Maker Faire Bay Area 2019 Wrap-Up: Seeed in a Nutshell
That’s a wrap! Were you at the Greatest Show and Tell on Earth? Yes, we’re talking about the biggest and best Maker Faire of them all: Maker Faire Bay Area in sunny California.
Some of the main highlights have to include the giant megabots and animatronics for sure, but for us, meeting passionate makers, old friends and Seeed fans has to be number one on our list. If you missed it, don’t worry, we’ve covered our best bits in this wrap-up.
Unfortunately, the Jetson Nano Spider couldn’t make to the faire because of some last-minute sore joints (you can see him on YouTube), but there was more than enough going on and many interesting conversations to be had. As always, it’s a challenge to cram all of Seeed’s activities into such a small space but our lovely Seeeders were there to make sure they were prepared to answer the big question: So what’s Seeed about?
Well, what do you want Seeed to be about? With so many faucets and directions, covering all sorts of audiences, areas of expertise and industries, this is probably the best question to start with. To assist with the summary, the Seeed booth was split into its major branches:
Manufacturing
We start with Seeed’s manufacturing services including the Seeed Fusion Online Manufacturing services and the Seeed Agile Manufacturing (OEM) service. We had to showcase our star manufacturing service and what better way to grab attention than with a giant Seeeduino shaped board! It certainly piqued a lot of passer-bys’ interests and lead to many conversations comparing hand soldering records and home cooking PCB methods.
Just by paying for the printed circuit boards and the components, you can get 5 fully assembled devices shipped to your doorstep with the Seeed Fusion PCB Assembly service. That includes parts procurement, PCB manufacture and assembly.
We also met a bunch of happy Seeed Fusion customers! It was a thrill to meet you all in person and see some of the boards in action.
Freebies!
Maker Faire just isn’t Maker Faire without stickers and all sorts of SWAG and we made sure we brought plenty. Stickers, tattoos, bookmarks, and PCB business cards were all up for grabs. But whenever the Seeed Fusion team goes to Maker Faires you can always count on them to haul a huge box of Design for Manufacture (DFM) manuals all the way from China – and there never seems to be enough! The Seeed Fusion DFM manuals contain invaluable and detailed guidance on PCB design and is suitable for beginners and hardened engineers alike. It’s nice to have a hard copy, but don’t worry if you couldn’t get your hands on one, there is always the free PDF version.
Let the second series of Seeed bookmarks refine the pages of your favorite edition of Make with inspiring quotes. Bazaar shoppers and Fusion users will be pleased to know that we are throwing these in all packages starting from today.
Huge thanks to everything who shared the love for the new member of the Grove family, the Grove Breadboard. Customize modular electronics with this little fella. #GroveBreadboard
“Bazaar” Online Store
The Bazaar is not only home to Seeed’s Grove family, mic arrays and Open Source Development boards and hats, Seeed also stocks a wide range of the latest open source hardware tech and third-party products from classics like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis to emerging hardware with the likes of NVIDIA Jetson Nano and SiPeed Edge Computing AI development boards coming onto the scene. At the time, the Seeed Bazaar was the only stockist with Jetson Nanos available for immediate dispatch!
Seeed Products Showcase
Many of you will be familiar with the Grove system: a simple modular plug and play system that uses the proprietary Grove connectors and cables, but did you know we also develop open source Google Home and Amazon Alexa alternatives like the range of ReSpeaker and Snips Mic Arrays? With the Snips demo, the Snips mic array responds to simple commands to activate a Grove relay module, that in turn, turns the lamp on and off accordingly. We also had some of the newer Grove modules on display, including a time of flight sensor with ten times more precision than the ultrasonic ranger, capacitive touch sensor and the latest temperature and humidity sensor.
It was also a chance to introduce the new Grove AI Hat for Raspberry PI, that combines the Grove system with powerful data processing capabilities for AI applications.
We’re on Kickstarter too! Good friends, clients and Kickstarter sensation, Piper, were kind enough to give us a Piper kit to display (and distract the kids). The Piper build your own computer kit was a definite magnet for the younger fans and kept them busy on Minecraft for hours!
Smart Agriculture
Many of you were very interested in the Smart Agriculture tech from our Industrial Applications Group. Think Grove, but on a much wider and industrial scale. SenseCap is the new solution for long-term data collection in the field. With low-power LoRaWAN communication, the rugged SenseCap modules can sense and transmit environmental indicators such as soil or air temperature and humidity, air pressure, CO2 concentration, luminance and even wind direction and speed over the course of three years without a battery change. Check out the pilot site on a mountain-top tea farm.
Last but not least, the trip was a chance to strengthen partnerships old and new ones with upcoming projects in the works, including with NVIDIA, Google, OKdo, DigiKey, Twilio, Tindie, Hackster.io, Piper, 96boards, DTOOR and many more! Stay tuned, it’s an exciting time ahead!
Next up, Maker Faire Prague! And don’t forget you can visit us on our local turf during Maker Faire Shenzhen! (We’re hosting!)
Are you a maker? If yes, answer the call to arms for Maker Faire Shenzhen 2019 in November. See you there!
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