Maker Faire Bay Area was the best Maker Faire that I’ve ever experienced. So many interesting makers — 40% were first timers — and a really good crowd of all kinds of people. As I stand at the entrance for the first half hour or so each day, I wonder who they are and what brings them to Maker Faire. They are curious, smart and ready to explore what Maker Faire offers and I’m grateful to see all of them come.

On Saturday and Sunday, we have a Maker Parade at 4pm and anything that moves from electric muffins to art cars and quadrapod robots and a Dalek line up and march down the waterfront, beside historic three-masted sailing ships. It’s a wonder how this all comes together.

In this newsletter, I focus on the winners of the New Product Showcase at Maker Faire Bay Area.

For our 20th anniversary edition of Maker Faire Bay Area, we organized a New Product Showcase on Friday to look at some of the new products that come to Maker Faire. Over the years, we’ve seen so many products get launched at Maker Faire, either before or after a Kickstarter campaign. Thanks to Ryan Spurlock and Humanmade SF for inviting some of the companies in their accelerator to participate.

Best New Products for 2026

Kasina Euchukanonchai

Very clever wind-up toys that are meant to be put together and taken apart, they are a great way to explore how a variety of mechanisms work. 

Our mechanical toys help people have a better understanding of the physical world around them. Our toys are assembled from scratch and have transparent casings, so players can see how the components interact with each other. Through assembling and experimenting with the toys, players learn physics and engineering concepts such as moment of inertia, torque-speed tradeoff, cam and follower, escapement mechanism, etc. With a better understanding of the physical world, we hope to create a repair culture by empowering people with the knowledge and confidence to fix many of the items around them instead of buying new.

While screen time has exponentially increased in the past decade, and the digital world has become ever more dominant in our lives in the age of AI, we all still live in the physical world and we need to understand how things work around us. Our mission is to help people have a better understanding of the physical world around them. 

1) We want to bridge the gap between learning physics concepts on paper and seeing them come to life through hands-on play. We want to get people excited about learning physics and engineering in our everyday life. Our toys enable people to spend their time learning without screens. 

2) We hope that a better understanding of the physical world will empower people with the knowledge and confidence to fix many of the items around them instead of purchasing new ones, creating a repair culture.

Grant Patterson

A generalized platform for controlling LEDs and creating custom patterns, ChromaBay is an app that Grant Patterson built to run his LED Butterfly project, Lepidoptera Imagineria.

ChromaBay https://chromabay.app is a platform for creative control of LEDs over wifi or bluetooth. Users can design complex lighting patterns using an intuitive yet powerful node-based interface on the web or mobile app. Patterns display on any configuration of LEDs connected to an ESP32, which support custom layouts and on-the-fly configuration changes. Share your patterns in the online gallery, and discover the most popular patterns others have created.

ChromaBay enables non-coders to create beautiful lighting patterns for any LED display. It's easy to install the platform on any ESP32, configure the connected LEDs, and control them from the web-based or iOS app. Each device can be configured for wifi, enabling robust always-on connections, or bluetooth--making it easy to use in remote environments without wifi. Control the patterns for an entire swarm of LED wearables, LED walls, art cars--all from a single app!

https://chromabay.app/devices

Justin Lesinski

The fifth iteration of this design, the UK5 looks cool, feels great in the hand and works easily as a pocket knife.  The blade is a standard box cutter blade, which can be removed if you need to go through TSA. 

UK5 is a low profile utility knife. It uses standard utility knife blades and fits seamlessly in a pocket watch pocket. It is designed to balance aesthetic beauty and functionality. UK5 is the result of five iterations in design, each addressing the shortcomings of the previous until the design reached maturity..

UK5 is designed to be a heirloom quality product. The design process prioritized functionality, aesthetic beauty, and ergonomics to create a cohesive object. UK5 has massive amounts of care and thought put into every detail. It features a unique action that extends and locks in one motion. This makes it easier to use than most utility knives on the market. UK5 is fully user serviceable despite lacking any external fasteners. The replaceable blades allow the user to use and abuse the knife without fear of damage. I have spent the past two years developing UK5 into the best knife that I can make and I am excited to share it with you.

Taran Ravindran

This unique combination of air quality monitoring in the home and grow light and watering system for houseplants would look good almost anywhere – home or office.

Aera combines a self-watering indoor garden, grow light, warm ambient lighting, and environmental sensing in a handcrafted wooden design. It helps people grow plants indoors, creates a soft evening glow, and guides breathing exercises through gently changing light. Integrated sensors measure conditions such as CO₂ and fine particulate matter, helping users better understand their indoor environment.

Aera makes indoor gardening, environmental awareness, and moments of calm part of an everyday object people want to live with. It brings together natural materials, living plants, and thoughtful electronics to create an interactive piece of furniture. Its engineering challenge is integrating grow lighting, water, sensors, and control electronics within a compact wooden enclosure while managing heat and moisture. Built by an independent maker in San Francisco, Aera connects craftsmanship with practical technology for the home.

