Maker Faire festivals are a beautiful showcase of what modern technology makes possible. The whole maker world feels like a big playground for both kids and adults. It’s incredible to think about what anyone can create at home today, on a small budget, using programmable controllers and online resources. And there’s no need to be especially handy anymore—you can leave most of the work to 3D printers or home CNC machines.
ESA Education Office, ESERO Czech Republic had a big stand at the Maker Faire. They were exhibiting projects of the Czech Rocket Society, DoSpace, LASAR team or VUT YSpace and their projects including cubesats.
Also on display was the LASAR system, which started as a high school project and has recently been making the rounds in our media and is intended to restart non-communicating satellites by rebooting through their solar panels.
Even with an ordinary digital SLR camera and ordinary lenses, you can capture fantastic photos of the starry sky. All it takes is a long exposure. But the Earth doesn’t stand still for that long, and longer exposures will stretch the objects being photographed.
The way around this is to mount the camera on a motorized mount that follows the movement of the starry sky. But professional equipment isn’t exactly cheap. The basic principle is quite simple and today you can build something similar for amateur photography using a 3D printer at home for a hundred bucks, using an ESP32 microcontroller and stepper motors with belts.
OG Star Tracker is an open-source project of manual equatorial mounting for astrophotography, designed by programmer Ondřej Gejdoš. At ogstartech.com you can find sample photos and the needed models, software, building instructions and an e-shop with ready-made components and kits for the first version of OG Star Tracker in case you want to make building easier. Then all you need is a ball head from a tripod and a camera and you’re ready to go.
It can support up to 2.5kg, works with lenses with up to 300mm focal length and allows you to shoot with exposures of up to 40 seconds. At Maker Faire, Ondřej showed off a prototype of the second version.
You can already find some tests and user experiences on YouTube.
The Brno University of Technology arrived at the Maker Faire with a lot of stuff. For example, with remote control cars powered by compressed air, which were created to promote the high school competition Pneuracer.
The student team TU Brno Racing exhibited their electric formula cars under the banner of Brno University of Technology. The latest Dragon e4 has already raced at the Most Autodrom, the Austrian Red Bull Ring and the German Hockenheim Ring.
Honza Toman and his colleagues presented their humanoid robot InMoov under the banner of the Brno FEKT. The French designer and sculptor Gaël Langevin is behind this project. It is the first life-size robot for 3D printing that was created as open source.
It has a modular design, so you can build it gradually. The construction parts are designed to be printed on a standard 3D printer with a 12×12×12 cm print area. Printable models and tutorials are available for free on Thingiverse and the project website. A large community of users working on improvements and custom modifications has also emerged around it. This makes it one of the most accessible humanoid platforms with the possibility of advanced modifications and extensions.
Matyáš Hejník showed his prototype of a whirlpool, which is supposed to help oxygenate ponds and water reservoirs and thus reduce their pollution.
The builders of small solar power plants from VŠB-TU Ostrava were also represented.
