This week, I hosted a call with seven makers (seven projects but actually nine makers) who talked about the projects that they are bringing to Maker Faire Bay Area, which is September 26–28 on Mare Island Naval Shipyard. The recorded video is below.

I pulled a transcript and edited it a bit so you can also read about the makers in their own words. Putting all seven in one edition of this newsletter would make it too long so I’m presenting three makers here and next week, I’ll send out part 2 with the remaining four makers.

Table of Contents

• Meet these makers

  • Dorian Todd - Full Contact Engineering: Robotics

  • Peter and Erin Scheessele - Organ Bike

  • Wayne Pavalko - Maker Buoy

• Two-Minute Film Festival screening at MFBA25

Meet these makers

I couldn’t be happier to hear from these makers and learn more about them and their projects. It affirms what I believe about makers and how the Maker Movement is creating the next generation of makers.

Here we have a first-year engineering student calling in from his dorm room and telling us about an electronic version of tic-tac-toe. Not only that, he re-invented tic-tac-toe!

We have a mother and son from Oregon who are bringing an organ bike to Make Faire. They had this idea to build a pipe organ, reached out to people in the Netherlands who shared their plans, and they found retired woodworkers to help them make parts for a kit.

We have an engineer who built his own ocean-going buoy that could communicate via a satellite. He brought it to World Maker Faire in NY in 2017, and I wrote a story about his project. Later, folks from The Ocean Cleanup contacted him and asked him to build buoys to help follow currents in the Pacific and track collections of floating plastic.

Next week, I’ll publish four more maker profiles. But the best thing is that — at Maker Faire Bay Area on Sept 26–28 at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo — you can meet these makers yourself and see their projects in action. Meeting makers like these is why Maker Faire is so important to me and I hope for many others.

Dorian Todd - Full Contact Engineering: Robotics

My name is Dorian. I host the Full Contact Engineering Booth. It's a little bit of a unique booth because it isn’t always one project. It’s usually multiple different projects and sometimes they have nothing to do with each other.

So, the box you saw in that photo, it’s actually a tic-tac toe board. It’s unique in that the board is made up of nine displays and each one of those displays can be actuated up and down. So it gives this tactile digital feel when you're pressing down on these little LED displays to do the tic-tac toe motions.

When I was testing this, I found out that tic-tac toe is probably one of the most shallow games. It’s either you win because someone forgot or made a mistake, or you get a tie almost every time. So I was thinking, what’s the simplest way I could make this a more engaging experience?

And I figured out if you only let each player place down three symbols total — so after they place their fourth, the first one you placed goes away — it means that someone will inevitably have to win. And it turns out it makes the game so much deeper and you’re thinking that’s a great idea and you're engaged.

What I found is that at previous events, when I play against other people, they’ll stand at the booth for up to 30 minutes, just playing tic-tac-toe, which a lot of people don’t expect to be so engaging.

Where are you located, Dorian?

So currently I am in my dorm in San Jose. I’m a college student. I just graduated high school last year. I’m at San Jose State University.

Are you studying engineering?

Yes.

When did you start doing things like Full Contact Engineering? How young were you?

That’s a great question. Funnily enough, my parents were super interested in Maker Faire and they were some of the few people that went to the first-ever Maker Faire Bay Area. The moment I was born, they brought me to Maker Faire Bay Area. So for almost every year until there was an unfortunate pause because of Covid, I went, and every time I would go and see these incredible projects and get so excited about it. But I felt like nothing I had built as a little kid was cool enough.

Then, over Covid, I learned a bunch of new skills and then I heard they were coming back in 2023 and I was like, I want to do it this time. I’m gonna get out there and I’m gonna go full circle. I’m gonna inspire some kids with the projects I’ve done.

Peter and Erin Scheessele - Organ Bike

Peter: We are Orgelkids USA and we’re bringing the organ bike. This is a kit that allows a classroom of students to learn about the pipe organ by building one out of these wooden pieces we have, and it’s constructed using pre-Industrial Revolution techniques because the organ is previous to the Industrial Revolution — it’s the most complex machine on earth.

So the kids get to learn about how it works, put together with tusk, tenon joints, which have no screws, no glue. It’s ridiculously strong. A lot of makers will have heard of these. They’re perfect for work benches.

And if the kids learn, they get to play it. It’s fully functioning. And then we’ve brought the organ bike, which we mount the organ onto. You pump the wind into the organ by turning the pedals. And then you can make music while someone pulls you around town. It’s a lot of fun.

Where did this idea come from? 

So when I was very young, the organ is such a mechanical instrument that I just wanted to look inside, see how the thing works. I’ve heard a lot of makers really do that to figure out how things work and adapt that well. I wanted to build pipe organs, but apparently that’s pretty difficult for a 6-year-old.

