Uncategorized Archives - Maker Faire Milwaukee

I was born an engineer and pursued engineering as a career from an early age. In high school, I was a member of ham radio Explorer Post 373 which met in the Bay View United Methodist Church, a few blocks from one of the Milwaukee Makerspace locations today. I eventually graduated from UW Milwaukee in 1981 with a degree in electrical engineering and embarked on a career that moved me to Illinois, California, Japan, and Texas. After 22 years at Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu Microelectronics, and Texas Instruments, corporate engineering and I had had enough of each other, and at 46 years old I decided to reinvent myself.

Six years of school followed, and in 2011, at the tender age of 52 years, I graduated from the Arizona School of Dentistry and Oral Health. In 2012 I returned to the Milwaukee area to work in a community health clinic and promptly joined the Milwaukee Makerspace. For the last five years, I have worked at Vivent Health, an organization that cares for HIV patients.

Work always interfered with my home engineering projects, and when I became a dentist, working just four days per week freed up an extra day for projects. My first project at the Makerspace was designing and building a 3D printer that was much larger than the kits that were available at the time. Over the next few years, I designed and built two more printers and managed the 3D printing area at the Makerspace.

I used the knowledge of 3D printing mechanisms and electronics, gained at the Makerspace, to design and build my first sand table, The Spice Must Flow, for display at the 2018 MakerFaire Milwaukee. There were lots of 3D-printed parts in the mechanism. After that initial success, I wanted to reduce the noise, increase speed, and build the mechanism into a piece of furniture I could use in my living room. The Arrakis sand table that can be seen at MakerFaire Milwaukee this year is the result.

You can see a blog post on Arrakis here: https://drmrehorst.blogspot.com/2021/10/arrakis-this-is-part-of-weirding-way.html

And video of Arrakis drawing patterns here:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXhpuy8MGC9zTHcek2UMJyPuZjJ8RXrlK

Come see us at the MakerFaire in the Milwaukee Makerspace booth. I’ll be happy to answer questions about Arrakis, 3D printing, the Makerspace, teeth, and almost any other topic, personal or scientific.

My name is Karl Stamm, I like to say I ‘am’ a Ph.D. of Computational Science because graduate school becomes such a big part of a person’s identity. I wanted to have an impact, do more good. I chose to study math as a force multiplier in lieu of any concrete ideas to ‘do more good’ in the world, and I ended up a data scientist supporting medical advancement. Now importantly, I’m also a dad and ultimately a Maker.

Basically, I spend a lot of time fighting computers to get data transformed from one shape to another. I needed to find a hobby that was not on keyboards and screens, yet still scratching that signals-processing itch. So about five years ago I got into modular synthesizers.

Musical synthesizers use analog or digital electronics to create sound and can have as much complexity as you want. “Modular” synthesizers are inside-out: those dozen major components of a musical synth are broken out into separate bits you can rearrange, replace and rewire to create unique sound-making machines every time you play. Musical instruments are expensive, and boutique electronics are expensive, so when the COVID pandemic closed my day job, I looked towards Do-It-Yourself electronics.

The basic components of a musical synthesizer were patented before I was born and designs are now available freely on the internet. The workings of an electronic filter are complicated and you might want an engineering degree to work out exactly how to make one perform, but in the case of noise-making, we don’t need precision and trial and error can get us close enough.
I was inspired by the YouTuber Sam Battle, AKA Look Mum No Computer, a reference to what crazy things you can build with really basic components. His motto said after every video, “don’t be scared to try it!” shows us that for the cost of burning up a few pennies worth of resistors and capacitors you can get an intuitive education on electronics design. All it takes is perseverance.

Initial circuits are soldered messes of wire. When they get too complicated, the transition to printed circuit boards is straightforward with free computer-aided drafting software and very cheap overseas fabrication services. They have a minimum order count of 5 or 10 boards, and I found myself duty-bound to set up a website to detail build instructions for anyone who gets a hold of a copy of one of my PCBs. Thus Karltron synthesizer company was born. Karltron.com sells circuit boards and parts kits to the DIY synthesizer community and assembled modules to musicians who appreciate unique hardware.

As a person who makes things in the Milwaukee community, I want to show the public both how electricity can be fun, and how sound synthesis works. I hope it inspires you that it’s not impossible to really make something you may have thought was intensely complicated just a few years ago. Don’t be scared to try it!

