( Originally published in Make)
In early July we spent a couple of days going through all of the submissions received to participate in Maker Faire Rome — the European Edition, taking place Oct. 3-6 in Italy. It was a great experience for us to discover makers’ projects from all around Europe, and the MakerTour gave us the chance to meet some of them and to produce 69 video clips to share this experience with all of you. You can watch the videos on the Maker Faire Rome channel on YouTube. Among those is a video of a visit to the Arduino factory in Ivrea.

On the blog we said thank you 320 times to everyone who submitted her or his ideas to Maker Faire Rome, and we published a map showing a total of 200 Italian projects and 120 from other countries participating in the Call for Makers, which ended on June 30.

To give you an idea of the diversity of projects we received, I chose three from Italy, France, and Spain.

BitCave is a project focused on local and homemade cheese production created by Guido Cortese, a technician based in Italy who likes bees and plein air. After self-producing beer and bread, it’s now possible to experiment with cheese making. If you don’t have a cellar or basement to age cheese, you can reproduce the optimal conditions to let raw cheese ripen by adjusting seasonal parameters with the help of Arduino. The parameters of temperature and humidity are governed by ripenINO, the brain of BitCave. The airflow is constantly cooled and humidified through the cell, and is corrected in case of microclimatic variations depending on the program you choose.

Shhh. Cheese sleeping inside.

FabSkate is a project designed as a proof of concept for digital manufacturing and developed by Luciano Betoldi with Fablab Barcelona team, in Spain. Their goal was to develop a system that delivers fully customized, high quality skateboards and longboards for the price of an off-the-shelf model. Initially trained as a product designer, Luciano became interested in digital manufacturing techniques while designing, developing, and prototyping high-end furniture for large European manufacturers. He quickly changed direction as he realized how these techniques would soon become the manufacturing process itself, and he focused on learning as much as he could about it, working closely with the Barcelona FabLab for the last five years.

An early FabSkate design.

Bionico Hand is an open source, affordable 3D printed robot hand adaptable for upper limb amputees with muscular interface. Nicolas Huchet started the project for himself, working together with the team of Labfab, a fablab in Rennes, France. Now the project is getting bigger as the team is collaborating with people around the world, especially from Brazil and the U.S. They also work in synergy with Gael Langevin, the creator of the incredible Inmoov Robot, which is coming to Maker Faire Rome as well!

You can watch a cool video interview of both below.

It’s going to be a great Maker Faire, full of surprises, and engaging activities. Are you coming to Italy?

This entry was postedby Massimo Banzi on Monday, July 22nd, 2013 and is filed under MakerFaire.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Some weeks ago I read an article on the New York Times talking about Kickstarter. The author was exploring the logic of the platform and especially in which way backers shouldn’t really be considered like investors. They aren’t because their main aim is not looking for the project that will give them the greatest return on their money.

Kickstarter as a phenomenon is made much more comprehensible once you realize that it’s not following the logic of the free market; it’s following the logic of the gift […] People contribute to them because they’re friends who know the artist personally; they’re fans engaged in a highly personal if unidirectional relationship with the artist [creator]; or simply because they’re intrigued by the project and want some sense of participation in it.

Here we are then, highlighting  two Arduino-based projects because we are intrigued by them and hope you like them too.

After successfully putting the Smart Citizen Kit in the hand of over 150 users around Barcelona in Spain, the team – organized by Fablab Barcelona and involving collaborations from all over the world – is ready for the next, and most crucial step and they need your help. The Smart Citizen Kit infact is an Open-Source Environmental Monitoring Platform consisting of arduino-compatible hardware, data visualization web API, and mobile app, empowering communities to collect data of what’s actually happening in their environment.

GOAL: $50,000

PROJECT ENDS: June 16, 2013
Check out what are their plans in the video!

Many hexapods can’t sense they’ve reached the edge of a surface without a lot of additional hardware expense and complexity and this kit solves the problem! BOT-LOGIC is an easy-to-assemble hexapod kit & controller that enables servos to also act as sensors to control the force applied as well as measuring force at set positions. Robots are thus enabled to sense surface edges and uneven servo load as well as measure and maintain gripper force.

GOAL: $10,000

PROJECT ENDS: July 10, 2013

Check the details in the video below:

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Monday, May 20th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Enviroment, Hardware, Leonardo.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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