Crowd Deluges San Diego’s First Mini Maker Faire: An Xconomy Slideshow

Organizers of the San Diego Mini Maker Faire were unsure what kind of a turnout they would get for the city’s first day-long festival of invention, held Saturday at the Del Mar Fairgrounds just north of San Diego. By Friday, only about 300 people had registered online and organizers fretted that they might not get more than 1,000 to attend.

“We were really hoping to hit 2,000,” said Katie Rast, a lead organizer, who worried that the cold, blustery weather and occasionally torrential downpours would keep Southern Californians huddled indoors. Yet more than 5,200 people braved the inclement weather. “The fact that we had 5,200 attend was really a great showing that people in San Diego are really excited about the maker movement,” said Rast, an evangelist for the movement. She was especially happy to see so many kids in attendance.

“There was just an amazing buzz,” she said. San Diego’s inaugural mini maker faire, held in the Bing Crosby Hall, was intended to showcase local innovation, local creativity, and local DIY crafts. More than 100 exhibitors put their do-it-yourself wares on display.

The flagship Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA, regularly draws more than 100,000 attendees, but Rast said, “That’s a space that’s already recognized, and that already recognizes itself, for innovation. [The strong turnout here] was especially important for San Diego, because we are just becoming recognized as a maker community and a maker city.”

Rast also has served as director of Fab Lab San Diego since 2007. The San Diego Fab Lab is part of a global network of similar “invention spaces” created as part of an educational outreach initiative conceived at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms to encourage innovation, ideation, creativity, and STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) among youth and adults.

Exhibits at the mini maker faire included wallet-size robots running on Snapdragon processors from Qualcomm, a premier event sponsor; the “CatGenie, an automated cat litterbox created with a $35 Raspberry Pi computer; a “switch blade” robot created by graduate students in the Flow Control and Coordinated Robotics lab at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering; and Lindsay, a giant electric giraffe.

Here are some scenes from the faire.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.