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Henry Lin and the NestWorks C500

Dale Dougherty
December 12, 2025

In Shenzhen, Henry Lin shows the new C500 CNC in the durability testing lab (photo by David Groom)

Maker Faire: Curious minds and human connection
A high school visit
Computer Engineering for Babies
Paper Inventions

Maker Faire: Curious minds and human connection

by Gillian Mutti, Maker Faire Director

If you’ve wandered through the creative chaos of a Maker Faire, you know it’s more than a showcase of gadgets. Beyond the spectacle lies the secret ingredient: human connection. Most projects on display don’t begin on a workbench — they spark in a conversation between curious minds from wildly different backgrounds.

At this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area, nestled in the Storehouse, attendees gathered around the first public prototype from NestWorks. It buzzed with intrigue, drawing feedback that confirmed a critical insight: the company’s costly bottleneck — over a million dollars annually spent on outsourced, custom-machined parts — was a problem shared by many.

This wasn’t a noisy industrial relic. It was a quiet, self-contained, third-generation proof-of-concept: an “accessible factory in a box” designed to bring professional-grade machining in metal, composites, and plastics to makers everywhere. The goal? To slash cost and time while unlocking a new tier of rapid prototyping. Imagine industrial CNC machining as accessible and compact as a desktop 3D printer.

Across the venue, creator Scotty Allen of Strange Parts headlined the Foundry Stage — yet he still found time to explore. He connected with Joey Song from Elephant Robotics and Henry Lin from NestWorks, sparking a collaboration. Months later, Scotty visited their headquarters to trace the origins of their necessity-driven innovation. His deep dive followed their journey through the complexities of traditional CAM software, their mission to make CNC as intuitive as 3D printing, and the monumental challenge of building a professional machine tool from scratch.

So next time you’re at Maker Faire, look beyond the projects to the people. Ask questions. Share your “crazy” ideas. The person you meet might not just help with your current project — they could become a collaborator on your next startup, a beta tester for your build, or the inspiration that reshapes your work entirely.

We come to Maker Faire to see what people build. We stay for the connections we make.
Maybe the most important thing you’ll ever make here might just be the connection that changes how everyone makes things.

Check out the wildly successful Kickstarter campaign for the C500, which has raised almost $8M with six days still to go!

A high school visit

In September before Maker Faire Bay Area, Henry Lin of NestWorks came to visit the Academy of Innovative Arts, a new public high school in Forestville, CA that I have been involved with. He met with students and teachers in the makerspace. He was joined by Rebecca Jiang and Rockets Xia of DFRobot and the Mushroom Cloud Makerspace in Shanghai who demoed the Unihiker K10 and the LattePanda. One of the questions that I asked the three of them was what high school was like in China — what would be different?

Henry shared his experience of both Chinese and American high schools. He went to high school for several years in Maine and enjoyed it. Rebecca talked about the state test that all students take after eighth grade and how only students in the top 50% go on to high school. She talked about how many students in China live in rural areas and their parents may go into the city for work and so the students stay with grandparents or live in dormitories. She added that if you tested in the top 1 or 2 percent, your life and the life of your family and even your village would be completely different.

Henry talked about how software would make the new CNC C500 easier to use for more people. I thought it was great for the students to learn about people who are building machines, not just using machines.

Henry Lin speaking to students and Marty Marfin, makerspace manager at the Academy of Innovative Arts (AIA)

Computer Engineering for Babies

by Kevin Toyama, Books Editor

The best gifts are those that are not just cool, but meaningful to the recipient — where it’s clear that you put a little thought into it. I bought a copy of Computer Engineering for Babies from the Maker Shed for Robotic Arms author and new dad Matt Eaton. It’s not a book that we published (jealous!), but I thought it would be a fun baby gift for a maker. He loved it, and sent me this picture of him and his budding engineer.

Make: author Matt Eaton reading to his daughter

Computer Engineering for Babies and Computer Engineering for Big Babies, both by Chase Roberts, are board books that integrate electronics to explain technical concepts. Both can be found in Maker Shed and they are Dad-tested and approved.

Page from Computer Engineering for Babies

Paper Inventions

This week, I hosted a livestream with author Kathy Ceceri. Make: has published a second edition of her book, Paper Inventions. Kathy is the author of over a dozen books for kids featuring hands-on STEAM activities. (More at kathyceceri.com). Kathy and I were joined by Jie Qi, a self-described “paper nerd” and co-founder and CEO of Chibitronics. She lives in St. Petersburg, FL. We were also joined by Angii De La Cruz who is the Lead Instructor at the Thinqubator (the children’s makerspace at the Tech Valley Center of Gravity in Troy, NY.