Really great 1930s era stadium built from stone filled with exhibitors’ tents surrounded by high-rises from every decade. Old tenements and new glass skyscrapers.
A booth where people assembled a kitted ukulele.
Mothers looking proud as their young sons soldered electronic kits.
Women my age exhibiting their hand dyed indigo fabrics and basket weaving skills, holding workshops to teach traditional crafts. People being just as enthusiastic to try basket weaving as LED blinking.
Superb LEGO sculptures.
A girl who was super stoked that I paid 20 yuan (~3USD) for their orange juice. (I was super confused, they were a coffee / juice bar, so all their bottled products said coffee/juice, and I was trying to ask if this coffee has juice in it, or does this juice have coffee in it)
Neat products. Super simple robot kits. A sweet dirt cheap LIDAR module for autonomous vehicles. Nixie tube clocks: a whole niche market fueled by soviet vacuum tubes.
Little kids operating tiny machining tools. A lathe just a foot long, a table saw that was 4 inches square. I can’t find the company that was representing there, but I found the product on alibaba. Parents were letting their kids cut and lathe and grind stuff with no safety gear and I was actually super concerned but nobody else was. Sam told a parent, ‘OK hope no one cuts their finger off’ and the dad just laughed. I’m like, ya’ll gotta tie your hair back what are you doing.
Lots of DIY laser cutters. Even little 2W lasers can blind you instantly why didn’t you build an enclosure you really should be wearing eye protection it’s not hard.
A long line of people waiting to step inside a giant safety net to pilot a quadcopter for a few minutes. A couple of quadcopters flying around outside this cage, videoing the event.
A young boy pointing up excitedly a the surveilling quadcopter in amazement. It occurs to me that if quadcopters eventually become omnipresent annoyances he might look back on the first time he saw one here.
Entrepreneurs getting to introduce hundreds of people to what their product can do. CNC machines, autonomous robots, and cute windmills all made from makerblock, pretty cool.
Entrepreneurs unable to attract a crowd to their demonstration of their variation on circuit lessons, puzzle games, or construction blocks. How they must have felt to have invested so much time to make a product and have everyone walk by to the crowded table neighboring theirs.
There’s a lot of people encouraged to make 10,000 of something to see if it will sell. So many ideas that only increase the demand for resource extraction for plastics, computer chips, and electricity.
But the air feels clean (pollution here, at least, is carried away by the breeze) and kids are building toy wind farms out of LEGOs.