Table of Contents

• Maker Faire Miami’s Nice Garden Party

  • Education Day

  • Maker’s Lab at Miami Dade College

  • Kayte Sabicer’s Helpful Advice

  • If you find these keys

• Dallara and the Indianapolis 500

Maker Faire Miami’s Nice Garden Party

Last weekend, Maker Faire Miami took place at the Fairchild Botanic Tropical Garden, a beautiful spot. The event was produced by Mario Cruz and Tom Pupo. It happened on the same weekend as the Formula One race in Miami. There was a little rain but there was also a lot of good energy.

Tom runs the Moonlighter FabLab in Miami Beach and it partnered with Fairchild on a NASA grant to develop the NASA Innovation Lab at the Fairchild. The Growing Beyond Earth program is developing experiments for classrooms to test factors in growing plants in space.

Education Day

Maker Faire Miami launched its weekend on Friday with its first-ever Education Day. The event welcomed over 250 K-8 students, inviting them to explore the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden while engaging in hands-on learning. Each student group participated in a variety of interactive activities, including:

• Soldering

• Screen and block printing

• Paper circuitry

• Mineralogy

• Designing and creating 3D hanging planters in the NASA Innovation Lab

Daisy Pulpo of Moonlighter FabLab played a key role in developing and delivering the program, ensuring an engaging, well-executed experience for all participants. Make:’s Gillian Mutti took a group of kids and escorted them around Maker Faire Miami.

Maker’s Lab at Miami Dade College

Ralph Provisero runs the Maker’s Lab at Miami-Dade College. When I started talking to him about the space he manages, he was excited to tell me about two students who were brothers from the Dominican Republic, Juan and Luis Luda. As students, they came to the lab early and stayed late. He pointed them out to me — these enthusiastic makers had their own booth as Luda Technologies at Miami Maker Faire.

Here’s my interview with Ralph along with Juan and Luis Luda.

Kayte Sabicer’s Helpful Advice

One of the featured speakers was model maker, Kayte Sabicer whose talk was titled “Making with(out) Intention.” She wanted to talk about the importance of making without an end goal. Kayte works in special effects as a model maker with Adam Savage at Tested and Phil Tippett at Tippet Studios. She’s a fun, engaging person who is open and honest about her own creative process.

Kayte talked about how she found herself “getting caught up in the anxiety” of having to create something, especially under a deadline. She gave the following good advice, which I wrote down.

“If you want to make something, make something.”

“Creativity happens in the moment, not in the planning.”

“To make a thing, first pretend to make a thing.”

In other words, stop overthinking about creating something and just start doing it.

Another thing that she’s found helpful is organizing what she calls a “Maker Hang.” She invites maker friends to get together somewhere and bring something they want to work on. It helps, she said, to be around other creative people to get ideas flowing.

If you find these keys

On the way out, Gillian saw a set of keys on a bench and picked them up. On the keyring was a disc with a QR code.

We looked it up and went to a page that said: thanks for finding these keys. It also said that you could follow the instructions to return the keys or you might want to just place the keys in a new location, which is what we did.

It was a funny, harmless prank. We had met the prankster earlier, Drew of Vida Custom Designs. Drew told me that when he found Make magazine, he decided to quit his corporate job and start his own fabrication business, which he showcased at Maker Faire Miami with his son helping him out.

Drew had planned ahead for his prank. He went to a locksmith and asked for any discarded keys. Then he made several sets and distributed them around Maker Faire Miami. He was interested in what people would do once they found them.

Dallara and the Indianapolis 500

From Forumla One in Miami to Indy cars in Indianapolis, I’m at the InfoSys Foundation USA Crossroads 2025 conference, not the Indy 500 which is at the end of them month.

A reception was held at the Dallara IndyCar Factory. One part was a showroom of race cars, shown below. The other part was a factory and I took the tour, which was fascinating.

Dallara is an Italian company. They are the exclusive supplier of the carbon-fiber body for all IndyCar race cars as well as other races. We walked through a huge fabrication area which employs about 80 people. It is an advanced manufacturing facility involved in creating carbon-fiber parts for race cars. Facilities like this one demonstrate the state-of-the-art of manufacturing in America — it’s a clean, well-lit space with lot of big computer-controlled machinery. It was huge and we were told not to take pictures.

I also got to see their large racing simulation that was developed with Ferrari, one of three in the world.

It costs $12,000 a day for a driver and team to use the simulator. Drivers use it to practice before and after races. The Dallara showroom had a bank of smaller racing simulators.

I was impressed by Dallara’s mission and its values as expressed on this poster in the break room. It made me want to work there!

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