It’s been five years since we made our first appearance at Maker Faire New York. Back in 2011, we were still showing demonstrations of the Raspberry Pi, prior to its release the following spring. This year, we had prominent billing alongside the robots and rockets!

Maker Faire New York ran from 1-2 October, and was as great an experience as ever. We brought a bunch of Raspberry Pis showcasing our brand-new Pixel desktop environment. Greg Annandale’s gorgeous photo of the Brooklyn Bridge was a stunning backdrop to the Sense HAT activities we had organised.

Lorna Lynch on Twitter Doing some pixel art with @Raspberry_Pi at #MFNY16 #MakerFaire #MakerFaireNYC

Joining the stalwart US Pi team of Matt and Courtney were Carrie Anne, Sam, and Lorna, as well as Raspberry Pi Certified Educator Kerry Bruce, who came all the way from Albuquerque, New Mexico. A community college instructor with a passion for STEM education, Kerry was a real trouper and a valuable addition to the team.

When we arrived at Corona Park to get set up, we were concerned about the inclement weather. Given that the Faire is outside, the prospect of running our Pi activities in an open-sided marquee was somewhat daunting.

We braved the elements to take a photo in front of the famous Unisphere, to explore the park a bit, and to geek out over the history of the place. I can’t have been the only one who was excited to see the towers on the New York State Pavilion in real life, after multiple viewings of Men in Black.

Carrie Anne Philbin on Twitter Team @Raspberry_Pi for #MakerFaire NY 2016! Come visit us and tell us about your makes!

Fortunately, the weather improved for the Faire; we didn’t have to remove electrical equipment from puddles! Resident design genius Sam decorated our tables with Pi-themed cartoons, including one answering this common question: how do you connect a Raspberry Pi to a computer?

Raspberry Pi on Twitter Here’s what happens when @samalderhyde shows up at your event! #MakerFaire #wmfny16 @makerfaire

We loved pointing to Sam’s cheery Pi character when explaining that the tiny board was the computer. It was great to see people’s surprise at the Pi’s power.

Matt and Carrie Anne both gave speeches: Carrie Anne’s presentation, “Digital Making: Encouraging Creativity in the Classroom and Integrating STEAM Project-Based Learning”, was part of the Make: Education series, while Matt explained how to get started with the Raspberry Pi on the Show and Tell stage.

Raspberry Pi on Twitter Go see @MattRichardson at @makerfaire’s Show & Tell Stage at 11:30 (in 10 min). He’s giving a intro to Raspberry Pi.

We heard great reports from the attendees, and we saw a lot of visitors to the stand who had been enthused by what they heard.

As in previous years, there were many excellent Raspberry Pi-based projects, as well as familiar faces from the Pi community. There was an excellent display of Pi-controlled Lego Mindstorms robots. We also met the guys from Pi Supply showcasing their new JustBoom equipment, bringing affordable high-quality audio to Raspberry Pi users. Eager experimenters of all ages came to try out our Sense HAT activities, and to tell us about the Pi projects they had made at home. One man was even wearing a Pi Zero as a necklace! Other visitors included Steven Welch, who updated us on the work his team are doing with Pis at CERN (we’ve blogged about this), and Henry Feldman of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who is using the Raspberry Pi and Camera Module for edge detection in laparoscopic surgery.

We also found a number of excellent projects with more artistic applications. Joe Herman had uncovered a cache of old 8mm and 16mm family movies, and was digitising them and projecting them via a modified vintage movie projector equipped with a Raspberry Pi and Camera Module. You can find out more on Joe’s GitHub.

Joe’s project wasn’t the only great Pi art project. Following on from Sam Blanchard’s amazing SeeMore, one of the main showpieces of last year’s Faire, we were incredibly excited to see another Pi-powered art piece in pride of place this year. The first thing to greet attendees visiting the Faire in the New York Hall of Science was the Pi-powered Sisyphus kinetic art table. We think it’s so amazing, we’ll be devoting a whole post to it, so keep an eye out!

For several of us, it was our first visit to the Faire and to New York, which really added to our excitement. One of the greatest things was meeting so many happy Pi fans, and introducing newcomers to the fun you can have with one. We lost count of the excellent animations we saw kids (and adults) create on the Sense HAT, and the joyful exclamations as another person got their first piece of Python code working; this is one of the most rewarding parts of our work. We can’t wait for the next Maker Faire! If you couldn’t attend, be sure to check out our tour video here: