In this video, Tom gives an overview of the SPOKE board.

SPOKE started as a throwaway experiment. I was building a musical instrument housed inside a miniature model of a building. The idea was that touching different parts of the structure would trigger different notes. Normally I would have reached for a Bare Conductive board or a Teensy, but I didn’t have either to hand. Instead, I tried a Raspberry Pi Pico with the CircuitPython touchio library, turning a single GPIO pin into a touch point with nothing more than a 1MΩ resistor.

It worked. And not just barely. It worked really well. Encouraged, I breadboarded the remaining 26 GPIO pins, fully expecting a calibration nightmare. I anticipated tweaking thresholds, chasing noise, the usual friction. But it just worked. Right away, and again, really well.

That moment clarified something I had been circling for years. I have spent over 15 years as an educator, workshop facilitator, and interactive instrument artist. I run events in London showcasing other instrument builders, and I have worked with organizations like Drake Music to develop accessible instruments. In that time, capacitive touch has always been a crowd-pleaser, but it has also been reliably awkward to set up, especially with beginners. The calibration is fiddly, the documentation is patchy, and the barrier to entry is just high enough to kill the creative momentum before it starts.

Capacitive touch sensing works by detecting the tiny electrical charge your body carries. When you touch, or even hover near, a conductive surface connected to a sensor, it disrupts a small electrical field and the board registers that as an input. It is the same technology behind your smartphone screen and most modern trackpads. In the maker world it has traditionally been handled by dedicated breakout boards like the MPR121, which measure capacitance across multiple pins and report back over I2C. They work well, but they require careful calibration, and getting reliable results with unusual materials like foil, water, graphite, or bare wire often takes more patience than most workshop participants have.

My realization was this: the RP2040 can handle capacitive touch sensing at least as well as any MPR121 breakout board, arguably better. So I decided to build something around that.

Prototyping

I moved into KiCAD and started prototyping. Early versions were essentially hats for the Pico, and after several iterations, with invaluable input from the team at Pimoroni who were generous with both their time and expertise, SPOKE took its final form. The board features 27 true-capacitive touch sensors, each paired with an individually addressable NeoPixel to show which sensor is active. A large reset button recalibrates all touch threshold levels in one press. 5mm holes along the edge accommodate crocodile clips or M5 bolts for attaching conductive objects. Two STEMMA connectors open the board up to I2C devices, PWM outputs, and ADC inputs, so you can extend it with distance sensors, gesture inputs, OLED screens, servo control, and more.

SPOKE is designed to let you build almost anything that talks to a computer: musical instruments, interactive HID devices, games controllers, software controllers, sound effect boards, whatever you can imagine connecting to touch. It runs CircuitPython, and customizing the code is as straightforward as editing a few numbers in Notepad. To lower the barrier even further, I developed a suite of free web tools that let you search for audio, record your own sounds, or upload video that SPOKE can trigger directly. No DAW, no additional software, no friction. The goal throughout has been to strip away as many obstacles as possible so people can get straight to the creative work.

I launched a Kickstarter which was a success, and SPOKE is now available through Pimoroni. What people have built with it has already exceeded my expectations. Students at Kingston University recreated Massive Attack’s Teardrop using mugs of water and spoons in their kitchen. Artist Frazer Merrick used it to make community-led interactive pieces inspired by the market stalls of Pitsea, where dangling metal chains triggered location-specific sounds. It has been used in accessibility-focused workshops at Berklee College of Music as part of the Able Assembly, where members of the MIDI Association gave it a thorough workout and left some very generous words behind. Kids in rural Aberdeenshire built a cringe-video jukebox as part of a STEM club.

Alongside the main board, I also developed the SPOKE Mini, a solder-it-yourself kit designed for permanent embedding in a project. What started as a way to make my own builds tidier quickly became one of the best classroom projects I have run.

My day job is as a teacher, and my students learned to solder, flash firmware, and code in CircuitPython, then turned the board into whatever they wanted. Some built MIDI instruments. Others wired up games controllers using the Adafruit HID library to send keyboard inputs like WASD and spacebar. One student 3D printed an enclosure shaped like Gary from SpongeBob. Another kitbashed a Warhammer tank with touch sensors on the hull. A third built a birdhouse with metallic leaves that played birdsong. Their imaginations ran wild, because they didn’t have to worry about the hardware or the software getting in the way.

