READER INPUT
A Master Maker in the Making
» I am writing to tell you about my daughter. She LOVES Make: magazine. Her name is Allie and she is currently 9 years old. She hopes to become an engineer / inventor and work for NASA. She has had that aspiration since kindergarten.
She has never been a fan of dolls like other girls. She has been a Buzz Lightyear fan since she was 18 months old, when we had to break down and get her a Buzz doll because she constantly carried around an imaginary one.
It would be her DREAM to participate in a Maker Faire, or in some way be a part of Make: magazine. We were first introduced to Make: while visiting the Omaha Children’s Museum. Allie caught the eye of some of the maker’s working there and they gave her a copy of the magazine, and they said they wished she lived closer so they could work with her more. We can only visit once or twice a year since we do not live close by.
Thanks for encouraging and inspiring my daughter to keep making and inventing! —Kara Weber, South Dakota
To get Allie more involved, our Maker Faire Program Director, Sabrina Merlo, connected Kara and Allie with the organizers of both the Omaha and Des Moines Mini Maker Faires. Looking for a Maker Faire near you? Find them all at makerfaire.com
Allie with her Green Dollhouse, which earned her an "invention" award at her 3rd-grade science fair. Designed out of recyclable materials, it included green space, a rain barrel water collection system, and a space-saving collapsible wall bathroom. Allie also incorporated a working wind turbine and solar panel to run the light system, and added in some of her snap circuits to make a rechargeable battery storage.
» REALLY ENJOYED THE WEARABLES ISSUE OF MAKE:
Just had to send you a note about the latest issue (Volume 43). Man, it had so many good projects! I bookmarked just the ones I wanted to do and there were like 10 stickies flapping around. [My wife] Jeanie liked the pieces on wearables designers as well. And the open-source RC airplane (“Maker Trainer R/C Airplanes”) from foam? That’s unbelievable! Well, I’m sure the controller is still something beyond my meager skillz, but the plane seems doable.
But then the (“Open-Source Smart-watch”) project was pretty deceptively simple looking with the exploded diagram of only a few parts, but I went to the website and read the plans and browsed the github; boy, good luck to whoever tries cramming all that stuff together!
Anyway, I enjoyed the issue cover to cover.
— Brian Bruce, New York, NY
» OPEN SOURCE FOR BETTER 3D PRINTS
The manufacturers of closed-source printers (MakerBot, Zortrax, etc.) should reconsider the benefits of open source for both the customer and the manufacturer. I will only buy open-source printers because they give me the flexibility to fix my own problems instead of being dependent on the manufacturer.
There are plenty of good open-source printers. Six out of 10 of the top performing printers in Make: magazine’s annual guide (what Make: called “The Standouts”) use open-source software. Four out of 10 have open-source hardware. If MakerBot Replicator 5th Generation and Zortrax M200 were open source, maybe a customer could figure out how to improve their test results.
— Ralph Kauffman, New York, NY