Tim Keller

Tired of toy 3D pens that aren’t up to real-world tasks?  Struder is an industrial-grade 3D printing pen, putting the hot-end in your hand for drawing new designs. 

Struder (Handheld Plastic Extruder) is like a MIG welder for plastic. It's a high-flow 3D printing hot-end helps people fabricate, weld together, repair anything using thermoplastic.  It is a highly versatile tool that has an equal role in the DIY toolbox, in classrooms and industry.

Struder is also designed as an end-effector for multi-axis robotic 3D printing systems, and our company has created agentic slicing tools to create the complex 3D toolpaths for 3D printing in an entirely new way:  interwoven directional deposition that treats 3D prints like composites and finally makes 3D prints that are STRONG.

There has never been a truly commercial-grade 3D pen, and no-one has ever cracked a scalable soluion for 3D printing that is strong in all directions.  Struder' handheld product is our baseline product, Struder+Robot+AI slicer is how we are helping to push the entire industry forward.

Gabriel Leoni

The Murf is a wall-mounted electric sit-stand desk that folds away when you're done working, turning your workspace back into living space.  See more at wallrisedesk.com.

There was nothing like this, so I had to build it. It's more than just a desk - it allows you to put work away when you're done without sacrificing ergonomics and productivity, creating a line between work and life and promoting healthy living.  

It's made of premium Baltic birch and high-end hardware. We don't skimp on anything, including the 20,000-cycle-tested lifting mechanism that raises and lowers the desk from sitting to standing.

I launched the product in March of 2025, and we've sold over 360 since then.

Karen Darricades

LitKit uses analog learning and no-code software to teach teens about creative technology through play! Our kits are a creative studio and media lab in a box, filled with all the materials and supplies needed for learning about digital systems through physical hands-on making and drag and drop software for creating countless works makers can save and share. LitKIts illuminate the applications and implications of emerging technology and empower young makers with the critical thinking and media literacy skills needed to survive and thrive, now and into the future.

There is currently a gap in STEAM education and a lack of products designed for teens and the unique challenges they face navigating digital environments and synthetic media. LitKit uses marker-based augmented reality to deliver immersive inspiration and instruction that plays and pops right off of the page and even inside the kits. Our kits are built by media artists and creative technologists and feature content from peers (other young creatives like our users), pros (professional artists) and the public domain (our shared arts and cultural heritage), for an experience that feels like the internet in a box, but that are curated by adults who know what youth want, and care about what they need. Our kits also have multiple immersive collectibles, from digital dioramas lighting up each box to posters and postcards that take learners on a journey through space and time to put media technology into context.

Mark Vaughan and team

The Sound Machine Kit adds real audio circuits to the SparkBlocks system, snap blocks that both play sound and listen for it. A speaker block plays back short recorded clips, a Bluetooth block streams music straight from your phone into a build, and a microphone can be built into a sound-sentivive circuit to react to noise-  so a build can spring to life when you shout at it. Everything snaps onto SparkBlocks and LEGO the same way our other kits do.

It's our first kit with two-way audio, not just movement or lights. Builders can design their own noisy, musical, voice-reactive machines from scratch instead of following one fixed build, all without an app, code, or a soldering iron. We're showing prototypes at Maker Faire specifically to get builder feedback before we lock in the final lineup.

Ravi Lingineni

Kitiki is a 13.3" open source e-paper laptop. If you're not familiar with e-paper, it's a black and white display that looks just like paper. It's the same technology used on a Kindle. Most devices using e-ink are single-use. So they are meant for reading or taking light notes.

Kitiki can run full Linux and do regular "computer" things. You're probably not going to use it to write an e-mail, or review Github PRs, or format a movie script. So you can use it to do almost anything. You can use it to write your next story, do light research or wrap up some emails with a lightweight computer.

Kitiki is a "calm" device. It's something you can sit and use in the sun.The entire hardware and software is designed specifically for this experience. Everything from the apps to the chassis of the device were designed in-house. 

Traditionally, manufacturing laptops are a complex investment. They require plastic molds or complex CNC routing. Kitiki uses laser-cut pieces and easy to assemble parts. The computer explores the use of a new in-house chassis, touch materials, and a custom operating system to bring a new kind of consumer laptop to life.

Meet Sesame, a pocket-sized walking robot with a face, from maker Dorian Todd. Eight servos drive four legs. An OLED screen shows expressions that shift as it moves. Out of the box it walks, waves, dances and points. Then make it yours. Choreograph new moves in Sesame Studio, drive it over WiFi, or give it a voice with the Python companion app. ESP32 powered. Fully open source. Limited run in Red/Blue, Orange, Blue and Pink.

RESERVE YOURS in the Maker Shed.

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].