months Kayla has been working on casting a pile of ingots for Maker Faire Milwaukee.  These ingots are made from scrap metal donated to the Milwaukee Makerspace by its members.  Everything from Kayla’s personal favorite, hard drive casings, to parts of tools and engines.  Its really cool to see her take trash and turn it into treasure in the form of aluminum bars.

Be sure to watch for Kayla at Maker Faire Milwaukee pouring hot metal and helping people make stuff September 24th-25th at Wisconsin State Faire Park.

Over the last few weeks the Maker Faire team has been hard at work making some new signs to hang in the exhibit hall.  These signs are 10 x 5 feet and will make finding your way around much easier.  The logos are first traced on vinyl sheets and then carefully cut out.

After the stencils are cut they are laid out on the fabric banner for painting.  It can be a challenge to get the curved lines of these very large logos to lay flat.  Kim, Mike, Kathy, and Pete have been doing a great job.  This project has been a labor of love for Kim who designed these signs and has seen them from drawing to fabrication.

Be sure to look for these signs and lots of others this month at the largest free Maker Faire in the US right here in Milwaukee at Wisconsin State Faire Park.  For more information about Maker Faire Milwaukee and all the amazing makers that will be there click here.

And failed miserably. Running at 18v (50% more than its rated voltage!), it was only drawing ~200mA, and could only lift 2-4 of the 7/16ths nuts I’d borrowed for use as ballast.

So my inner maker came boiling to the surface and yelled at me, “why not wind my own!?”…

I present to you, failure #2: The small, drill-wound electromagnet:

This magnet was made from 28ga wire, and also ran at about 18V. It didn’t pull much more current than the previous one, and was also only able to lift ~3-4 of the 7/16ths nuts. I remembered Tom had a GIANT SPOOL of copper in his area, so I asked if he minded if I used a bunch of it. It turned out to be 17ga! After searching the ‘space for the right core (initially, a bolt, as shown in the previous photo), I found a nice piece of 1/2″ bar stock, and a piece of PVC tubing that the bar fit into perfectly. Once again, the drill came out, and I wound a much larger electromagnet:

This guy means business! It metered out at about 2.3 ohms. I fired it up with the bench-top power supply in the electronics lab, which immediately went into current-limit mode. At 6V DC, it was drawing 2.75A! I brought it over to the pile of nuts and it picked up about 15 of them! SUCCESS! According to Ohm’s law, if I run it at 12V, it’s going to draw close to 5A of power.. But the resulting field should be even stronger!

The original plan was to wind the copper around the PVC, but I would it too tightly and wasn’t able to remove the PVC afterwards. Oops! There was some debate as to whether a U-shaped core would be best, so that’s what I worked towards. After some testing, I found that the U-shaped core didn’t help at all, so I had Dan help me turn the u-shape into an eye. This will make it easy to suspend from a string.

Here’s a comparison of the three magnets to give you an idea for size..

Stay tuned for more photos of the electromagnet crane build!

(Also, for the Monty Python fans.. working on this project made me feel a little like the King of Swamp Castle must’ve felt..)

Dan loves fire! It’s a fact! For Maker Faire Milwaukee we made a fire poofer which was triggered by pressing a button. Tons of kids (and adults) pressed that button over the course of the weekend.

While Dan the Blacksmith (and John McGeen from BBCM) were the primary builders of the fire poofer, I did the trigger electronics and enclosure.

I’ve written up a blog post with lots of images explaining the (somewhat rushed) build of the device. It’s Arduino powered, has some relays and a beeper, and looks semi-nefarious. Read more about The Detonator.

A couple weeks ago I got a blower from American Science and Surplus and this week I got it running by using a model airplane ESC and servo tester to drive its brushless DC motor.  It appears to be capable of blowing much more air than I’ll need.  There are many unknowns yet to test.  How much chilled air/CO2 will it take to solidify the chocolate after it leaves the extruder?  How long will a block of dry ice last when used this way?  Will ice build-up inside the chiller box adversely affect its performance?

I designed and printed three parts for this system- a mount to attach the blower to a foam box up to 1.5″ thick, a hose coupler to allow delivery of the chilled air/CO2 to the print, and a hole saw to cut holes to fit the other two parts.   The printed parts fit as if they were designed for the job!

3D printed hole saw

Hose connected to hose coupler

Hose coupler parts

Blower mount for air chiller box

I mixed about 1 liter of extra thick pancake batter to a consistency that I thought would be much thicker than molten chocolate (pancake batter is much cheaper than chocolate) and shoveled it into the syringe, then bolted on the pusher and hooked it up to a power supply:

Looking back, I probably should have loaded the syringe from the other end.

Syringe loaded with super thick pancake batter.

Here’s the actual test.  It gets especially interesting about 1 minute in:

The syringe continued drooling after power was removed due to air that was trapped inside the syringe.  As the plunger pushed, the air was compressed.  When the motor stopped the compressed air continued to push out the batter.  I will have to be careful to eliminate air bubbles in the material when it comes time to use this in a printer.

It only took a couple minutes to clean out the syringe after the test was done.

The pusher did its job much better than expected, and the plunger held up just fine, too.  I feel confident that this device will be able to extrude chocolate.   Now the real work begins…