Make:cast

Rose Hedges of UnityPoint Health in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Anna Young of Maker Health join me to talk about how a makerspace on the first floor of a hospital has created opportunities for nurses and other medical staff to prototype solutions to problems they encounter in their jobs. Rose is a nurse and manages the makerspace called Generate Lab. She is also organizing a Maker Faire at the hospital...

Galen Powers is a multi-faceted person: a maker and an inventor who has been successful in business. He credits his success to working with people who are passionate about their craft. In this conversation, Galen talks about growing up in rural California, learning about plastics and engineering graphics in high school and then figuring out how to get a job doing something useful. He talks about h...

Organizer David Caulkins and Combat Robot Legend Ray Billings talk about the return of Robogames, which takes place at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton CA on April 6th through 9th, 2023. Robogames is the world's largest robot competition with over 54 different events -- everything from tiny little Rubik's cube-sized Sumo robots that act autonomously to humanoids that play soc...

Maks Zolin wanted to build a better, faster printer that was also quieter. He set out building the Voron printer in his garage but he ended up deciding that he didn't want to run a 3D printer company. So, he open sourced his work and invited others to collaborate with him. That's how Maks came to launch Voron Design, an innovation community pushing the limits of what 3D printers can do....

Maker and educator, Debra Ansell is my guest on this episode of Make:cast. She is obsessed with orbs -- colorful, LED orbs and she shows us how to build a brightly lit orb in the new issue of Make Magazine. Debra and I talk about the process of developing her orb project. She also talks about her LED pillows based on the Pixel Blaze controller, as well as an LED neck pendant, both of which have be...

A lot of makers struggle to learn CAD. Why is this keystone piece of software such a challenge to learn? This is what I talk about with Jake Sugden and Josh Manley, who are the teachers of CAD Class at cadclass.org . Jake and Josh met at Urban Workshop in Costa Mesa, California, a professional makerspace where they had a lot of opportunity to see people struggling to learn CAD. They have put toget...

Microsoft's Bryce Johnson and John Helmes Join Make: Editor Caleb Kraft to talk about creating adaptive devices that can be customized, hacked and modded easily by makers using 3D printers as well as the people with disabilities who use them. Bryce Johnson works at the Inclusive Tech Lab at Microsoft who is one of the co-inventors of the Xbox Adaptive Controller and the Surface Adaptive Kit....

The world needs more maker microfactories and I wonder if Santa might be interested in learning more about them from Tim Keller, the head of Inventopia in Davis CA, my guest on this episode. A maker microfactory is a kind of makerspace that focuses on the needs of startups and individual entrepreneurs who are creating prototypes for a business. Keller started Inventopia because he wanted such a sp...

Jasmine Florentine's new book introduces making and STEM to middle-schoolers. The book, "Hex Allen and the Clanksmiths", creates a fantasy world where real problems are solved by hands-on skills. Jasmine is driven to help young people understand STEM, not just as a field of study, but as an opportunity to apply their creativity as well as intelligence. She believes if more kids knew...

Dorothy Jones-Davis has been Executive Director of Nation of Makers for six years. She recently announced that she is leaving to join the KID Museum in Bethesda Maryland as Chief Impact Officer. In this episode, we talk about how Nation of Makers got started, some of its accomplishments and where it might go. I also asked Dorothy how working in this role has changed her as a person as well as in h...

Jason Pohl calls himself a "pretengineer" because he's self-taught. Trained as artist, his design work has taken him from creating video games to actually designing and fabricating parts for Orange County Choppers. Jason moved into CAD design and working with CNC machines. He has boundless energy and enthusiasm as someone who is doing what he always wanted to do -- make things that...

Meet the winners of this year's Amazing Maker Awards. Our top winners come from the US and Canada, Turkey, Japan, and Germany and they are as young as 14. Their projects represent social impact, art, technical achievement and education. This is an audio recording of our October 4 Live Showcase in which I talked to our top winners about their projects. https://make.co/make-cast/

I'd like you to meet Amy Zell - mother, librarian, grief counselor, and maker. In this episode, she talks about the power of making to change things, to change people. She credits Casey Shea, a Sonoma County maker educator with telling her about "maker empowerment" at the Fab Institute in Pittsburgh in 2018. She understood "maker empowerment" to mean the wherewithal to cha...

