Sunday was the last day of Tokyo's first ever Maker Faire.
It's safe to say I was pretty blown away by the whole event. Imagine squeezing shoulder to shoulder step by step through a space as big as a football field, chock a bloc with little tables, thousands of people, and tons of blinking, flashing, gyrating electronic gizmos.
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I came knowing nothing about Arduinos, Rasberry piis, and flying drones, and left knowing nothing more ... sadly, I was way too intimidated to ask a programmer to explain basic coding and circuitry to me in Japanese.
I did however, do a lot of googling when I got home, and learned enough to have a semi intelligent conversation (in English) with someone next time I need to, which could be quite soon considering I'm now planning on building one of these to do my grocery shopping for me...
This is a giant cardboard giraffe robot that was designed and built by kids using a program developed at MIT called Scratch.
The folks at a design group here in Tokyo called Otomo held a series of workshops for kids earlier this year where this noble beast was conceived and built.
The giraffe has a camera in it's head and a controller in it's tail. As the giraffe's head "looks" around, video streams to an old-school, Wizard of Oz-style monitor nearby.
I don't think I could have dreamed of something that would have captured my imagination more than this amazing cardboard safari creature.
I basically had to pick my jaw up off the floor, and embarrassingly said "This is so cool" way too many times while talking to the couple from Otomo.