Table of Contents

• A night at the movies

• Ten things from Maker Faire Shenzhen 2025

• Talking creativity and Paper Inventions

A night at the movies

Yesterday I was joined by special effects pro Jesse Velez and three filmmakers who entered the Maker Faire Two-Minute Film Festival. All three were students and they talked about the process of creating their two-minute movie as well as the tools they used. Each of them built their own props. Keeping it simple was a theme throughout

• Derek Kessler, a high school student from Calabasas, CA. Derek produced a movie titled The Device. He showed us the prop for the Device, which had different parts hot-glued together.

• Ana Roure, a student in animatronics at the University of North Carolina School of Arts. She produced a horror movie called Switch. Ana talked about the doll she fabricated and then animated with two servo motors.

• David Thulin, also a student but who created his movie at a library makerspace in Orem, UT. His movie was titled Scavenger. Everything in David’s movie was from a product recycled, including making the spaceship out of a fast-food coffee cup. Scavenger earned both the Judges’ Choice and People’s Choice awards.

It was a stimulating and surprising conversation and special thanks to Jesse for sharing his insights on practical effects.

If you’d like to watch all the judges’ favorites that were screened at the Maker Faire Two-Minute Film Festival—and the the trailer for Scavenger as it heads to the film-festival circuit—go to this playlist.

Ten things from Maker Faire Shenzhen 2025

by David Groom

Ten quick highlights from this year’s event:

#1. Seeing the Makera Z1 (currently live on Kickstarter) accessible CNC machine in person and witnessing its incredible output (plus meeting the lovely team!). This easy-to-use machine can do everything from acrylic and wood to aluminum and brass, and even titanium, and ships to backers in January for under $1000.

 #2. Checking out the upcoming Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2; the follow-up to the amazing original Centauri Carbon adds multi-material capabilities and a larger bed, while maintaining a similar footprint to the original; shipping next year at an astonishingly low price!

#3. Heaps of innovative new products from M5Stack, as always (they release at least one new product every Friday!). The new Cardputer ADV, pictured here with LoRa “Cap” which adds a LoRa radio and GNSS. A new keyboard add-on for the Tab5 turns it into an impressive-looking cyberdeck.

#4. A bunch of great LattePanda use cases including an AI-powered drift car from the wonderful folks at DFRobot. The “Donkey Drift” platform tweaks the original Donkey Car with a high-performance Arduino-powered chassis.

#5. The new RDK S100 monster of a machine from the D-Robotics team. With 80-128 TOPS (S100P), D-R have gone from taking on Raspberry Pi with the RDK 5 to taking on NVIDIA, easily outclassing the latest Jetson Orin Nano Super with their own custom chip.

#6. Some of the most exciting new devices of the event, including this new handheld prototype from Lily and Co. at LilyGo. Combining an e-paper display with a clamshell keyboard, this diminutive cyberdeck is something to look forward to.

#7. A very special new version of the PicoCalc from the incredible Clockwork Pi! Instead of the RP2040-based microcontroller in the original, this adapter upgrades it to a full Linux machine, based around the Raspberry Pi Zero.

#8. Of course Seeed Studio was on hand, laden with new XAIOs, LoRa and Meshtastic devices, and countless other innovative and customer-incubated products!

#9. One of the most impressive indie projects was a custom t-shirt (or tote bag, or any other fabric item) printer that used thin printed layers from a Bambu Lab 3d printer with a special bed, creating remarkably durable designs on (in?!) fabric, similar to dye sublimation, from Chinese maker LubanDaddy.

#10. This Arduino Mouse Keyboard Violin generates incredibly expressive MIDI output using a mouse scroll wheel and any arbitrary stick-like object as the string/bow, and the keyboard keys as frets. While the USB HID to UART conversion could be used for almost anything, the particular implementation as a “violin” is uncanny in its realism.

See the full report at https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/maker-faire/maker-faire-shenzhen-soars-to-new-heights/ !

Talking creativity and Paper Inventions

Join me next Wednesday, December 10th, at 7:30pm EST and 4:30 PST for a discussion with Make: author Kathy Ceceri, about her book Paper Inventions. Kathy’s book is perfect for parents and teachers who are looking for fun STEAM activities for children. Kathy will show us some of the projects from the book, and she’s invited a few guests to join her.

Register Here

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