SPOKE is, at its core, a tool. It doesn’t tell you what to make. It just tries to make the making easier. The circuitry handles the hard parts so that you can focus on the idea: the instrument, the installation, the game, the story, the thing only you would think to build. Looking ahead, I want to keep developing the web tools, expand the library of examples, and find new ways to get SPOKE into the hands of educators, artists, and anyone who has ever had a creative idea and hit a wall of technical friction. I am also working on expansion boards that use the STEMMA I2C connectors to add new capabilities, extending what SPOKE can do without changing what makes it approachable.

More than anything, I am excited to see what people do with it.

Monique Evette’s Koi-tar

Maker/engineer Monique Evette used the SPOKE Mini board to create the “Koi-tar,” a musical instrument in her Whimsical Machines series.

The SPOKE board is available in the UK via pimoroni

And in the US via pishop

Tom Fox is a Design Technology teacher based in Hertfordshire, UK. He’s also a creative technologist and interactive musical installation artist. He co-runs a group in London called Hackoustic which is all about showcasing other musical Makers and run events and workshops. He’s also CTO for MusicTechFest which is a Europe-wide company focusing on musical tech innovation, education and experimentation.

Table of Contents

• Meet the Microduck

• Maker Faire Yukon

• AI as a Medium is the message

• Anouk Wipprecht - F1 trophy maker

Meet the Microduck

Previously, I wrote about Reachy, a desktop robot from Pollen Robotics in association with HuggingFace. That partnership has come up with a new kind of open-source robot — the Microduck. “At 25 cm tall, 14 cm wide and under 800 g, Microduck is built for the messy reality of reinforcement learning,” says the press release.

Reinforcement learning is a way that robots can learn to do something instead of being taught or programmed to do it. The key is that they can try a million ways until finding something that works. It’s like a child learning to walk and falling all the time until they figure it out. They call this kind of learned behavior a policy. They explain that doing reinforcement learning on the robot itself is slow. Their solution is to “train the robot in simulation and transfer the learned policy to the real world, known as sim-to-real transfer.”

A typical development loop looks like this: train in simulation (on your computer), deploy on the real-world robot, observe the behavior, refine the simulation parameters, repeat the process, share the policy with the community.

The results looks like a lot of fun but it should be fun for developers to train. There’s something a lot more playful with a robot that looks like an animal rather than a human. Maybe there are lessons to be learned from cartoon characters, the world of animation is a lot more fun and playful rather than “realistic” characters.

Microduck was designed to feel like more than just a robotics platform: dynamic, lively and expressive, with behaviors that make it engaging even before users start customizing. Its compact proportions and deliberately playful gait give it a distinctive waddle that reinforces its duck-like character.

Microduck’s camera, LiDAR and motion sensing let users create behaviors that react to people, objects and the surrounding environment, making interactions feel less scripted and more pet-like. A dedicated camera indicator, inspired by classic REC lights, turns on whenever the camera is active. At launch, Microduck will include perception-driven modes such as detecting and chasing a laser dot across the floor, much like a cat.

from press release

The Microduck robot will sell for $399 and will be available by Christmas from Pollen Robotics.

Rocket Eggs at Maker Faire Yukon

This weekend’s Maker Faire Yukon takes place at latitude 60°00′ N in Canada. It is organized by Yukonstruct, an innovation hub and makerspace. Producer Rick Yorgason told us they have a lot planned for both days, including a Cyberpunk Ball, an LED and blacklight fueled costume party.

Rick said that “some of our events and booths definitely have a northern edge, like making your own birdcage awl out of chainsaw files and antler.” (I like that a guy named Bob Sharp is teaching “Tool Making.”)

“One of the unique activities we like to run is something called Rocket Eggs,” said Rick. “It’s like an egg drop, but the egg is on a CO2-powered sled, so the challenge is to see how fast you can make your egg go without breaking it.

Find out more about Maker Faire Yukon on Makezine.com.

AI as a Medium is the message

Tim O’Reilly wrote a really interesting essay on Writing with AI. While some writers are defiantly turning away from AI, and others are embarrassed to admit they use it, O’Reilly is using it in interesting ways, and he sees “AI as a medium.”

I say AI is a medium, like painting, sculpture, photography, music, or language itself. If AI is a medium, it is a field of possibility from which humans can and will summon up and communicate insights, truth, beauty.