Power Racing returns for 2022! After a great run of events across the country starting at our sister Faire in Sheboygan, Power Racing hits the home stretch in Milwaukee.

In the collaborative, “can-do” spirit of the global Maker Movement, we invite individuals and organizations to explore local challenges and meet other tech people, crafts people, educators, entrepreneurs and community innovators who want Milwaukee to be a Maker City!

Maker City begins Friday, September 24 at the MSOE STEM Center

Presented by

Join Us In Person or Virtually

2 pm | Making an Impact, Kyle Jansson, Director, UWM Prototyping Center Forbes recognized makers around the world as 2020’s Most Disruptive Innovators for their collaborations to manufacture PPE at the start of the pandemic. With access to the world’s most advanced prototyping technology and maker skills, Kyle’s team worked around-the-clock to design PPE for frontline workers, and it’s an amazing story.

2:30 pm | Making Workers, Dan Meyer, Publisher of BizTimes & STUFF A panel discussion about the changing landscape of education and work, and the impact of the Maker Movement on jobs and career paths.

4 pm | Making in STEM Education The community’s premier STEM education non-profits discuss their missions, programs and collaborations.

A Maker City is democratizing entrepreneurship, increasing access to the technology and tools redefining education and work, and creating positive economic and cultural change for everyone in the community. The program is inspired by Maker City, A Practical Guide for Reinventing our Cities, co-authored by Dale Doughtery, Founder of MAKE: Community and Maker Faire.

Maker City continues at the Faire on Saturday and Sunday!

Check the Faire schedule for updates; please contact us to join a talk or suggest a topic.

“The maker movement and Maker Faires are critical to our future. Our rapidly changing world requires job skills that meet the changing needs of a workforce increasingly driven by information and analytics. If you get a chance to go to a Maker Faire in your area, I highly recommend you do. You might even become a maker yourself.”– Tim Bajarin, PC Magazine

Makers are redefining education and the workforce, bringing diverse talents and skills – the maker mindset – to challenges around the world. Forbes recognized Makers as the year’s Most Disruptive Innovators for their work to prototype, manufacture and distribute personal protective equipment at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. You can meet some of them at the Faire.

Maker Faire Milwaukee showcases individual makers and organizations that are supporting STEM education and creating new education and career paths for students, young talents and skilled makers. We are grateful to these higher education and workforce development partners and 2021 Faire sponsors.

Army ROTC is supporting Maker Faire Milwaukee again this year, and we are pleased to acknowledge their participation in the event, and their mission to offer education opportunities for student leaders in the STEM fields – science, technology, engineering and math. Army ROTC offers merit-based scholarships that can pay up to the full cost of college tuition at almost 1,000 colleges and universities. Upon graduation, Army officers earn a competitive salary and benefit package either on Active Duty or in the Reserve.

Maker Faire Milwaukee also partners with STUFF, a BizTimes publication focused on workforce development and career opportunities in the manufacturing, building, technology and healthcare industries. STUFF highlights the companies in our region that are doing cool things, the technology they are using to do that, and the workers who are building careers and helping their organizations succeed. STUFF is distributed to technical colleges, high schools and middle students and families, educators, guidance counselors, Workforce Development Centers and other organizations throughout the state.

We’re happy to introduce Kickstart Design in our first Meet the Maker profile of 2021.

Tell us a little bit about your business.

Kickstart Design was founded by three friends and makers, Cameron Bradley, Francis Gilligan, and Lionel Rocheleau. The three of us met at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, where we studied Digital Fabrication and Design. After university we spent a few years in the workforce, each specializing in different areas of expertise, mostly working for small businesses around Milwaukee, such as Retrospekt and Parts-Badger. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, like many others around the world, we began to reassess what we wanted to be doing with our futures and with our lives. During the summer of 2020, we began to construct our idea for what kind of company we were looking to be, and by August, we had filed and started our company, Kickstart Design LLC. Since then, we have helped many individuals bring their ideas to market and helped other businesses increase productivity by providing engineering solutions.

What will people see when they visit the Kickstart Design booth at the Faire?

