Samwise Makers' News
Saturday, September 26, 2026
Five Easy Ways to Sink Your Hardware Startup
Hackaday highlights five easy ways to sink a hardware startup, drawing on observations from Ryan Walker that remain as relevant today as when they were first written. Topping the list: skipping market research — do customers actually exist for this product, and do they want it enough to pay for it? Premature optimization is another key trap, with founders perfecting engineering details before validating whether anyone wants the product at all. The article serves as a reminder that while hardware startups are unique, basic business realities still apply — the hardware itself is only one part of the whole.
Joy and Mayhem at Maker Faire Bay Area’s 20th Anniversary Opening Day
Maker Faire Bay Area opened its 20th anniversary edition on September 25th at Mare Island, drawing a packed first day with more than 300 exhibits. Make: Magazine’s opening-day coverage describes attendees arriving with enthusiasm that “well exceeded physician-recommended levels.” Among Friday’s standout attractions was Udder Mayhem, an alternative controller rhythm game in which players squeeze four silicone udder teats to a beat, playing a barista preparing café lattes to earn their score. The game proved so popular that visitors returned again and again to try to top it. Maker Faire Bay Area runs through September 27th.
A Robot Party in the Foundry at Maker Faire Bay Area
Make: Magazine takes readers inside the Foundry at Maker Faire Bay Area 2026, where a robot party under soaring steel beams and a massive overhead crane showcases nearly every variety of robot imaginable. Exhibits include Bay Area Droid Builders, an eclectic group constructing Star Wars droids; OpenSAINT, a modern replica of the Short Circuit film robot representing over 20 years of work by the Input-Inc team; and the Yolo Maker Guys, bringing Dave’s Cafebot — a high-top table built from a wheelchair base — and Copperbot, a kinetic-art robot packed with vacuum tubes, hundreds of LEDs, stereo sound, flapping wings, and a cup holder.
Welcome to the Light: Inside the Maker Faire Dark Room
Make: Magazine steps inside the Dark Room at Building 101 during Maker Faire Bay Area 2026, a space dedicated to LED art and audiovisual technology. Among the featured installations is Sepia Lux, which includes a 35-foot animatronic inflatable illuminated cuttlefish called the Cuttlefish Art Car, alongside Flash the Tortoise, a mobile sculpture crafted from custom-formed HDPE paneling with similar lighting. Visitors can also encounter Lepidoptera Imaginaria, an AI-powered butterfly that uses machine learning to translate voices into glowing light patterns across 570 LEDs. Interactive elements include a piano and drum set visitors can use to play the lights themselves.
AiboJam: Sony’s Desktop Aibo Lives Again on a $40 Fruit Jam
AiboJam brings a circa-2000 Sony desktop Aibo robot back to life on Adafruit’s Fruit Jam, a $40 credit-card-sized computer powered by an RP2350B running at 150 MHz with 8 MB PSRAM and 16 MB flash. CircuitPython handles the menus, buttons, and pet behaviour, while a native C module renders the robot dog in live 3D. The project includes 49 motion clips, 17 sounds, five skins, and a virtual pink ball for the dog to follow — recreating the full Tiny AIBO experience with its original geometry and animations. AiboJam is not a Sony collaboration and is not endorsed by Sony.
Sources: Adafruit Blog
30 ATtiny412 Chips Recreate D. H. Lehmer’s 1928 Number-Sieve Machine
In 1928, mathematician D. H. Lehmer built the first number sieve using 19 bicycle chains on a common shaft, with twisted wire pieces tripping microswitches to reject candidates. A maker has now recreated this machine using 30 ATtiny412 microcontrollers paired with an RP2040. Each ATtiny handles one modulus; as the RP2040 advances a shared clock, all 30 chips step through their patterns simultaneously, pulling a shared open-drain VOTE line low to reject any candidate. The modern build evaluates roughly 500,000 candidates per second — about 100 times faster than Lehmer’s 1932 gear machine — with results verified against published problems from all three historical Lehmer machines.
Sources: Hackster.io
Sesame: The Open-Source Quadruped Built for Other Makers to Build
Dorian Todd designed Sesame from the ground up specifically for other people to build: a low-cost, open-source palm-sized quadruped using 3D-printed parts, an ESP32 microcontroller, and eight low-cost servos, with a total build cost around $50 to $60. The project has attracted over 1.1 million combined views. Make: founder Dale Dougherty profiles Sesame in the Make: Substack newsletter, covering the robot’s appearance at Maker Faire Bay Area 2026 where visitors can drive Sesame robots in teams of two across a miniature soccer field, using retro game controllers. The open-source design is hosted on GitHub.
Sources: Make: Substack
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