— Tim O’Reilly

I heard someone recently point out that film is about a hundred years old as a medium and look what’s been done in that time in terms of craft, artistic vision and yes, commercialization. O’Reilly thinks “it will take time for its possibilities to unfold, discovery on discovery.”

He adds:

If AI is a medium, the idea that you can’t write with it will someday seem as odd as the idea that you can’t make a good portrait or landscape with a camera, only with paint or pen and ink. Technical innovations have often changed the nature of art.

One might expect this medium to be a collaborative art, the way film is, but also empower the individual creator. Who will be the creators and makers experimenting and failing but also finding out something that others have not — the techniques, the forms, the new uses for interactivity, and new forms of expression — and what they could create that others were unable to create previously?

The “medium is the message” is a phrase from Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book, “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.” Technology alters the scale and shape of human communication and its associated social patterns.

Anouk Wipprecht - F1 trophy maker

Dutch designer/maker Anouk Wipprecht, a fashion favorite of Maker Faire Bay Area, designed and made the trophy for the Dutch Grand Prix last week, as she writes on LinkedIn.

Last Sunday, the trophy I designed for the Formula 1 Dutch Grand Prix with Royal Delft at Zandvoort was lifted on the podium by Lando Norris - and seeing something that started as ideas, sketches, polygons, electronics and a lot of problem-solving become part of that moment was pretty surreal.

I soldered, engineered and coded these trophies with my own hands 🔩⚙️🔧 And alongside Julia Huijer, Joffrey Walonker, Mischa, and Royal Delft’s masterpainter Laurens, we worked on this for almost 6 months.

Adapted from the Make Things newsletter.

Pass a magnet over a hidden spot on the box and — surprise! — the lid snaps open and four spring-powered snakes fly out at your startled guest. This build takes some basic tech I use in a lot of my escape room builds and lets you add some interactive chicanery to your skill set.

Here’s a video that Bizarro made showing the scare box in action.

The key is a magnetic reed switch, the kind found on doors because they have both normally open and normally closed connections. He uses the normally closed switch, “which means that it will supply power to the lock until a magnet releases it.” He also thought about having to reset the box many times during the course of an evening and he came up with a clever way of doing it.

Bizarro was a guest on Make: Live last week with Make: Editor-in-Chief Keith Hammond and talked about his work on escape rooms in Las Vegas. He showed us his scare box and talks about how he designed it — starting with pretty cheap box he happened to find.

If you want to build this jump-scare box, you can find the build instructions in this PDF from Make: Vol 98, “Trick or Treat box.”

Trick Or Treatbox From Make 98

4.8MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

As Bizarro mentions in the video above, share your photos/videos if you actually build it.

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I bet you could tell a pretty good story in two minutes. Telling a story without words is harder — but as filmmakers, we have help. Movement, color, framing, editing, music, all working together to tell a story. The Maker Faire Two-Minute Film Festival challenged our team of three artists to use these tools to tell a story and build a world, with as many handcrafted things as possible. Our film Aiko’s AI Code was one of eight two-minute shorts that screened at Maker Faire Bay Area 2025, and we had fun making it together. So, as our movie’s “director,” I’m pleased to be your guide as we explore the making of Aiko’s AI Code!

Act 1: The Plan

So, how did all this start? I love movies. I love the process of filmmaking, I love animation, and in 2025, I had the goal to do something movie-related with a story I’d written. But what would that something be? I had no idea, until early May when I saw a post about the Two-Minute Film Festival. I didn’t even know what a Maker Faire was, but it looked cool, and a two-minute short film was the perfect challenge to get me motivated — so I went for it! I planned my time to cover the three stages of filmmaking: pre-production (planning, sketching), production (building, filming), and post-production (editing, effects). At the time, it was a foolproof plan.

My hope was to make this short both fun and meaningful. The story would have a message of cautious optimism, telling makers to be mindful of the intent and spirit behind what we make. Artificial intelligence was (and is) on my mind as both an artist and a tech enthusiast, and the title Aiko’s AI Code was one of the first things I decided on — Aiko being a character from my story who became the focus of the film. The plot: Aiko, a cyberspace ninja, conjures a bot to help her navigate the internet — but when her program starts attacking her, she’s made to realize that her creation is a reflection of herself.

Enter CJ, my mom, and the first person I told about my plan. She generously offered to create an Aiko doll for stop-motion animation, but I was a little hesitant. At the time, my plan was actually to make the short using hand-drawn animation — on my own. Then I realized that to make something meaningful for Maker Faire, I should really embrace the “Maker Spirit.” That meant embracing the handmade feel, and embracing teamwork. CJ and the doll were in.

