It's the middle of the day, Memorial Day 2014, and
it's hot in the little room we use for an office. I'm staring at the
screen, trying to understand where it all went wrong. I'm a fit
frustrated. There's a little sweat.
"It says to upload the sketch, dad," says my 12-year-old daughter. "Is there an upload button?"
We're trying to figure out how to use the arduino
IDE. But I've never even seen an arduino out of its box before this
weekend and while I can find my way around a few different programming
languages, I'm unprepared for this part of the
exercise.
Actually, let me rephrase that: I'm not prepared for any of the parts of the build.
It all started at Maker Faire 2014 in San Mateo.
For some reason, I've loved Maker Faire and the make movement for a
while, but I don't do any "making" -- at least, not the electronic, or
creative, or robotic kinds of making. But the stuff
fascinates me and also my daughters. We went to the 2012 Maker Faire
and the girls learned to pick locks and solder. They had a blast looking
at all of the kinetic art, and they enjoyed the Mentos and soda
fountain (I think it was Diet Coke that year).
I hated the crowds, which got so bad around 1pm that I began to try to steer the family to the exits.
In 2013 we returned, despite the huge crowds, and
we saw more fire, life-sized mouse trap, and lots of electronic
projects. My younger daughter mostly loves the art side of the Maker
Faire, but she did linger at the tables where makers
showed off their stuff. Meanwhile, everyone at the Maker Faire took
their opportunity to bump into me, jostle me, or step on my feet. I was
unhappy and vowed to not return in 2014.
Then we returned in 2014.
My daughters found out that Maker Faire was coming
and begged me to get tickets. I did, we had fun, and even the crowds
seemed nicer this year. I was bruise-free at the end of the 5+ hours we
spent there.
The girls did the "Learn to Solder" thing again and
then we started looking at fun projects to try. There was no real
discussion or deliberate decision made, we just kept saying "Maybe we
could do that one?" as we walked through.
Eventually my younger daughter and I decided we
would look through the Make magazines at home to look for a simple first
time project.
She saw the Radio Shack ad inside the front cover
of Make 38 for the Critter Cam and we decided it looked
possible. We live in the suburbs, but there's a creek nearby and we get
raccoons, possums, owls, squirrels, and tons
of neighborhood cats roaming through the yard. It might be interesting
to see if we could capture any of them in pictures.
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