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Maker Faire

Maker Faire 2026

Get inspired by the energy and ingenuity of makers worldwide at Maker Faire Bay Area and Maker Faire Rome. Watch the highlight reel and see how our technology fuels creativity—from robotics and IoT to wearables and smart devices. Are you ready to build what’s next? Explore projects, connect with our experts and discover how we can power your next big idea.

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Maker Faire Bay Area 2026

September 25–27, 2026

Find us at Maker Faire Bay Area's 20th anniversary celebration with some of our most interactive demonstrations yet. Turn vegetables into musical instruments with a carrot piano and potato drums, play retro arcade games built with our PyKit Explorer, tune a balancing robot using Bluetooth® LE and more—all in Coal Shed 3. 

Maker Faire Rome 2026

October 23–25, 2026

Explore new demos at Maker Faire Rome, including gesture-controlled robotic hands and facial recognition with liveness. Perfect for students, we are ready to inspire the next generation of innovators with practical technologies and educational tools that make engineering accessible, interactive and fun. 

Maker Creations

ProjectDescription

Balancing Bot

See real-time control and sensing in action with a self-balancing robot powered by Zephyr® RTOS on PIC32 and SAM microcontrollers. Using onboard inertial sensors and advanced control algorithms, the robot continuously adjusts its position to maintain stability on two wheels. This demo highlights how our embedded solutions enable responsive, deterministic control for robotics, automation and intelligent edge applications.

Blipblox® Musical Synthesizers

Discover the joy of music with Blipblox, Playtime Engineering's music synthesizer that is designed for children. Dive into a world of interactive melodies and hands-on fun, igniting creativity and musical exploration. 

Claw Machine

The Claw Machine reimagined—no quarters needed. The PyKit Explorer-operated Claw Machine ditches the touchpad and puts you in direct control. Tilt the PyKit Explorer controller board to drive a segmented robotic arm through three dimensions, lining up your grab with nothing but your own sense of balance and a 9-DoF IMU. Each segment of the arm responds to the angle of the board in real time, translating your wrist movements into precise mechanical motion. It's part carnival classic, part robotics demo and a simple way to show that IMU-driven control isn't just for drones and self-balancing bots. Step up, tilt to aim and test your precision as you navigate the challenge below.

PyKit Explorer Arcade Game

The PyKit drives multiple classic retro games, including Donkey Kong®, Snake, and Super Mario Bros.®, complete with sprite rendering, collision detection and sound effects, all in CircuitPython® on a 32-bit Arm® Cortex®-M4F built into an arcade cabinet. Step up, grab the joystick and see what a CircuitPython development board can do when you give it a proper stage.

PyKit Explorer Balancing Bot

Balancing on two wheels is a complex control challenge. See how a Nine-Degree-of-Freedom (9-DoF) Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), complementary filtering and a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control loop running in CircuitPython work together to keep this robot upright and stable in real time. Our Balancing Bot shows the PyKit Explorer performing real-time sensor fusion and closed-loop motor control—the same fundamental techniques used in self-driving vehicles, drones and industrial automation—all written in approachable Python code that you can read and modify in real time.

PyKit Explorer Ruler Band

Did you know that a carrot can play a musical note? Our PyKit Explorer's capacitive touch inputs turn vegetables into instruments. Tap the carrot piano keys or work the potato drums to trigger notes through the on-board audio amplifier. Play the synthesizer by tilting the ruler left and right to sweep through pitches, forward and back to ride the volume and wave your hand over the proximity sensor to bend notes in real time. This band of conductive vegetables eliminates traditional controllers, rather utilizing a 9-DoF IMU and a gesture sensor doing what embedded engineers do best: turning hardware into something people can't resist.

MakerZone Webinar Series

Our MakerZone webinar series focuses on the Maker community and covers the projects, resources and product portfolios we offer to support this vibrant and creative group. The sessions cover topics such as our evaluation boards, Arduino® support in our microcontroller (MCU) development ecosystems and other subjects of interest for makers everywhere. Watch the series on-demand for access to cool maker content and live audience Q&A.

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MakerZone Gatherings

Gathering #1: Series Kick-Off

In the first gathering, Bob Martin introduced the resources that we offer to the maker community and the strategy changes he has noticed in the maker space over the past few years, especially in the area of microcontroller (MCU) evaluation boards and the hardware and software ecosystems around them. Bob also introduced the new family of AVR® MCU devices and some of the new features of these parts.

Gathering #2: Maker Space Hardware Part 1

Gathering #2 began with a quick rundown of the more popular Arduino® and Arduino-compatible boards and the upgrades and functional trends that have appeared over the past few years. Bob then moved on to the Curiosity Nano platforms and how they fit in the maker space with direct Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) support.

Gathering #3: Maker Space Software Part 1

Gathering #3 introduced the Arduino® IDE 2.0. Bob dove directly into the Arduino support packages for our Curiosity Nano boards and the Arduino sketch import functionality available in Microchip Studio and MPLAB® X IDE. Importing sketches into formal C++ projects opens up a whole new world of debugging power.

Gathering #4: Maker Space Hardware Part 2

Gathering #4 picked up from where Bob left off in Gathering #2, introducing the mini cellular IoT board, our first board specifically targeted for the maker space. 

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