This weekend, the University of the District of Columbia hosted the inaugural National Maker Faire. The event was a free, family friendly version of the monster expositions that filled UDC's Van Ness campus. The event was organized by the government of the District of Columbia, UDC, and Nation of Makers (the group that previously put on the DC Mini Maker Faire) in collaboration with Make Media.

Ars spent Saturday at the event, which included instructional sessions as well as a blend of corporate sponsors, individual makers, undergraduate and graduate student projects, and things targeted at or built by children. It also provided a snapshot of just how far "maker" culture has begun to infiltrate the mainstream.

The event had a fairly heavy federal government presence, as government agencies are attempting to both reach out to individual makers and leverage some of their expertise. NASA, for example, was on hand to promote the agency's Solve initiative—a crowdsourcing project aimed at helping the agency find answers to some of its most difficult mission challenges. One example on display was a sample of an airtight "zipper" closure that might be used to assemble parts of habitats on Mars; by its nature, it's supposed to be extremely difficult to unzip (though I did it relatively easily by using a little leverage).

The Department of Veterans Affairs sponsored a number of exhibits and resources, including one on the development of low-cost, 3-D-printed prosthetics. And the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Labs Advanced Manufacturing team was there to show off what looked like a vintage Shelby Cobra sports car—one that was fully electric and had been entirely built using additive manufacturing technology.

A small drone pavilion was set up inside UDC's gym (there's a bit of sensitivity about flying drones outside in DC for fairly obvious reasons). One of the projects on display was Nova Labs Makerspace's RhinoHawk, an effort to create a low-cost, easy-to-use drone for protection of rhinos in South Africa. RhinoHawk is one of the projects competing in the Wildlife Conservation UAV Challenge, an international crowdsourcing effort to develop wildlife protection drones sponsored by the Kashmir World Foundation.

Some of the maker projects on hand were launching in a different way—the developers were there to promote their Kickstarter crowdfunding efforts. One, called GrowBox, is an Internet-enabled hydroponic system designed to automatically "achieve high yields so you can depend on your own consistent supply of quality produce" (or perhaps some other product—the personal growing and use of marijuana is legal in DC now). The project grew (so to speak) out of a student project at Boston University, which won the Intel-Cornell Cup. Another, Cardboard Teck, was there with the Pinbox 3000, a cardboard pinball "artcade" machine-made with recycled, laser-cut cardboard.