This Whoop Drone that weighs less then three nickels. Cover image for Make: V98
As a rule, I never ask makers why they’ve built something. I already know. It was something they had to do, wanted to do, were compelled to do, could not not do. Yes, but doing it was fun. If it wasn’t fun, it might not get done at all. Don’t underestimate the power of fun. Building a whoop drone and flying it - fun. Building a better go-kart than the one you had as kid for your kid - nothing but fun. Making fire twist and turn and rise into the sky — it’s fun living a little dangerously. Makers just want to have fun.
At Make:, we want you to have fun. In this preview of Make: Vol 98, you’ll start thinking how much fun it would be to build any of these projects. If work was this much fun, imagine how much more we could get done!
Table of Contents
Whoop It Up
At last year’s Maker Faire Bay Area, we met Scott Stevenson from Santa Rosa, CA in the Microdrones booth. Later in the year, I invited Scott to visit a local high school and he did a demo of some commercial drones and showed the different iterations of ones he built himself. One of them went straight up in the air, almost vanishing from sight, and the kids were amazed. We asked Scott to write about his specialty, whoop drones.
For my debut article in Make: Magazine, "Lightest Whoop" project, my goal was to be able to make a drone using parts that are readily available for makers to produce an unusually light but fully capable drone that is a standard 65mm size. The innovation to achieve this taps into an exceptionally small and light camera. Most whoop drones use weightier and larger cameras that use 5V and require camera housings so the challenge was to find a means to accommodate the 3.3V requirement for this tiny camera while also avoiding adding more weight from a housing or additional circuitry. The only drawback of this tiny camera is a limited FOV but it should be possible to add a tiny lens to widen the field of view (perhaps from a cheap laser pointer). Fair warning, this project is a bit tricky from a micro-soldering standpoint!
A bit about me: I have been making RC drones since 2013. Since 2006 I was assembling RC helicopters (and flying them out my apartment. window (see video below).
Much like my fellow makers though I have been tearing things apart and putting them back together since I was a child. It is amazing what we can learn from opening things up and having a look! As an avid maker and fan of the maker spirit and how makers express their creativity, I am very much looking forward to attending the upcoming Maker Faire on Mare Island in September and seeing folks showing and telling!
It’s been ten years since we’ve had a drone on the cover of Make: Magazine and it is good to have them back after all they’ve been doing in the world.
Speed Demon
Saul Griffith is a maker extraordinaire who has been back in his home country of Australia since the Covid era. In 2020, he wrote a visionary four-part series for Make: called “Electrify Everything,” which is the subject of several of his books, Electrify and Plug In: The Electification Handbook. Griffith was also the co-creator of HowToons with illustrator Nick Dragotta, which ran as a feature in Make: for over ten years. (See this article: “Meet the Makers of HowToons.”) Griffith opens his article in Make: 98 with the following paragraph:
I love making things. I became an engineer because I loved making things, and after a couple of decades of doing it for a living I’m convinced most engineers I meet are in this for the same reason. It’s our love language. We can argue about what “making the world better” really means, but we can’t argue the fact that engineering is full of lovely challenges and puzzles, and building things that didn’t previously exist is fun. Like conjuring, but without the witchcraft.
This article is about making things for fun.
In this article, Griffith describes how he built a super-fast plywood go-kart. He says that the project is “rigorously engineered to be appropriate for a fifth-grader to build and a grandparent to drive.” (Note - Tim O’Reilly is Saul’s father-in-law and I hope Tim is not the grandparent driving it — I’ve ridden with him in a Volvo on backcountry roads.)
Fire Tornado
It’s not like you need another thing to worry your neighbors but you can create a helluva scene at night with Tim Deagan’s Flame Vortex. Deagan has written many articles for Make: and two books - Make: Fire and Make: Modern Leatherwork for Makers. I interviewed Tim to learn more about him in this Make:cast episode: How Hard Can It Be?. He’s back making fire in this issue. “This project could be the world’s coolest fire pit on a deck, or a crowd-pleaser at a campout or festival,” he writes. (Legal disclaimers apply!)
Having a blast
The original Nerf blaster, Blast-a-Ball, had a singular purpose, writes Ryan Cho — to fling foam. Cho tells about how the modder community evolved and some of its favorite mods. If you’re an outsider to this community, Cho will help you get started with Extreme Nerf Blasters and soon you’ll be on the inside of this community.
How much fun would one of these cyberdecks be?
Make: Editor Sam Freeman started seeing these cool custom cyberdecks online and he found Kati, a software engineer from Germany, to tell us more about how you could make one of your own.
Anatomy of A Dragonfly Art Car
If you’re going to be out on the playa at night at Burning Man, you either have your own ride or you are a passenger on someone else’s. If you want the kind of ride that looks and runs like a dream (at 5 mph), then Sean Orlando and Engineered Art Works at Seaport Studio in Richmond, CA are where you want to go. I went there to find out how they build an art car from the bottom up. I learned what I could from Sean and his team about how they designed and built a Dragonfly art car for a client.
Sean Orlando (photo by Dale Dougherty)
Sean was an art student at UC Berkeley but went to work in New York City as an aesthetic entomologist who studied insects. “I was spreading beetles and butterflies, studying their anatomy,” he told me. “I was just fascinated with them, especially dragonflies.” When a client asked him what kind of art car he’d build for himself, the idea of a dragonfly popped into his head.
Make: Vol 98 “Action”
You’ll find a lot more fun in this upcoming issue. Really, we just scratched the surface.
Make: Vol 98 went off to the printer earlier this week. In a couple of week, it should magically appear in your mailbox. How fun!
Write for Us!
If you’ll notice from the few examples above, Make: is fortunate to work with makers who have written for us many times but we also welcome first-time authors as well. Our next issue, Make: Vol 99, will be exploring the hardware behind Physical AI. After that is Make: Vol 100, which we want to be extra special. If you have a worthy project, a tutorial or a feature profile to share, submit a proposal for an article or book here!
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I’d love to hear from you if you have ideas, projects or news items about the maker community. Email me - [email protected].