We plan to show off a few of the projects we have worked on thus far and display our process of how we developed it. We hope to connect with others who may need help developing a product or taking it to market. We hope to also showcase our own line of PCBs for DIY projects specifically for makers, including but not limited to, Li-Ion Charging and Boost boards, Charging and Boost Boards with built-in microcontroller, microcontrollers with built-in MP3 functionality, and potentially many more. This is dependent on the global chip shortage and stock, as most of these boards are still in development.

Why do you consider yourselves makers?

We consider ourselves makers because of the ideology and practice of how we create products or solutions. Oftentimes, there is a lot of research involved as our clients look for many different things in their products. In addition to research, prototyping and rapid iteration are crucial to our design process. 3D printing and laser cutting usually help us create our ideas and change them quickly when parts of the design need tweaking or fixing. When we create, it’s more than likely it will take us at least 3 iterations of something to finally land on a design we are proud of, which we believe is a core tenant of the maker ideology. Our facility has a small shop where we do most of our own tinkering and creating for making our client’s prototypes, trying only to outsource when there is a gap in our expertise.

Hi Everyone,

Since we wrapped the 2019 Faire, people have continued to reach out to us about whether the Faire would continue. We were not very hopeful, until our friends at Gearbox Labs took on the event a few months ago and contacted us.

We know that many makers have had time at home to develop their craft or pursue something new. We know that many have had to make hard decisions about their creative work and businesses, too. Things have changed for us as well, but we are getting the band back together as volunteers to plan this year’s Faire. We need you and the stuff you do to help make it a success.

If you know us, you know we are passionate about redefining education and how we prepare children and young people for the changing world around them. The past year has reminded us how critical education is in shaping our lives and communities, and how important access to the technology and tools revolutionizing education is to economic opportunity and cultural change. Showcasing the impact of the Maker Movement on education – making it more relevant, more equitable, and just more fun – is one of our top priorities this year.

We also want to celebrate the power of the global maker community to do good. The Forbes 2020 Technology Awards recognized makers as the year’s Most Disruptive Innovators – indeed – for stepping into the COVID-19 crisis to prototype, manufacture and distribute personal protective equipment at the start of the pandemic. The Milwaukee Makerspace, UWM Prototyping Center and other local makers were part of these incredible efforts, and we were thrilled to see Forbes acknowledge the Maker Movement in this way.

We probably won’t be breaking our attendance record this year, but we want to bring back Maker Faire to share the work of makers in our community and the collaborative, can-do spirit of the Maker Movement. We hope you will join the planning effort or support the Faire in other ways. Reach out to us at info@makerfairemilwaukee.com about ways you can get involved.

Be well – Carrie, Pete and Stacie

P.S. Gearbox Labs is co-hosting Maker Faire Sheboygan on June 19, 2021. Put that on your calendar, too!

As we’re sure you’ve heard by now, we will be attempting to set A Dalek World Record at Maker Faire Milwaukee this year, working closely with Dalek Asylum Milwaukee over at Milwaukee Makerspace.

We’ve even got Daleks coming across state lines to join us, but we still need more help, and that’s where you come in. Did you know you can create your own Dalek for around $12? You can!

Now, it won’t be an exact replica of the Daleks seen in Doctor Who, or quite up to the quality that Dalek Asylum Milwaukee is creating, but every Dalek counts! If you want to build a Dalek costume and join us, download this PDF!

Remember, a World Record is at stake. We can’t wait to have the largest gathering of Daleks right here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA on September 23rd, 2017!

We’ve been lucky to have The Milwaukee Tesla Coil Builders bring their crazy contraptions to Maker Faire Milwaukee and put on an amazing show (you may remember Knight versus Tesla Coil from 2015.) Well, we were not disappointed in 2016, as they were back with an even better show, including a Faraday cage that people could stand inside while the Tesla coils did their thing.

Plans are in the works to have The Milwaukee Tesla Coil Builders return again in 2017… Who knows what they’ll come up with this year!?

Did you happen to see Hand Of Man at Maker Faire Milwaukee in 2016? Hand Of Man is a 26-foot long hydraulically-actuated human hand and forearm which is capable of picking up and crushing cars, and a glove device that controls it. Visitors were able to operate the hand and pick up (and drop) cars during the Faire.

We’re busy gearing up for 2017, but wanted to share this great video that shows some of the action from last year. Enjoy!