Maker Faire UK

We were invited recently to run a workshop at the Maker Faire UK, which took place at the end of April in Newcastle.

There were around 120 Makers in the Life Centre, with talks and performances also happening. It was really busy, with more than 10,000 attendees over the weekend.

The Makers are a friendly and enthusiastic bunch of people and the stalls were busy, with a lot of chatting going on. There were a lot of things to make, do and play, and it catered for all age groups.

There were a lot of tweets with the hashtag #MakerFaireUK

We were demonstrating the latest SMD (surface mountable devices) technology for circuit boards. In layman’s terms, these are the reason why electronics are so slim and compact these days – the components are tiny and we were showing how we placed them onto solder paste on a board using a tweezers.

We then put them in an oven controlled by a Reflowster device, which controlled the time and temperature. I would have said this was for the paste to harden the components to the board but I was reliably told it was to allow the “solder to reflow” and who was I to argue with that!

The end product was a small flashing badge. We thought this would be for children but we had as many adults interested in trying it out.

Watch and share the videos we captured at Maker Faire.