All the Makerfaire type events have their own “feel”, Derby is held in a listed silk mill and gets a good foot-fall. Derby holds on to a good mixture of craft and electronics, having screen printing, weaving, knitting and much more next to the microprocessors.

Sticker Critter and the Cognitive mirror projects were on show.

We did around 300 sticker designs and a constant flow of people to the the mirror, unfortunately I don’t currently log the mirror usage so don’t have any figures for that one.

We were several people deep around the table for the duration of the day, even after official closing time people were trying to come back to us as we’d been so busy earlier in the day.

I was good to be told how much good feedback the organisers had been getting regarding our show, even better how much the people at the table were praising the activities and asking questions too.

More photos here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/28730769@N07/albums/72157674408863130

The creativity

There were quite a lot of younger visitors to this venue compared to the previous two, and the age range was much more diverse, we had some lovely older members of the community join in too.

Judge for yourself how this town full of engineering folks from JCB, Toyota and Rolls Royce did when faced with an artistic demand.

Here are a selection of the stickers made during the faire, after censorship…

Click to enlarge photos!

It was a pleasure to exhibit at Liverpool MakeFest last weekend. We were made to feel very welcome and the venue was amazing. The MakeFest took over the central library in Liverpool. The library has ultra modern architecture with floating walkways in the sky and an amazing roof terrace overlooking the city.However the building retains some of the original oak rooms with really traditional reading rooms.

We were swamped with visitors from opening to after closing! People were queuing to have a go of our sticker critter and cognitive mirror.

For this show, I reprinted the critter nose in yellow that gives a much more distinctive face. I also improved the messaging and animations on the LCD screen. This has resulted in a speed improvement as the critter no longer has to wait for the messages  on the screen. As one of the things that visitors seem to be amazed by is the speed the sticker is produced, this should make them even more impressed. This show also uses the self peeling sticker option on the new ebay Zebra printer. This means the visitors don’t have to rip the sticker off, that resulted in no jams and less messing..

I also updated the Pi Win IoT to the latest insider preview version, that seemed to produce some performance improvements.

The sticker design was updated with the branding for this faire. Below were some of the designs people came up with.

Over the weekend it was great to get so much positive feedback from visitors and fellow makers!

Finally we settled on Sticker Critter as the name of our little creation, and that is what the project will be renamed at future showings.

Now that I have a 3D printer and am better at CAD I can draw things up and print them.

This is what I have done for a bracket to hold the micro switch to the millimetre above the end of the platform. The bracket has to reach over the top of the drawer runners too.

Below is the CAD drawing…

Here it is with the microswitch attached. The holes were so good, I don’t even need to put nuts on the back of the bolts, screws into the bracket just fine without.

Sketched  and printed in no time!