After stepping on Malcolm's lego bits and bobs for the thousandth-or-so time, I decided to create a Lego-themed desk and bookcase for him... this is what I ended up with
you can see that it's a bit of a mess on there, but considering that most of that stuff was underfoot before, I consider it a success. I tried to make it stock Lego colors of red, white, blue and yellow although some of the very bright colors are hard to match.
This desk was a bit different than my original Sketchup design
That one was from How to Build with Grid Beam which requires drilling, well, hundreds of perfectly uniform holes in stock lumber, or buying factory materials I couldn't find. I thought it would be fun to do with Malcolm so (with my friend Jesse's help) we set up a drill press rig in the garage to make the grid 'beams'. We made some beams all right, but my dad and neighbor Doug talked me out of the complex desk design in favor a simpler one. The grid beam stock will be used for a matching bookcase.
If you're into Sketchup BTW, you can find the Sketchup model for the grid-beam desk here, as well as a vastly-more complicated 3D Sketchup model of our house (created from the original 2D CAD design drawings) here.
We had a terrific time at MakerFaire 2011 in San Francisco last weekend -- I'm just now getting around to posting pictures and videos (all of which you can find here).
We've been talking about going to MakerFaire for a while, and this one (the 10th Anniversary Bay Area Maker Faire) was our first. What a treat! It's kind of a family-friendly, geek-centric Burning Man Festival, a little heavier on the robotics hackers and engineering types perhaps, but still an interesting mix of steampunks, R/C hackers, robotics afficionados, alt-energy fans as well as artists who create large and interesting things with steel, fire and high-voltage electricity.
The glue that ties it all together is that it is about making things rather than just consuming things: It's a celebration and a hands-on demonstration of the creator and tinkerer's way of life, and it runs the gamut from candles and crafts to ginormous sculptures and 1/2 million watt musical tesla coils... here's Malcolm's hero and keynote speaker Adam Savage from Mythbusters dancing in the Faraday Cage to the Doctor Who theme
We started off at a 'learning tent' by soldering up blinky LED badges together as a family... Malcolm got his right in the first go and Susan did too!
"Dangerous Things for Boys", indeed -- what could be better than a hot soldering iron to an eight-year old? "It's like welding without a license!" he said with no small amount of delight.
Besides that he made a simple working motor (at an Exploratorium hands-on booth), a cardboard 'Halo' costume (and got to meet a group with awesome homemade Halo outfits), engaged a Google guy about his Android-controlled R/C car and created a building from CNC routered parts... not back for a weekend, and it whet his appetite (and ours!) to create more things. I brought home an Arduino experiments kit (thereby scratching a long-standing itch) and Malcolm brought home some easy-to-assemble and test robot insects that use motion detection.
That's a lot of stuff listed above, and there really is a great deal of things to see and do there. As a cherry on top, we (along with a large contingent of German tourists) stayed in the Hotel Del Sol in the Marina District which had a heated pool and was within walking distance of the Palace of Fine Arts/ Exploratorium, Fort Mason and the waterfront, and on the bus line to CalTrain (down to San Mateo/MakerFaire) and easy bus ride to/from Chinatown. I hadn't been to San Francisco in over eight years and I'd forgotten what a fun and interesting city it is...
So we came back with the urge to create more things -- mission accomplished, there -- and we'll definitely go back next year I think.
