To date, we’ve been featuring the Makers who will be at Gulf Coast MakerCon. We thought you might enjoy meeting some of the folks who are making Gulf Coast MakerCon possible, starting with event producers, Eureka! Factory.

The Eureka! Factory developed as an outgrowth of Steve and Terri Willingham’s work as founders of a educational nonprofit organization back in 2003. The Eureka! Factory’s mission is to help move people from passive consumption to active and empowered creation, to inspire community driven innovation.

They hosted the area’s first Maker festival, Tampa Bay Mini Maker Faire, in 2012, and launched Gulf Coast MakerCon as an independent Maker festival in 2014. The Eureka! Factory is a consultant for libraries and other community organizations on the design and creation of public makerspaces, and are the designers of the Hive Community Innovation Center at the John F. Germany Library in downtown Tampa.

A highly collaborative organization, Eureka! Factory this year has teamed up with Mity Mo Creative, the Innovation Lab at St. Petersburg College, Gamers on the Edge, F5Live:Refreshing Technology, Scrap On Spot, The Tampa Bay Inventors Council and Real Life, Inc. You’ll hear about each of them this week, and hope you’ll take some time to see these great collaborative partners in action at Gulf Coast MakerCon on April 18th!

No slouches when it comes to Making, the Eureka! Factory often teams up with other makers on a variety of builds and projects. You can find the Eureka! Factory on Instructables, and check out some of their build projects on YouTube, where you can see entries for Red Bull Creation and the Deconstruction, among others.

At Gulf Coast MakerCon, the Eureka!Factory is debuting their latest project, the Scan-o-Tron 3D body scanner they built for Boca Bearing Company (aka, the Bocatron). Based on the Thingiverse Scan-o-Tron design, the Eureka! Factory was tasked with building a version that would showcase bearing use in the turntable and elsewhere, and would be easy enough to take to conventions and exhibit.

The Bocatron utilizes a Kinect device to make a 3D image of an object, in this case, a person, which can then be 3D printed. The basic design calls for a turntable platform on which an individual can stand while being scanned by a Kinect operated from a trolley device.

And recently, FreeFab 3D made some 3D prints from the files. Eureka! Factory is putting some finishing touches on the Bocatron this weekend, and you can give it a spin at Gulf Coast MakerCon, before Boca Bearing Company takes it back down to South Florida after the event. Bring a thumb drive to save your scan, and you too can be immortalized as a tiny plastic figurine!

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You can see and try the Eureka! Factory’s Bocatron and some of their other projects, and meet all our great Makers at Gulf Coast MakerCon 2015 on April 18th. Discount tickets ($2 off gate admission) are available online through April 17th.