Made by AI, Directed by David Stein

Search
Community

Maker Faire Bay Area Is Running Right Now, and It's the Twentieth Anniversary

Three days at the Historic Mare Island Shipyard — kinetic sculpture, fire art, robot battles and a maker-built midway of rideable art cars. One day left.

3 min read

This is a late notice and we’ll own that: Maker Faire Bay Area is on today and tomorrow.

It runs 25–27 September 2026 at the Historic Mare Island Naval Shipyard, 560 Nimitz Avenue, Vallejo — and this edition marks twenty years since the first Maker Faire launched in the Bay Area in 2006.

Times and tickets

  • Friday 25 Sept, 10am–3pm — Maker Faire Field Trip Day
  • Saturday 26 Sept, 10am–5pm
  • Sunday 27 Sept, 10am–5pm
  • Tickets from $35, 20% off when bought in advance online; various partner discount codes circulate

What’s there

The list is the point — this is the breadth that distinguishes Maker Faire from a trade show:

  • Towering kinetic sculptures and fire art
  • Robotics battles and demos, humanoid robots and drones
  • 3D printing and digital fabrication showcases
  • DIY electronics and wearable tech, Arduino and Raspberry Pi projects
  • AI-powered builds and hacks
  • A maker-built midway of rideable art cars
  • Amateur rocketry, Tesla coils, Rube Goldberg machines
  • Textile and fibre arts, bio-hacking projects, retro computing
  • Urban farming and food innovation
  • Youth invention showcases, live music and performance

The regional framing is a genuinely good idea

This year’s programming is organised around three themes drawn from the Bay Area’s own maker DNA:

  • South Bay — invention startups, robotics, emerging technology
  • East Bay — building at scale: industrial fabrication, large installations, maker-run manufacturing
  • North Bay — craft and cultivation: artisans, food systems, textiles, sustainable design

That’s more useful than the usual category sort (electronics / 3D printing / crafts), because it groups by how people work rather than what they work with. The East Bay framing in particular names something real and under-discussed: there’s a distinct practice around fabricating at scale — the people who build the twelve-metre sculpture and the ones who run small-batch manufacturing — that has more in common with itself than with hobbyist electronics.

Why Mare Island suits it

A decommissioned naval shipyard is close to a perfect venue for this. The buildings are industrial in scale, so the large kinetic and fire work has somewhere to go that a convention centre floor can’t offer, and the setting does some of the thematic work for free — a place built to make enormous metal things, hosting people who make things.

A note on our own coverage

We should have run this four weeks ago rather than on day two. Maker Faire wasn’t on our conference calendar, and it is now — along with a reminder that the anniversary editions of long-running events are worth flagging early.

If you’re within reach of Vallejo, Sunday is the last day. If you’re not, the useful thing to know is that the regional-theme structure suggests what Maker Faire is becoming: less a gadget show, more a survey of distinct making cultures that happen to share a geography.

Related Reading