After a short snafu with a missing labcoat, we managed to find a brand new one at LabPro in Sunnyvale, and with it we arrived in scientific style at Maker Faire Education Day.

When we arrived, we were amazed at how much everyone had worked to get there, and wanted to enlighten both kids and educators. With Intel making a huge presence volunteering to lead the huge troves of student groups, eagerly awaiting a glimpse at the wonders awaiting inside the gates.

We found our way to the exit accidentally, and Sylvia hopped on board to sign about 100 of the special "School's Out" MAKE Magazines being handed out to students as they leave! Sylvia had a blast playing celebrity for the moment, then it has back to the cool stuff.

What few makers were setup, still had lots to show off. From a kickstarter we'd only seen last week was Makey Makey, an instant touch interface for makers to turn anything conductive into a keyboard key. With beach balls and bananas kids were amazed at how easy it was to turn every day objects into interfaces with just alligator clips and a simple little board.

After the students had all left, it was time for the teacher education portion of the day, and with us squarely in both categories, we stayed for the fun. MAKE: Education was announced, with conversations by AnnMarie Thomas, Gary Stager, Steve Davee and many more big personalities in real world hands on education.

After a fun romp talking to educators, signing magazines and eating pizza, we headed out to Evil mad Science headquarters, for an impromptu tour and opportunity to try out their brand new industrial embroidery machine.

And all this before the actual event! Friday is shaping up to be a lot of fun on its own, and maybe with a bit of luck and elbowgrease, we can find a time and place to remake our DML demo for a new audience at Maker Faire 2012.

The first and best Maker Faire is coming around again this year, and for our 5th year, we'll be there!

Unfortunately, because of a badly timed whole house move of our family of 6, the projects and demos we had planned on bringing have been completely disrupted and left in a state of half-packed and half-done.

Not to worry though! We'll be there for the entire event and hopefully be out and about for Maker Faire fishbowl interviews and possibly a makeshift demo, and we'll be rooting for our very own Pedalcar! Family friend "TheD" brought his welding skills and we created our very first real steel construction. It's far from perfect, but with a little work and not very much money, we were able to make something rideable.

We'll be posting more updates soon, so stay tuned! But real quick, here's a few things we can't wait to see at Maker Faire:

• John Edgar Park's Arduino GRANDE
• All the awesome pedalcars for the Death Defying Figure 8 Races
• Joe Grand's favorite Prototype this projects
• Getting to meet Bunnie formerly of Chumby
• Other great young makers like Caine Monroy and Joey Hudy showing kids that making something is always awesome

This year, the Kauffman Foundation has graciously offered to sponsor Sylvia and I to be a big part of their Kansas City Maker Faire. We incredibly honored to be brought halfway across the country just to see and be seen by our fellow makers.

We plan on doing multiple group sessions on things we've done before (Molding/casting, ALTAlarm), and a few new-to-us classics (Mr. backpack, No heat lava lamp). We also hope to bring kids and adults together to make some simple things they can take home and be proud of (Crazy Putty, Chicken in a cup). It's going to be great! See you there if you're coming, and if you can't make it, we'll be posting some photos to Flickr and a video to come.

May 21st brought us to the 10th annual Maker Faire (The 6th in San Mateo), with Sylvia and I running two demos at the Make: Live stage.

Our very first time presenting together, the demos were a little harrowing, but still lots of fun. For the first demo we showed everyone how to mold and cast a miniature pointer finger we’d made out of sculpey. When the demo was done, we gave out a bunch of finished Composicast urethane resin mini pointers to everyone! The audience had a great time and so did we.

For our second demo, we attempted to show off and of our version of an Arduino Laser Tripwire Alarm, though because of laser and microphone difficulties, it ended quickly and without much fanfare. At least we had some fun with it, and the code is out there for all to use and enjoy.

Sylvia gets out of school soon for summer break, and she'll be posting up her own log of the incredible makers she met and things she did this year. Not to be missed!

As for the future; we’ve signed up with Make Magazine to do a volley of Mini Maker shows, about once a month (or more often if we can make it) for the summer and beyond, as long as we can keep the show ideas flowing, and near as we can tell, there’s plenty to be made. We're also going to start a brand new post section called "Show and Tell", that chronicles the adventures of people like you, kids, adults, teachers, moms, ninjas and the rest. People who actually got out there and made something because of the show, and want to tell the world.

If you or someone you know made something and feel proud about it, drop us a line on our contact form!

At the end of June we’re heading off to Maker Faire Kansas City, our very first out of state Maker Faire! We’re going to try and do something great for the community there, and hope to see all our favorite makers, and hundreds of new ones. Arc Attack will be there, and maybe Sylvia and I can work up the courage to get in the Faraday cage like Adam ;)

Obviously we'll have to work on our "Robot" skills that don't involve servos and micro-controllers.

At Bay Area Maker Faire (BAMF) 2011 (and now at Maker Faire KC) one of our demos is how to build your very own laser tripwire to help guard your room!

Inspired by action_owl's version at instructables, Sylvia and I made up our very own version with audio feedback for calibration, and authentic alarm sounds!

Get the code at Github to copy and paste into your Arduino IDE right here!

More instructions, build details and the like to be updated after our Demo today.

Update: Alrighty, so our demo didn't go quite as planned, with our cheap laser diode falling to pieces during the presentation, but we did our best with what we had. We're quite sure that with more time we'd have had everything working great! Not that it matters to much, as there's always time for you to get out there and try it yourself!

As the code explains hints at, for this build you only need a few things:

• An Arduino (any version will do)
• A small cheap red laser diode (a small laser pointer will do)
• A small piece of mirror, or something else flat and reflective
• An infrared LED from a remote control (or something else to sense the light from the laser)
• and last but not least, a speaker (if you want a noisy alarm)

For the code as it stands, plug your laser's positive lead into pin 13, one lead of the speaker into pin 10, and the positive lead of the LED into analog pin 0. All the other leads go to ground. When powering up, the laser gets ~3volts from pin 13, which should be enough to light it and send it's photons off toward the mirror, where they will bounce off. If aimed correctly they should find their way back to the infrared LED.

When infrared light hits the LED, it sends very tiny (but measurable) voltage back through to analog pin 0. On our LED, this was read at around 115, or about 0.5v. Without the laser, this came down below 100 reliably, so we set the alarm threshold at 95. If the LED's value stays above that number for more than 5 seconds, the alarm is considered "Armed" (it gives a nice beep every second to let you know, then a double beep when it's armed). If the beam is broken (and the LED value drops below the threshold), Woop woop! Alarm!

A serial signal is sent at the same time, and if you have a program on a computer listening for this, you can trigger any action you want! Maybe a twitter message for every intrusion, or perhaps an email or text message silently alerting you!

We may just want to go ahead and do a quick video on this cool little project in a bit, with all the bugs worked out this time :)

Leave a comment if you've got questions! Thanks!

Update: For our Maker Faire KC demo, we took out the middle man mirror and replaced the Arduino powered laser diode (which gave us problems galore!) with a simple laser pointer pointed directly at the LED. This is an invisible modification and doesn't require any code change, so you can make yours either way.

Me and my Dad finally finished episode 2 of my Super-Awesome Maker show, and here it is. Have fun! Tell your friends! Submit an idea!. And most of all, let us know what you think of the show in comments, here or on youtube. Thanks again for watching!