Dublin Mini Maker Faire

When I saw how plausible a trip to Ireland by air was from Bristol I knew that I’d take advantage sooner or later. When the opportunity arose to visit Ireland’s first Maker Faire how could I say no and a trip to Dublin Mini Maker Faire ensued. Trying to keep costs low I opted to travel on Saturday morning 14^th July leaving the boat at about 5:30am for a 6am bus.

me looking angry drinking Club Mate and pointing

 Finding the Mini Maker Faire was fairly easy. It was held outside in the grounds of Trinity College on what they call the Physics Lawn… seems appropriate to me. They also used the Science Gallery as a venue too and this inside/outside approach worked well though we were lucky it didn’t rain.

There were about 30 makers tables in total and a few familiar faces including Martin with his Underwater Autonomous Vehicles, Build Brighton where Mike P brought pedal powered Scalextric grandly constructed of KNEX and Matt Edwards had brought along the latest variant of Robo-xylo (he tells me there will be 2 Robo-xylo at the Manchester Mini Maker Faire). There were also a table for old friends Sugru (James, Jane and Suki) and Beta Layouts (Siobhán). The Irish Hackspaces had a large banner with the names of all the spaces on, great idea! There was also a table for TOG and for 091Labs from Galway.

Irish Hackerspaces promote each other... great idea! 

TOG co-founder Rob “Partfusion” Fitzsimmon and myself were setup on the “Learn to Solder” tables. Rob had made up a classic flashy badge with “I can solder” on the front. We taught about 200 folk to solder the youngest must have been about 5 and the oldest about 80 so Rob and I reckoned later on.

The makers were well looked after with a minion bringing us lunch (a very nice ham and cheese sandwich and a home made flapjack). This was a nice touch. The volunteer minions also happily looked after my bag all day and insisted I have a free Tshirt before I left. One big difference to other Mini Maker Faires I’ve been too was that they had arranged for talks to be given throughout the day in the theatre of the Science Gallery.

Jane from SUGRU did an excellent talk on the Maker movement. The talk was very well attended and well received. Jane spoke of a need to encourage making and fixing things and introduced the new branding of SUGRU with the tagline “the future needs fixing” and explained that mending stuff rather than buying new things wasn’t going to save the planet and we need to start applying the maker culture to every walk of life. Also Irish TV star Mary “Make & Do” Fitzgerald who some of the TOG guys got very nostalgic about but sadly I missed her talk.

TOG co-founder Jeffery Roe told me that they estimated they had had 6000 visitors through the Physics Lawn based on a couple of counts and a bit of fancy mathematics. The event was free so they didn’t have an entry point to keep an exact count. The event was part of a number for Hack the City a Dublinwide event lasting most of July.

I stayed in the Old Jameson distillery in Legal Quarter (or Smithfield) a very modern and well done hostel called Generator. It was very cheap about £12 per night. Obviously I was in a shared dorm but it was clean and the bed was simple and comfortable with plenty of power sockets for charging electronics and a good sized locker for my gear. The shower and toilet were clean and en suit too. I heard from a friend that the girls dorm (for 10) had a hot tub in it.. they wouldn’t let me stay in there though. Breakfast was €4 and consisted of coffee, toast, cereal and meat and fruit. Seeing as it was eat-what-you-like it was very good value indeed. Staff were helpful and courteous and helped me break the padlock off of my locker with a massive set of bolt croppers at 8am in the morning after I left my key at TOG. It barely woke my house mates either.

I’ll write about my visit to TOG in another blog post soon! I can’t wait to return toIreland and plan on going back before too long to visit the other Hackerspace inCork and Galway.