 After a disturbingly storming early morning, things calmed down on the grounds and inner recesses of The Henry Ford, as makers began to prep in earnest, kids descended from the area for a little educational Faire preview, and Make: Live geared up for its 5:30pm ET webcast.
And then came Happy Hour, a chance for staffers and makers to meet and greet. Tomorrow, the real magic happens, as the Greatest Geek Show on Earth gets well and truly underway.  The Maker Faire crew cools off with a refreshing beer during Maker Happy Hour after the Make: Live webcast! That’s Bridgette, Louise, Sherry, Dale, Josh Goldberg, Becky, and Matt R in front of Gon KiRin. -Becky
 130 six to twelve year old descended unto The Henry Ford today for an early preview of Maker Faire Detroit. They learned to solder, thanks to Maker Shed. The kids then got to do a hands-on project compliments of Arts & Scraps, had a walk through of Maker Faire and a great tour of the The Henry Ford Museum. As a finale everyone got a great show from the fine crew at the Lifesize Mousetrap. -Gidge
 Matt Richardson and Becky Stern prep for Make: Live.
 Download the 4-page Program Guide [PDF]. Includes maps of the site, event schedules, Faire highlights.
To get the latest coverage of the Faire as it happens, get thee to the Maker Faire Daily.  
Over the past few months, my friend Bertrand and I have been working on a game console, the PIX-6T4, which is powered by a Netduino Mini. The console is designed as platform for learning digital electronics and C#: we're in the process of writing a book covering all aspects of building the console, how its components work and how to write games for it with our framework. As always, it's entirely open source / open hardware and we hope that you'll have as much fun building your own and making games as we did, which we will cover in a series of upcoming posts, often referring to past articles on this blog.
In the Maker Shed: 
Netduino Mini  
News From The Future: Thought-Controlled Bike…. Jason @ WIRED took one for a spin… The team set me up with a neurotransmitter helmet connected to an iPhone 4 mounted on the stem. The neurotransmitters are embedded in the helmet. Sync your brain bucket to your phone and you can switch gears simply by thinking about it. Shifting couldn’t be easier. Think, “shift up” and it does in a blink of an eye. It’s faster and smoother than anything else I’ve ridden. It can be tricky, because you’ve got to keep your head clear — the neurotransmitters work off your brain activity, so if your mind is bombarded with grocery lists or thoughts chasing down that guy who blew by you, shifting could be tricky. This is where the bodhisattva training pays off.
What things do you think will eventually be thought controlled, besides – TV remote and videos games :) Post in the comments, or use your wordpress-mind plug in!  For this weekend’s Maker Faire Detroit, one of our video producers (among others), Nat Wilson-Heckathorn, is there shooting some of the salient sights and sounds. Here are a few videos posted this morning on our YouTube Channel. The first is of a trip some of the MAKE team took to i3Detroit earlier in the week to see how their Power Racing vehicle build was going, the second shows Gon KiRin, the fire-breathing dragon sculpture/truck, making its way to The Henry Ford. Stay tuned for more… 
And to keep up to date with Faire events as they happen, don’t forget to regularly check out Maker Faire Daily. We’ve assembled an awesome team of staffers and local Detroit makers to contribute their on-the-fly impressions of the event via this Posterous-based blog. More:
Power Racing Series Gears Up  
Multicopters is an exciting new area of hobby robotics. They are also sometimes known as UAV’s, and essentially they are “flying hobby robots.” They are made with a center that holds micro controllers, sensors, receivers, transmitters, power and payload. Pointing out from the center are a number of pins holding motors and propellers. This is the first episode looking at multicopters, and Frits has a very advanced hexacopter in the air. Later episodes will look at products you can buy, and some cool cheap and less complex alternatives new on the market will be demonstrated. Here are some inspiring links to other videos with other types of multicopters: Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube orVimeo. Check out all the episodes of The Latest in Hobby Robotics.  
Aaron Amatnieks, aka Flickr user akama1_lego, built a Lego dragon that breathes real fire! A tricky proposition when your medium is a polystyrene copolymer that melts at a temperature below the boiling point of water. A butane lighter has been fully incorporated into the structure, including a mechanical start-lever disguised as a rocky crag on the back side of the mountain. Aaron has also created a Lego diorama that incorporates moving water. I have not included a picture here because, well, let’s just say it’s a bit risqué. [via The Brothers Brick]  
The Aeromodeller II project is a design for a zero-emission, autonomous, nomad hydrogen-based airship that will never land. The ship regenerates its fuel, creating hydrogen from wind power and the rain on its skin. When it depletes its energy reserves, the ship needs to drop anchor and rest, in order to replenish its energy in a renewable way. A thousand airbuses jumping back and forth over the ocean twenty-four-seven. Fly, land, replace crew and passengers and take off again. A thousand machines using up their fuel reserves in a mad, insomniac frenzy.
Until they run out… One thousand hyperactive passenger jets, and one airship that needs to rest when its energy level is low. Just like everything else wandering around on this planet.
Both the Aeromodeller page and this We Make Money Not Art article [via] are fantastic, read both of them!  
Ever wonder what kind of information gets stored on your cell phone’s SIM card? Find out with the SIM Card Reader / Writer Kit from the Maker Shed! Build the kit, then use the accompanying software to read and write from the card, to back up stored SIM card data, recover deleted SMS text messages and phone contacts, examine the last 10 phone numbers dialed, and more. Also works on some smart cards. (Hint: Today might be a good day to subscribe to the Deal of the Day RSS or to start following us on Twitter!)
 
Here’s an extremely innovative idea from Yi Lu and Yu Xiang at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, just published in Nature Chemistry. Medical demand for home blood glucose monitoring equipment has led to the development of inexpensive, accurate, and widely available electronic instruments that can measure glucose levels in blood. Some modern personal glucose meters, or PGMs, cost as little as $10. Li and Xiang reasoned that, if they could find a way to chemically couple a compound with glucose, i.e. a reaction that would produce one molecule of glucose for each molecule of the target compound, then a PGM could be used just as well to measure the target compound. Then they went and found a way to do that for, well, just about any compound a person might want to measure. The process requires some fancy chemistry to raise a DNA fragment that will bind specifically to the target molecule, but once that’s done, the reagent can be produced and sold in bulk inexpensively. You would buy a reagent custom-designed for your analyte of interest, mix it with your sample, add a pinch of sugar (literally), and the sugar would be converted to glucose in direct proportion to the concentration of your target. Then stick a grocery store PGM in the vial and take a reading. [via Science Daily]  | |
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