Microsoft Canada at Vancouver Mini Maker Faire

Last weekend I got a chance to participate in Vancouver Mini Maker Faire event. I still don’t understand why it’s called “Mini” because the exhibition filled all the space at PNE Forum including outdoor exposition. And, of course, we had our own booth there as well. So, what was Microsoft doing there?

Half of our exposition demonstrated ability of Visual Studio to support IoT projects for different boards like Arduino, Netduino, Raspberry Pi 2 etc. I have developed two rovers based on EZ-B controller and based on Arduino. In case of EZ-Robot I used UniversalBot project for developing Windows 10 applications. For Arduino I used the instructions which you can find on windowsondevices.com but you can use Visual Studio to develop and deploy Arduino applications directly using Visual Micro plug-in. Additionally I have developed the drone based on Netduino board, so I used .NET Micro Framework and C# to develop all stabilization algorithms there.

The second part of our exposition was around Kinect and 3D printing. Thanks to 3D printing support in Windows you can develop your own applications very quickly without thinking about how to cut the model in slices or generate G-code. Additionally, you can use existing 3D printing software like 3D Builder to create own models and print it.

Additionally, 3D Builder supports Kinect devices to 3D scan of existing objects.

Of course, we used Kinect not just for 3D scanning but for entertainment as well. All attendees have a chance to dance in our Xbox One area where we used Kinect as well and installed Just Dance Kinect ready game.

I hope that everybody had some fun visiting out booth as well as all other expositions there.