With all the excitement about the Mr Cougar event last night, I did not get a chance to talk abotu the other event that I went to earlier in the evening. It was the 4th event held by the Vermont Makers. Last night’s event was an Arduino workshop by SprarkFun‘s Jeff Branson. I wasn’t able to stay for the workshop, but I was able to come by and meet up with everyone before the event. Jeff had driven all the way from Sparkfun’s home base in Bolder Colorado to give this and many similar classes around the north east. Jeff’s entire job is to spread geekiness in the name of getting people to have more  fun with electronics and invention. Sparkfun is one of those companies that does well by doing good. they run free soldering workshops at makerfairs, sponsor robotic competitions, and give away 100’s of thousands of dollars of stuff to folks (like me) all over the world in the  getting folks to let their geek shine.

Last nights workshop, i heard, was a big success.. we had no trouble filling all 15 slots..available..

What’s amazing there is the growing interest in all things Maker in the Burlington area. When a couple of us at UVM began organizig our own Vermont Fablab last fall, we thought we were the only ones in the state thinking this way.. coem to find out that there are at least 8 groups that we’ve now brought in under the umbrella of something we call ‘Vermont Makers’ Vermont Makers is being lead by Jenn Karson of Sesemedia and a couple of her buddies. They are the ones that have organized these last 4 events including last nights workshop, two general meetups and a lecture by Casey Reas, the father of Processing. . The size of the group keeps growing as do the number of organizations who are aligning with us. There are rapid prototyping groups like ours, metal workers like Burlington Makers, cyber hackers at Lab-B, Arduino hackers at Champlain College and a number of other groups all devoted to Making things… Thees even a group planning a small makerfaire in Fall of 2012 .

Jenn is putting a complete list of the groups we know on the website at http:/vermontmakers.org (Its not there yet)

If you’re a maker, ad your reading this.. and we don’t know aout you.. please send me your contact info and we’ll add you to the mailing lists, etc..

ok.. gotta sleep now..more tomorrow
-nite all, nite sam
-me