After Maker Faire Bay Area, our team had to buckle down to finish Make: Vol. 99, our annual Boards issue. Last Thursday, we sent it off to the printer in Wisconsin. I still have to remind some people I meet that Make: is a magazine in print, something you can hold in your hands. But you’ll also be able to access the digital edition even earlier - best of both worlds.

Now that we’ve wrapped up Vol 99, we’ll begin work on Vol 100. While we might look back on how making has changed over 20+ years, we’d also like to think about what changes we might see in the next twenty years. If you have ideas, or want to contribute an article, let us know.

Here is a preview of the issue you will be receiving in a few weeks.

Features

Pedal, Paddle, Push with Puns
How Team Pineapple’s person-powered Rebel Appliance won the 2026 Kinetic Grand Championship.

Workshop: Building the Impossible
Davis DeWitt makes movie magic at Backhaul Studios.

Get On Board! The New ESP32’s  
The tiny chips that connected the maker world are packing way more than Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

From Blinking to Thinking
Will Arduino, now part of Qualcomm, still be Arduino?

Two Brains Good
Creative AI projects using new Arduino Ventuno Q.

Meeting of the Minds  
Using Arduino’s new App Lab IDE, try the “Hello World” LED blink on a board with two brains.

Making the Baochip-1X  
Andrew “Bunnie” Huang designed a microcontroller that’s radically transparent and trustworthy.

Instant Writerdeck  
Go distraction-free the easy way — pair a keyboard with an ESP32 reflective LCD screen.

AI Playgrouond Cyberduck  
Build the XGO-Duck robot, a DIY version of Pollen’s Microduck, using the Arduino Uno Q.

Mighty Ducks!  
Charting the evolution of Pollen Robotics’ amazing new Microduck.

Learning to Waddle  
Droid builders are reverse engineering Disney’s real-life BDX robots.

Living With Sparky
How former Google engineer Alexis Gallagher turned a Reachy Mini Lite into an intelligent, emotive robot.

AI Is Not One Thing  
The World of AI is a family-oriented approach to AI and imagining a future worth building.

Secret Handshake
Train your Very Useful Monster to guard your stuff — and learn how AI really thinks in the process.

Open Sesame
Dorian Todd’s affordable DIY quadruped robot has inspired a thriving open source community.

Reinforcement Learning for Robotics
Teach a robot to balance, using RL in simulation just like the big labs.

Projects

Star Wars Control Panel
Direct from ILM, 3D print a real prop from Andor to control whatever you want!

Free Your DJI  
This clever hack gets HDMI video out of your DJI consumer drone.

Udderly Fantastic Game Controller  
Make a squishy cow controller (or something equally squishy and silly) for your next indie video game.

Spray a Spectrum
Paint (almost) every color of the rainbow with this real-time spray paint mixer.

Electronics Fun & Fundamentals:

Bannishing Breadboards  
Free yourself from the breadboard’s fatal flaws
with this simple trick.

Art That’s a Little Shady
Build a light-inverting solar circuit that’s fired by shadows for art, music, and more.

Toy Inventor’s Notebook:

Secret Surprise Stencils  
Mix and match these mischievous stencils.You won’t know what you’re drawing until the very end!

Skill Builder Radio — The Bottom End  
Explore the quirks and useful applications of radio’s lowest frequencies.

Check out the Blue Ribbon Winners from Maker Faire Bay Area and see some of our favorite projects.

Check out on one of my favorite features, which appeared in Make: Vol 07. “Strange Love” is about the physicists who built the nuclear bombs, profiling Ted Taylor. I’ve always remembered the opening lines by George Dyson: “Physicists love explosions. We owe our nuclear predicament to a quirk of human nature: designing, making, and testing nuclear explosives can be fun.” One might say as much about the predicament of super intelligence.

Make Things is a weekly newsletter from Make: for the Maker community. This newsletter lives on the web at makethings.make.co

I’d love to hear from you if you have ideas, projects or news items about the maker community. Email me - [email protected].