I’m thrilled to be part of the group of people organizing Maker Faire RI. We’ve just launched our new web site, just in time for all our workshops and events leading up to the main event on Saturday, September 19. See you there!

This geek dinner is going to be a lot of fun. It’s got mobile technology, a company who uses my favorite phone in their demo videos, what more could you ask for? Oh yeah, geeks, beer, and tacos. Come out and see Gypsii talk about their mobile social networking/location based services. As always, more details and RSVP over at the Providence Geeks Blog. See you there!

Photo Credit: Bret Ancowitz, M.D.

There’s another Providence Geek dinner coming up this week; don’t miss it!:

Andrew Schiller, founder of Woonsocket-based Location Inc./NeighborhoodScout.com, a nationwide neighborhood search engine for home buyers and movers with 1.8 million unique visitors last year, will be talking about their patented search technology that answers the first question most home buyers have: “where should I focus my house hunt?”. The audience will try the algorithm by ‘building their ideal neighborhood’ on the site, and finding the local neighborhood that best matches the ideal imaginary one. A sneak peek at NeighborhoodScout v2 will reveal flash-based maps, data mining that has produced new levels of granularity for neighborhood crime, appreciation rate, and school ratings, and ‘smart search’ taken to a new level. Andrew will be joined by Andy Couture, VP of Business Development for the company.

Be sure to check out Andrew’s blog post at RI Nexus about their forthcoming new site – Building a 250,000 page website.

I hope you’re coming to this dinner–please RSVP at the Providence Geeks site so we can get an idea of who all is coming!

Don’t miss this month’s Providence Geek Dinner (this Wednesday!); In the spirit of the holiday season and giving back to the community, Providence Geeks is a proud sponsor of Rhode Island’s 2008 FIRST FTC Robotics Challenge. The program provides high school students the opportunity to build working robots and test their creations in head-to-head competition. At Wednesday’s Geek Dinner, Tech Collective President Tim Hebert and other RI FIRST FTC team members will give an overview of the program, the kids, & the robots, and explain how Providence Geeks members can serve as volunteer mentors and referees. Details and RSVP here.

I got home late afternoon Tuesday, and I’ve had a few days to reflect on the fun I had at Maker Faire. This was my third Maker Faire, but only the second one that I really worked at (at the first one, I had an exhibit, but I didn’t participate in the setup/teardown). At the 2007 San Mateo Maker Faire, I spent nearly all my time in the Maker Store, where we sell books, issues of Make, t-shirts, and my favorite, electronics kits. Make is nothing without its community, so we have a voracious appetite for kits from independent makers, and we sell these kits online and at events. These include kits like Adafruit’s MintyBoost, MiniPOV, electronic game kits from Grand Design and XGameStation.com, and a whole lot more. (The above photo shows Mark Frauenfelder trying out the Critter and Guitari cellular automata kit.)

At the Austin show, I worked in the store again. But this time, we had added a lot of new kits, and among the breakout sellers were the Arduino and Arduino-compatible boards. Arduino is generally described as a platform for physical computing (you can sense and control the physical world with them). It’s open source (both the hardware and software can be studied, modified, and passed on to others), and it’s very easy to program because it was designed by and for artists and designers. The board is based on the 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontroller, and the programming language is similar to Java.

One of the reasons that the Arduino did so well (we sold out of the pre-assembled boards fairly early the second day of the show) is that we also had a new book for sale: Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk, which is a full-color book with projects showing how to create amazing things with Arduino. It was a no-brainer for someone who wanted to play with Arduino to buy one or two Arduino boards along with the book. All they need to get to the Arduino equivalent of “Hello, World” is a USB cable, a computer (Mac, Windows, or Linux) to program the board, and a red LED to blink.

If it sounds like I’m shilling for product, well, I probably am, but my enthusiasm for it exceeds my desire to sell things to you. When I edited Tom’s book, I got the Arduino fever, and now my office is filled with sensors, displays, solar panels, passive components, LEDs, and Arduino boards. When I was a kid, I played with electronics and home computers whose capabilities were similar to Arduino’s. One of my big thrills at Maker Faire was setting up a ZigBee-based demo using a couple of Arduino boards that I put out and let people play with.

One of the cool things about working in the store was that we had a section reserved for the independent makers who build the kits we sell. Limor Fried of Adafruit spent a lot of time there talking about the MintyBoost and MiniPOV. Dave and Cheryl Hrynkiw of Solarbotics had a permanent crowd of kids, which led to us selling out of Mousebot kits really fast. Karl Papadantonakis of LEDKit.biz was showing off his amazing no-solder LED digital clock. Andre LaMothe of XGameStation.com demoed the 8-core Hydra game console and the XGameStation Pico. Jed Berk, maker of the Blubberbot autonomous/semi-domesticated blimp robot was also there. Raphael Abrams set up a great demo for the Daisy MP3 player and answered questions about it from attendees. And from my own neck of the woods, Paul Badger of ModernDevice was joined by David Fowler from uC Hobby to show off Paul’s Bare Bones Board, an Arduino-compatible microcontroller board that you build yourself! What’s more, all these folks gave talks and did workshops on their kits (more on that later).

So even though I was deep in the belly of a commercial enterprise for most of the faire, my responsibility was to connect these small independent kit makers with a community of people who are enthusiastic about their creations. What really blew me away was that there’s a growing market around people who take a cool idea, find a way to produce it in modest quantities, and maybe make a living selling them to enthusiastic fans who are going to learn a LOT from building and playing with their kits!

P.S. if anyone knows of a good, small Newtonian reflector telescope kit (or wants to design and manufacture one), let me know in the comments!

The Pittsburgh Perl Mongers are pleased to announce The PITTSBURGH PERL WORKSHOP, a two-day, low-cost conference on Saturday and Sunday, October 13-14, 2007.

The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is an annual conference dedicated to the Perl programming language. In 2006, the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers hosted the first Perl Workshop based in the United States. This year, the Workshop has been expanded to two days. The 2007 Workshop is structured as a series of short lectures, but the atmosphere is low key and engaging: the perfect combination to open your mind and then cram it full of good stuff.

You can get more details here. Man, it’s been a long time since we had a Rhode Island Perl Mongers meetup. A lot of former RI PM folks have been coming to the Providence Geek Dinners, which is a great place to talk about Perl and many other technical topics!