Atmel is everywhere at the 2013 Maker Faire, episode 1

As I walked around the 2013 Maker Faire in San Mateo, it seemed that everything that interested me had Atmel chips inside of it. Even before I got inside a pavilion Saturday, there was a full-sized flight simulator as I walked in the gate.

The Viper Flight simulator is a kickstarter project that actually got built. Created by a team of high-school students, the Viper was at Maker Faire with its mentor’s family, the DeRoses.

Dad Tony DeRose told me “we use Atmel all over” the project.

Something tells me the real brains of the outfit is mom Cindy DeRose, here standing next to some of the simulator’s controls.

And every engineer can commiserate with having to crawl under the control panel to work on the electronics. We can see dad Tony handing a circuit board to ——

……his son Sam, who he described as the EE and ME of the project. Tony is no slouch himself, working over at Pixar as senior scientist and lead of research.

Frankly, it’s great to see something that actually gets finished on Kickstarter. We need another website called Kickfinisher, where Cindy comes over to your lab and tells you to stop playing video games and screwing off so you can get some work done. If you are a good boy she might bring some cookies and orange juice. In addition to a passionate core of mentors, it helps to have some sponsors, and Viper got support from Autodesk, Nvidia, and automotive repair shop Hawker Inc.