I paid a visit to this year's Maker Faire at the weekend, held again in Newcastle. The format was much the same as last year, though much of the event had moved from tents in the square outside the Life Centre to inside the Life Centre itself. As last year, there were demos by Friispray, lots of bits and bobs using Arduino circuits, and the excellent Oomlout. New additions this year (or at least stuff that was new to me) were two enormous Tesla coils playing music (see something similar here), Sonodrome and its tobacco-tin oscillators, Mbed's rapid prototyping microcontrollers, Gocco printing, a Rubik's Cube-solving robot, and more knitting, stitching, LEDs and microprocessors than you could shake a stick at.
The best two things, though, were the brilliant Digital Funfair, which took up residence in a tent in the square and embodied the anarchic and creative marraiage of high-tech and low-tech that epitomises the Maker Faire, and, in particular, Sugru, one of the more low-tech exhibits at the fair. Sugru is a new material that has terrific potential, I think (and you can see on this clip from the Culture Show that the designer Tom Dixon agrees with me). I can see all sorts of uses for this cross between super glue and modelling clay, especially in medical settings and for use in adapting tools for older or handicapped people. At the moment it only comes in bright colours, as the makers said they want to "highlight" the hackery that Sugru encourages. But they can make it in any colour, they said, and I think black and white Sugru would have huge sales potential for repairing chipped crockery, augmenting laptops or mice, etc.