Next we needed a world for the doll to live in. Enter my friend Lauren, who suggested decorating an industrial-themed cardboard set with pipes made of bendy straws. Just like that, we had a set decorator. The team was assembled and ready to get creative! It was now time to start building.

Act 2: The Build

I wanted the setting of the story to feel big, like a large, empty factory or warehouse, inspired by the shipyard buildings where Maker Faire Bay Area would be held.

With the Aiko doll coming in at 8-inches tall, a set that was true to scale would be pretty big. We set out to make three walls out of old cardboard, each about 2.5-feet wide and tall, painted by Lauren to look like concrete and metal, with windows made of tracing paper to diffuse light, as well as four “concrete” Styrofoam floor panels to complete the old-factory vibe.

Lauren Meichtry (set design, set dressing, story): “That day when I was trying to paint concrete — when I was trying to mix all the different colors and organically come up with some kind of rusted material and mossy concrete material — that was fun. That pushed me, because I was like, ‘What can I make out of just basic paint colors? How can I make this resemble different textures and materials?’ It’s all just Styrofoam and cardboard and plastic straws and stuff, so that was a good challenge!”

The Aiko doll was also coming together, starting with a wireframe skeleton that was then padded and costumed in “ninja style.” Aiko’s gloves are made with electrical tape over wire, and the soles of her shoes are made of craft foam. The head is a separate piece that slots into the neck — we were worried about damaging the head while trying to adjust it. This way, I could slide the head off to adjust the wire underneath, and it would all slide back together thanks to a plastic tube inside the head.

The doll’s hair was the most challenging part. I was worried that actual doll hair might easily fray, so instead we decided to use strips of textured black paper. I was pleasantly surprised by how it turned out! CJ arranged the strips into a stylish hairdo, and also applied marker to the strips to give Aiko’s hair an almost-shimmering quality in sunlight.

The other standout piece of Aiko’s ensemble was her reflective sword, a tiny katana that played a big part in the film. The hilt is paper wrapped around a toothpick that was then inserted into the blade — two layers of shiny cardboard glued together, finished and detailed with silver paint.

Meanwhile, I was distracted building out the story; my writer side got the better of me. My story had become two stories: one about making from the heart, and the other about teamwork (Aiko was originally part of a team, and I was looking for ways to include them). But I wasn’t focused on my real-life team, and they were looking for my input. I needed to be a better director, and that meant taking the time to engage with my team. I refocused and cut the story down to the core idea: Aiko and the robot. Aiko’s friends and the teamwork plot line were out.

Lauren: “The cool thing about our dynamic is that we really enjoy working together, and we keep each other accountable. We motivate each other, and will give each other a gentle push: ‘Hey, just checking in, where are you at? What do you need help with?’ We changed the project by brainstorming; that’s just what naturally happens sometimes when you brainstorm. I feel like the project’s changes had a natural flow, and that it was for the better.”

There was of course another reason to trim things down: The movie could only be two minutes long! How was all that extra story going to fit? For the more ambitious storytellers, a two-minute time limit might seem limiting or challenging — but it can also be inspiring! A short time or small scope can help you find that core idea to focus on and develop, making it stronger.

Simplifying things turned out to be the right move. Busy work schedules and health problems meant we couldn’t meet as often. I wondered if we could finish in time. We hadn’t even started to figure out the robot yet!

Then, CJ found an odd piece of cardboard while unpacking a new vacuum cleaner. The way it folded made it look like a four legged creature, and I instantly knew that was our robot. I completed the design with two small cardboard boxes, and CJ wire-rigged and hot glued it all together to create a poseable puppet. (I really like the iridescent eye that can turn a happy green or an angry red depending on the angle!)

CJ Nava (doll and puppet making, costumes, props, character design, set building): “To see what was done with three people on such a rudimentary level makes me think, ‘What would that have looked like if we had better tools?’ We made a robot out of old supplement boxes. If we had taken the time to access a 3D printer, you could have had a real robot. I love what we did! But what would that have looked like with just a few invested nuances and a little bit better tools and supplies?”

