Source: Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers
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“My first hundred thousand dollar mistake was making all the molds.” –ADI Founder Kevin Liang
Inventing the City of the Future at Maker Faire Barcelona
When tens of thousands of makers gathered this past weekend for Maker Faire Barcelona (@MakerfaireBCN), they weren’t just taking part in a European maker extravaganza — they were also bearing witness to myriad ideas and technologies intended to explore the future of lived urban spaces.
As such, the event was a grand experiment in the power of groups of innovators to collectively confront a design challenge, and the results were extraordinary. There was the Fertilecity Project (@Fertilecity), for instance, which is exploring ways to harness rainwater and residual heat to produce food on next-generation rooftop gardens. There was also Open Source Beehives (@OSBeehives), which is creating a system of sensors and algorithms that beekeepers can use to track colony health, as well as Mass Distribution of (Almost) Anything, a trans-media exhibition by Fab Lab Barcelona (@fablabbcn) that looks at how manufacturing can be reintegrated into the urban environments — and, of course, much more.
“We’re giving visibility to an immense local community that tends to stay in their garages producing,” said Mariona A. Ciller, the director of Maker Faire Barcelona. “We’re connecting business, makers, citizens of all ages with the Maker Movement and giving them new ideas of how cities can produce locally and connect globally!
”How Tariffs Could Affect Maker Pros
We’ve written previously about how looming trade conflicts could affect hardware startups and other entrepreneurs who build things. Now, inveterate maker pro Andrew “Bunnie” Huang (@bunniestudios) weighed in on his blog — and he believes that the tariffs scheduled to go into effect next month are going to hurt small-time makers far more than big companies, which can afford to protect their supply chains.
“A huge variable I realize that nobody knows the answer to is how durable the tariffs will be, e.g. are they here for just a couple months until the midterms are over, or are they a fixture and ultimately a new revenue stream the government will become dependent upon to tighten up the deficit…
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