Authors of the new book, Make: Calculus, Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron talk about using Legos and 3D printed models to create visualizations that help anyone learn calculus. After we talk about the book, Joan and Rich show some of the models that demonstrate Lotka Volterra equations, for instance. You might prefer to see that portion as a video, which is available at: https://youtu.be/a0v4fUSFl2U...

Susie Frazier created the Maker Town platform for makers and artists working in Cleveland and Northern Ohio so that more people can find them and learn about what they make. Susie is a maker, creator and artist. Her own journey led her to Cleveland, Ohio, where she began developing her own functional and decorative art, working with stone and then organic materials. She hosted a TV show. Then she...

A refugee from TechShop in SF, Ryan Spurlock took what he learned there and applied it to a new makerspace called Humanmade located in the design district of San Francisco. Two things stand out about this makerspace. One is how it was funded: a local developer whom the City required to set aside funding for community development worked with Ryan to locate space and build it out. Second, Humanmade...

Maker Faires are slowly coming back. After not happening for two years, Maker Faire Long Island took place in June at Port Jefferson Village's Explorium. Everybody was happy to come back. said co-producers of Maker Faire Long Island, Angeline Judex and Lisa C. Rodriguez. Angeline is the Explorium's Executive Director and Lisa is in digital media marketing for the science center. They sha...

Tyler Kerr runs the Innovation Wyrkshop, a makerspace at the University of Wyoming. During COVID, state officials saw the potential for makerspaces in vocational rehab and developing skills in local communities. And so they are funding the build out of a network of makerspaces throughout the state. Tyler and his students set out to build a safety pass, the Maker Access Pass that would allow studen...

Makey Makey, a creative platform for children of all ages, turned 10 years old this month. In this episode, we talk with Jay Silver, the creative technologist behind the platform, and Jay Melican, formerly of Intel who runs the business. Jay Silver talks about creative play and learning, and the community that has grown up around Makey Makey. https://make.co/make-cast/

DIY lifer Gareth Branwyn has compiled a new volume of his series, Tips and Tales of the Workshop, Volume 2. He joins Dale Dougherty to talk about how he collects tips — asking a person directly to share a tip is not very productive. He shares some of his favorite tips he has found. He talks about the aspirational quality of tips, how picking up an idea from someone can help us become better. Learn...

Julie Darling, author/educator/librarian, talks her book "Social-Emotional Learning Using Makerspaces and Passion Projects: Step by Step Projects and Resources for Grades 3-6". She is a Media Specialist at A2 Steam in Ann Arbor, CA. We talk about getting fidgety kids engaged and excited. She explains that a Makerspace can be a creative place for students and an opportunity to develop soc...

Mike Senese has been the Executive Editor for Make: for almost nine years. He started on volume 36 and leaves now after wrapping up issue 81. Mike joins Dale Dougherty to talk about his experiences at Make: and Maker Faire, as well as working with the maker community. See ya soon, Mike Senese. https://make.co/make-cast/

Determination seems like the best word to describe the collective response of Ukrainians as they fight for their country, for their home and their freedom. One month ago, I spoke with Yuri Vlasyuk and Svitlana Bovkun who live in Kyiv. That was the day Russia invaded Ukraine. I knew them because they were producers of Maker Faire in Ukraine. I wanted to find out how they are doing and what the make...

You might say that CNC is like a stepchild in the digital fabrication family, not the friendliest or easiest tool to get to know in the maker-space. Yet CNC is not something that most makers should be afraid of, especially as new software allows you to see in simulation what the CNC machine is going to do before you press go. In this episode, I'm joined by Anne Filson and Gary Rohrbacher, co-...

My guest on this episode is Wayne Seltzer who is lifelong fixer himself. He started the U-Fix-It Clinic in Boulder, Colorado to help others learn to fix things. Wayne helped put the "you" in Fixit Clinics, making sure they empowered people to learn to do the repairs themselves rather than having an expert do it for them. Wayne's article in the current issue shares the story of how h...