Headfirst [Maker Update]
This week on Maker Update: a cosplay helmet with product-grade design, Halloween for profit, a robot for golf, and WLED lighting design for your yard.
The Ceiling’s the Limit [Maker Update]
This week on Maker Update: a dorm room drone show, a tiny volumetric display, a new look at screen printing, and bullying robots.
Surfing with the Bern [Maker Update]
This week on Maker Update, the most expensive rip surf ever made, some huge news from Raspberry Pi, thin floating shelves, clever mechanisms, making cut lists and foaming TPU.
Counter Rhythm [Maker Update]
This week on Maker Update, a test machine gets its groove back, the winner of the 2020 Hackaday Prize, 3d printed HOTAS, Controller teardowns, perfect circles, cutting felt with a table saw.
Making the VK-01 Cocktail Machine
There’s an Instructables page up now, collecting all of the work on my cocktail machine for the 2020 Cocktail Robotics Grand Challenge.
I call it the VK-01 Off-World Bartender. It’s a Blade Runner-inspired machine that’s a mix of sci-fi and retro. Every detail I can think of is collected in the Instructable — every line of code, wiring diagram, and 3D design.
I hope it can inspire you to build your own cocktail machine. It’s been a challenging project, but one of my most rewarding yet. It was also a great motivation for becoming more comfortable with coding, 3D design, and exploring the possibilities of working with other makers and artists. I wouldn’t take back a minute of it.
Jon-A-Tron’s 3D Printed Animatronic Puppet
Occasionally there are projects that hang at the top of my “someday” list and refuse to budge, nagging me until I tackle them. Jonathan (Jon-A-Tron) Odom’s 3D Printed Animatronic Puppet project on Instructables is one of these projects.
When I started Maker Project Lab, the whole idea was that I was going to be rebuilding, evaluating, and elevating awesome projects that makers have shared online. It’s a process that was part of my job as a Projects Editor at Make: magazine, and it seemed like a cool thing I could continue doing. I mean, isn’t that part of what the Maker Movement is all about — sharing what you’ve done and inspiring people to build their own version and take it someplace new?
Needless to say, if you’ve been following this blog, you know that I got wonderfully sidetracked by making my own weekly show and reviewing tools. What little spare time I have left for actually making my own projects is typically sucked in to paid original project content, or personal projects for which a lot of the appeal is selfishly chipping away at something that’s just for me.
Whiteboard Bandit [Maker Update #124]
This week on Maker Update, a Roomba for your whiteboard, a wearable for people who talk too much, a geometric planter, Arduino for Nerf, and mashing up code with Becky Stern.
Alexa Grows a Finger [Maker Update #85]
This week on Maker Update, Alexa presses buttons, Google gets a laser, robot fish, robot dogs, 1-dimensional pong, drill bits, speed squares, an unholy union of DeWalt and Ryobi, and a resistor kit roundup.
L3 Liberates Alexa [Maker Update #84]
This week on Maker Update, an Alexa-powered L3 droid, a pedal-powered art machine, a robot snake, robot bread, an FPV rover, last call for cocktail robots, and creative clamping techniques.