makers

Circuit Benders can customize and hack technologies to do things they aren't designed to do. They can turn toys into musical instruments or transform household gadgets into things that are truly bizarre. A Circuit Bender explores what's under the hood of the electronics all around us.

Join us for three full days and nights of activities, including more of the provocative and enlightening speakers that the HOPE conferences are known for. In addition, we have access to a massive amount of space to put together all sorts of hacker projects and assorted fun stuff. In the past we've had huge hackerspace villages, film festivals, Segway rides, lockpicking villages, a wide variety of vendors, art installations, live radio, vintage computers, robots, ham radio installations, electronics workshops, book signings, and the country's biggest supply of Club-Mate.

innovation is not to be collected or consumed – it's to be explored. These are the types whose first instinct after using new technology is to take it apart, driven by a compulsion and motivated by sincere curiosity to find out: How. Does. It. Work. These are the makers. And they're assembling their latest toys and technologies to showcase at Orlando's first-ever Mini Maker Faire.

“This business card plugs into a USB port of a computer and enumerates itself as a USB Mass Storage Class (a thumbdrive) which contains my resume and the source code for itself.

believe in an Internet of Everything where Humans, Nature, Machines, Objects, Environments, Information, Physical and Virtual spaces all mix up, talk, intertwine, interact, enrich and empower each other in all sorts of ways. This is what we are building and we think that we are not alone.

This is why we have created Open.Sen.se an open platform for all those who want to imagine, prototype and test new Devices, Installations, Scenarios, Applications for this globally interconnected and immersive world.

"In the U.S. and Europe, people are starting to realize that there's this opportunity to make again," Muren said. "I think in the rest of the world, they're kind of like 'Well, isn't it funny you all call this 'making.' We've been doing this forever. That's one of the things that's exciting to me is the meeting of those two places. "

At last Fall's PopTech conference in Camden, Maine, he talked up some of the products that have been created with the help of Humblefactory, and other creations from the "maker movement" including the aforementioned Egg-Bot.

Drink Better Beer

Held on the first Sunday of each month starting @ 4:15 PM

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

Cubelets are magnetic blocks that can be snapped together to make an endless variety of robots with no programming and no wires. You can build robots that drive around on a tabletop, respond to light, sound, and temperature, and have surprisingly lifelike behavior. But instead of programming that behavior, you snap the cubelets together and watch the behavior emerge like with a flock of birds or a swarm of bees.

The SoundPuddle is an interactive space of visual-acoustic synesthesia. This spectrographically colorful dome creates color and light from sound, illuminating every noise you make on an immersive canopy of light. You will laugh, shout, and sing as thousands of solar powered LEDs unify your ears and eyes.