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Maker Faire Bay Area 2017

2017-05-24 | By Kevin Walseth

AdaBox

Makerfaire Bay Area 2017 is a wrap. Another great show put on by the Make: Media team. Make is always a great partner to work with.

To start off with, check out their newest issue of Make: magazine Vol. 57. This issue features one of the industry’s favorite electronic pioneers – Limor Fried (aka. Ladyada) who is the founder and CEO of Adafruit Industries. Creatively placed in the photo as one of her eyes, is a Circuit Playground. Conveniently, we happened to have a 4-ft. diameter version at our booth – which was being driven by an original 2-inch version.

We have loved the Circuit Playground since it was launched over a year ago. Oh, and speaking of the Circuit Playground, during Makerfaire we began talking about our partnership with Adafruit and Girls Who Code. This summer, we will be donating a special edition Circuit Playground to Girls Who Code for every one we sell at DigiKey. It will be a “Buy-One Give-One” promotion that we are really excited about..

Image of TE and Adafruit Display

We also launched our partnership with TE and Adafruit around the Formula E race in NYC this coming summer. Formula E’s are similar to Formula One cars – except one big difference: electric motors. These cars are very eco-friendly and extremely fun to watch. DigiKey will soon have a super cool mini racing robot and we would like to challenge you to modify it and show us your updates. It will be an Adafruit robot using TE sensors to sense temperature and humidity.

Image of Sparkfun's Rock-Paper-Scissors Leaderboard

Roshamglo! - Sparkfun: Sparkfun was a huge part of our booth this year! We gave away 1200 of these amazing Rock – Paper – Scissors boards at Makerfaire. It was like Black Friday at our booth and we loved it! With this game, we asked people who received the board to battle anyone they saw wearing a DigiKey lanyard. The individual that won the most games of Roshamglo each day won an HTC Vive VR headset, Beats X headphones, and Snapchat Spectacles. Amazingly, we had over 1700 wins on Saturday and nearly 1600 on Sunday. These individuals were serious! Thank you Sparkfun for the great product and the partnership. If you were lucky enough to walk away with one of these, please see the hackable projects for these awesome boards:

Image of Dig-Key lanyard equipped with Sparkfun's Rock-Paper-Scissors boards

Here is my interview with Sparkfun’s Engineering Superhero Shawn Hymel:

A few of the partners we were showing at our booth included:

Techshop: We have a great partnership with the team over at Techshop. DigiKey works with Techshop to create fun and educational classes around electronics for their members to enjoy. The most recent class was building a “secret book” using the Adabox003 and Adafruit.io. This was a really cool project where you could program the book to unlock wirelessly at the change of temperature or movement. It would also alarm you if it was opened without your knowledge. New way of having a diary kept private from snoopy peers!?

 Image of Adafruit's ADABOX Display

Image of Overlord DreamMaker Pro 3D printer

DFRobot: The Overlord DreamMaker Pro 3D printer is currently my favorite 3D printer. I had it doing a test print within 5 minutes of taking it out of the box. It is very user friendly and prints in amazing quality! Here I am talking with two of the team members at DFRobot:

I was even lucky enough to interview R2D2: click here.

These were the high-points of the DigiKey booth, stay tuned for some pretty cool re-cap videos from us! Also, check out a few more interviews at:

Kevin Walseth
Tech Marketing Manager – DigiKey

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