So my mom found Orgelkids in the Netherlands in 2016. I think this came from being a family that would go to Maker Faires like Dorian’s family.

Erin: We took you to the Maker Faire in Portland, Oregon. They had a giant trebuchet. You would see people making stuff. So like, why can’t he make a pipe organ? And I felt like I was failing you. So anyway, Google led us to Orgelkids in the Netherlands in 2016.

Peter: I wrote them a letter and asked if we could have the plans, the hand-drawn plans for the kits. And they said yes.

So we found some retired organ builders and expert woodworkers, and we raised money and had them build a kit so that we could start teaching about the organ in the Corvallis area.

Erin: We are Orgelkids USA because we wanted to help bring that program from the Netherlands to the United States. Our retired organ builders in Eugene, Oregon have now built over 50 of these kits and they’re scattered across the states. It’s 133 pieces of beautiful handcrafted wood. And that aspect was a little bit beyond our capabilities.

Organs are complex. But as makers if you want to teach someone about something, let them build it and then they’ll have an intrinsic knowledge of how that complex machine works.

It’s been wonderfully collaborative. One customer in DC came up with a 3D-printed music stand that hangs on the wood frame because we didn’t have a music stand yet, and they shared that file. We’ve been to Taiwan helping them with their program. So it’s a global effort.

Talk about playing it. Did you know how to play the organ before you built one or did you have to learn after you built the organ?

Peter: So I’d been learning for a couple of years at that time. Like basic stuff. I couldn’t reach the pedals. And that’s part of playing the organ.

You have a keyboard, you play with your feet, which is pretty crazy. But I was too short back then. But since then I’ve had to learn how to play the kit. It’s a little different. For instance, on the bike I have to balance on there and pump at the same time. And falling off is possible, but we get better at it. It’s a lot of fun, though.

What kind of music do you play? 

We’ve actually outsourced this. We put out a competition and a whole bunch of people wrote pieces for it, transcribed pieces for it, and there’s a huge repertoire now that can fit on the two-octave span of the keyboard. So you’ve got two octaves to play with and it’s impressive what you can fit on two octaves.

Wayne Pavalko - Maker Buoy

Dale asked to talk about how I got into making: I think like with a lot of people, it starts really early. In my case what really helped was a workbench that my father had down in the basement. To me that was like everything. I would go down there, and work on things. It had a vice, and eventually a soldering iron. That was just the place that you could make things. That’s a plug for anyone who wants to get their children into making things: find a space that they can do it. It’s okay if it’s messy.

I eventually got a proper education and went to work. My day job for the last 30-some years actually has been in engineering. I work for a national research lab here in Maryland, and in the evenings I build things.

That’s my thing to do. And how I got into buoys is an even longer story. We lived overseas in the Middle East and there was really easy access to water. So I was doing a lot of things in the water like an autonomous boat.

It turns out though, if you bring an autonomous boat back to the United States and you put it in your local park, immediately they're gonna say no remote-control boats; it’s gonna harm the wildlife. So I had to shut all that down and thought about what else I could put in the water where no one’s gonna bother me.

One place is pretty much the open ocean. So that’s how kind of Maker Buoy came about. I wanted to experiment with them. I wanted to experiment with a satellite module, which used to be really expensive, but maybe a decade ago, it came down in price. They’re much more reasonable, a couple hundred dollars instead of thousands.

And I wanted to see if I could do a high-tech message in a bottle, right? I built a buoy similar to this one. I needed to get it out into the ocean from Maryland and we’re close to the water, but I really wanted to get it out there. So I ended up talking to a fishing captain, like a charter boat captain in Norfolk, Virginia Beach. I told him I had this kind of science project, educational project. It was educational for me. But the cool thing about maritime people is that they’re just can-do people; you give them a mission and they're gonna go do it.

So I hand over this piece of hardware and say I don’t want it back. And they did such a good job. They actually filmed the whole thing being deployed in the ocean, fifty miles off of Virginia Beach; that’s pretty much in the Gulf Stream. We thought the buoy would last a couple months in the ocean, maybe a couple weeks.

The way it works — just to give you an idea — this satellite module sends messages up to the satellites, and it comes back down. You can get it on your website, in your email. And basically we had position, water temperature, and pitch of the buoy. And we put an accelerometer in there so we could tell how rough it was in the water.

So all that kind of stuff comes to you, via an email or eventually to a website. But I thought maybe after a couple weeks that would be fun to see. And it ended up lasting two and a half years in the water. It ended up going all the way to Portugal, coming back down what’s called the Canary current, coming back all the way toward the Caribbean.