Lauren: “I think by keeping it kind of simple, we were able to focus on the creation part and the story and not be so fixated about everything having to look a certain way — it just has to vaguely resemble stuff and we’re fine! People can pick up on a lot with a very little amount of context clues, they can put things together. Everything doesn’t have to be photorealistic. I think that took the pressure off, just having fun with the materials.”

The robot was the last thing to be finished. Time had flown by. I had to start filming!

Act 3: The Shoot

From here on out I was on my own. I had all the pieces, now I had to put them together — sort of. Instead of actually putting the set pieces together, I decided to keep them separate and work with a modular set. That way, I could rearrange the walls for better angles and lighting, and even turn the “concrete floors” into “concrete walls” if needed. This proved helpful given my filming situation — everything was filmed from my bedroom windowsill. Each morning, I would set up the set in the window and get a few shots while the light was good.

The shots of Aiko “conjuring code magic” are favorites of mine, and they were the only special effect I wasn’t sure how to do. I ended up using wired ribbon, coiled tightly around Aiko’s arm to start. Then, with each frame, I loosened and expanded the coils slightly.

I was flying blind — since it was stop-motion, I had no way of knowing how it looked until I pieced it all together. I felt like I was in Old Hollywood, shooting on film, waiting for “dailies” to see how a shot turned out. Across multiple takes, I think I adjusted that ribbon more than 300 times — it definitely gave me an appreciation for stop-motion animators. Once I got into the flow of it, the process was fun!

I also enjoyed the challenge of editing. Each evening, I moved the photos to my computer and lined them all up in a video-editing software, but that alone wasn’t enough. As the saying goes, timing is everything, and the timing needed to be adjusted for each shot — sometimes each frame — for it to feel right. For example, I sometimes repeated specific frames to emphasize a moment or image. One by one, finished shots were added to the final mix and laid over the music until finally, a few days before the deadline, everything was completed.

Two months later, watching our film with an audience at Maker Faire Bay Area, I heard a voice from behind me — someone I’d never met — say, “This is pretty good!” And as rewarding as that was, it was even more rewarding to hear that my teammates were proud of it.

Lauren: “When I first saw it, it reminded me of the early Gumby-era kind of style which I really like, because it’s just very playful. It was cool to see it actually come to life!”

CJ: “I enjoyed just being in that creative energy with other people. To be able to share that process and come out with something that carried a message that I appreciated was a good experience.”

Just as Aiko sees herself reflected in her robot, I saw our team reflected in this little movie. As I finished it, my focus shifted from telling my story to showcasing the awesome work of my collaborators.

I think what I’m most proud of is how my story created an opportunity for others to create and collaborate — and that’s what the Two-Minute Film Festival does, too. If it wasn’t for Maker Faire, this wouldn’t have been made, at least not in the same way, and not as collaboratively.

Lauren: “I really liked when we would all be in the studio together just making stuff, all three of us. That was really fun, because even when we were doing separate things, we’d have music playing while we built little pieces of the set, with all of us engaged in creativity. I think that was my favorite part, us actively making stuff around each other.”

CJ: “Relax and enjoy the process, and you will find your creativity will excel even more. It’s okay to laugh, it’s okay to get off schedule. Loosen up, go to work, and have fun!”

You may think making a two-minute short film will be easy, or maybe you think it seems challenging. Either way, if you love movies like I do, it’s worth doing. Get making, and get filming! I hope to see your short film at the next Maker Faire!

A big Thank You to the folks at Make: for running this film festival and creating opportunities for others to create, and for inviting me to write this article!

And an even bigger Thank You to CJ Nava and Lauren Meichtry, my filmmaking crew who made this film worth making!

The Team
William Nava
@avanlliw on Instagram and YouTube
CJ Nava
@cjnava.art on Instagram
Lauren Meichtry
@Likem_design on Instagram

Will Nava is a young maker who works as a freelance artist and music composer, and Aiko’s AI Code was his first film. He’s currently working on CODED, a film that blends live-action and animation; Dimension Cafe, a series of shorts with Lauren Meichtry; and a sci-fi world building project called “Mother Moon.” He lives in Chico, California.

Maker Faire Two-Minute Film Festival

Does making your own movie sound fun? Michael Corrie filmed A Thing in a single afternoon, and it was selected alongside Aiko’s AI Code as a Judges’ Favorite and screened at Maker Faire Bay Area 2025! Submissions are now open for the 2026 Maker Faire Two-Minute Film Festival, and the deadline is still weeks and weeks away on August 24, 2026. You can do it!

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