Maker Faire San Diego: Celebrating 'Geekdom' of Every Stripe
September 29, 2016 / By Tiffany Fox
San Diego, Sept. 29, 2016 — It’s billed as “The Greatest Show (&Tell) on Earth,” and researchers from the University of California San Diego will once again be part of the spectacle as Maker Faire San Diego takes over Balboa Park.
For the second consecutive year, affiliates of the UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute (QI) and Jacobs School of Engineering will participate in the celebration of the global, tech-influenced and do-it-yourself community known as the Maker movement.
Maker Faire -- which takes place on Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 1-2 – is an all-ages gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, engineers, science clubs, authors, artists, students and many others. The Faire is part of Innovate San Diego, a week-long series of events showcasing innovation in the Cali-Baja region, and has become part of pop culture – a place for experiential marketing, debuting new technologies and inventions and celebrating geekdom of every stripe.
Researchers from QI and the Jacobs School will exhibit their work at venues throughout Balboa Park (for a full list of makers, click here). Included among them:
- QI’s DroneLab and its Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) will have several drones on display, as well as drone-derived imagery.
- The joint Engineers for Exploration (E4E) program between the Jacobs School and QI will also demo an underwater stereo camera rig, a paraglider and a radio-collar tracker (for tracking wildlife).
- The Computer Science and Engineering Department will showcase Gadgetron -- a hands-on experience that uses a GUI-based programming environment to program configurable robots.
- The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department will bring homemade pinball machines and Arduino-based, open-source projects, most of them developed in the spring by students who took ECE professor Michael Yip's ECE 115, a new course on Rapid Prototyping that is also part of the Experience Engineering Initiative.
- The Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department will showcase laser-cut acrylic pendulum clocks and student-made robots.
- The EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio used by students in multiple departments in connection with the Jacobs School's Experience Engineering Initiative will highlight how to build and create a user-oriented maker space.
Also representing UC San Diego at Maker Faire is the UC San Diego Solar Car team, a joint venture of two student groups (Engineers for a Sustainable World, and Triton 3D (a 3D printing club) and UC San Diego Extension.
“The nice thing about Maker Faire is it’s an opportunity to show the community at large the cool interactions between engineering and exploration and science,” says QI principal design engineer and E4E Co-Director Curt Schurgers. “It’s a chance for people to see how you can become an engineer and become another Indiana Jones.”
Maker Faire San Diego is open to the public on both days from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 for children, $15 for adults. Admission fee includes entry to all participating venues. For more information, visit sandiego.makerfaire.com.
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Media Contacts
Tiffany Fox
(858) 246-0353
tfox@ucsd.edu