Then it eventually died, but that was two and a half years into it. Prior to that, and this is where it gets interesting for Dale. In the middle of that, in 2017, I took my family up and applied to give a talk at the New York City Maker Faire in Queens. Maybe toward the end of my talk I saw Dale and he must have stopped by the booth that I was presenting at. Actually, Dale, you don’t remember probably, but you talked to me a little bit about this project I was doing, and posted that up on the web and eventually about a year later, I got contacted. He said, “We see you building these buoys, and we’re doing a project to clean up plastic in the ocean. Would you be willing to make buoys for us? Because we need some custom buoys made for us.”

At the time, I had made four buoys. I was in the middle of that two and a half year voyage. But they trusted me. And that kind of started Maker Buoy. I had to tell my employer that I was doing this. They were asking, “Why are you doing that, Wayne?” And they actually build buoys there, too. So we had to work out something, but we agreed to open source it.

They own kind of the copyright on the original design, but it’s open source. And anybody could make it. And they agreed that I could have a small little side hustle to make ‘em for people who didn’t wanna do it themselves. And that’s continued to this day. I’ve built about 460 different units.

And one of the things I’ll talk about at the Maker Faire is that we’ve had a number of these go across the ocean. So this particular one I’ll bring with me, it actually went across the ocean to the Shetland Islands. So it went from Maine all the way to the Shetland Islands.

Wayne brought up a picture. That’s a young boy who we actually got in touch with on Facebook to go recover this buoy.

So it’s really amazing, the whole maritime and going across the ocean. It’s its own special thing. I’ve met so many people these past eight years. It’s been incredible.

Kanita asked how much plastic can they pick up?

The original customer is a company called the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit out of the Netherlands, and they’re building this kind of open ocean plastic-collection system. Actually the system went out of San Francisco originally, so I took a trip in 2018 for the ocean cleanup to take their system.

It’s like a large boom in the water that gets dragged by ships and it collects this plastic surface plastic. But my buoys were basically meant to simulate plastic. They’re put there temporarily to simulate plastic and then get collected. And so it basically, it’s kind of to see where the ocean currents are. It tells you where the kind of collection points are. Because there really are collection points, although I showed you the one that went from Maine to the Shetland Islands. Everything that goes into the Gulf of Maine goes pretty much straight north to Norway and UK, all that area.

But if you put something in the middle of the Pacific between San Francisco and Hawaii, it basically stays there. Very little of it flushes out. We know this because we’ve had buoys there now for the past like six years. It just stays in that area and that’s why plastic stays there.

Two-Minute Film Festival screening at MFBA25

What happens when makers have a story to tell?

If you ask the judges of the inaugural Maker Faire Two-Minute Film Festival, they’ll say you get movie magic — and you can see this magic at Maker Faire Bay Area all weekend long in a free, exclusive screening of their favorites!

“I was blown away by the resourcefulness, creativity, and diversity of the films submitted to the inaugural Maker Faire Film Festival,” said Pixar Sr. Assistant to the Director of Gatto (2027) Hannah Chu, one of the judges. “It reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite Pixar films, Ratatouille, with Chef Gusteau’s motto: ‘Anyone can cook.’ All our film submissions cooked up some great fun and inspiration with whatever ingredients they had at their disposal!”

Film Fest submissions from the maker community came in a wide variety of genres, from sci-fi to action to even (PG!) horror. And filmmakers leveraged a wide variety of maker skills in areas like electronics, sewing, 3D printing, painting, and engineering to bring their fantastical worlds to life.

“To me, filmmaking is the ultimate Maker playground,” said special effects guru and judge Jesse Velez. “All of our favorite films needed skilled tradespeople to bring them to life, and the variety of these skills and crafts perfectly exemplifies the Maker ethos. We have some fantastic submissions for this first-ever Film Fest, showcasing  everything from papercraft to DIY robotics. I’m excited for visitors to be inspired and think differently about how stories can be told.” 

The judges’ favorite films will be continuously screened from Friday through Sunday in a deluxe mobile theater courtesy of Chill Theaters. Attendees of the screening will watch the two-minute movies in style, thanks to the air-conditioned theater’s 100-inch screen and immersive sound system.

“Watching these films has been a delight, each one fun and inventive,” said models/miniatures expert and judge Kayte Sabicer. “Really can’t wait for everyone to see them at Maker Faire and get inspired themselves!”

Look for the Chill Theaters mobile theater at Maker Faire Bay Area in Storehouse Alley, between the Make: Live stage and the Hands-On Activities tent.

Make Things is a weekly newsletter for the Maker community from Make:. 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].