Greetings, and welcome to The Maker Show, a new Channel 9 show for makers, hackers, developers and disassemblers. If you want to know how to get started with Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's, this is the show for you. If you grew-up taking stuff apart like your family's toaster or your dad's VCR, this is the show for you. If you're more comfortable with a laser cutter than a pair of scissors, then this is definitely the show for you.
The Maker Show is an informal dive into the exciting world of makers. Each week, one of our expert makers will go hands-on with techniques, how to's, tips & tricks in various maker areas including electronics, programming tools, hardware boards, components & sensors, connectivity, building hacks & gadgets, 3D printing, manufacturing prototypes, and other cool yet useful topics. You'll see hardware, you'll see electronics, you'll see code, and you'll definitely see a lot of cool stuff. This is a no fluff technical show. This is a show for beginners and experts alike, everybody's welcome to join.
We have 4 episodes available to watch now, with new shows being published every week. Here is an overview.
Episode 0 – Meet Your Makers
This is special episode 0 (yes, we’re developers, everything is zero-based) where you get to meet your makers. We rounded up some of our show contributors – Jeremy Foster, Sam Stokes, Bret Stateham, Ian Philpot, Kenny Spade and myself - who are all makers - so you get to know them better, I'll get their perspective on the maker world, how to get started, and ask them what they have in store for you in future episodes of the Maker Show.
Episode 1 – Introduction to Electronics
Episode 1 may have been a lame Star Wars movie, but it’s an awesome episode of The Maker Show. David Crook does an introduction into electronics and how they work. This episode focuses on many of the fundamentals of the very thing that drives most of our projects, electricity. How to generate more power, how to ensure you don't blow your circuits, why electricity flows where it does. And of course introducing a good philosophy of when life gives you lemons, to make electricity.
Episode 2 – So I Got a Blinking LED… Now What?
In episode 2, Brian Sherwin starts with the "Hello World" of electronics: blinking an LED. But what do you do after that? In this episode of the Maker Show, Brian uses the Arduino to introduce a few new ways to work with your blinking LED from inputs with buttons and potentiometers to viewing input in the serial monitor.
Episode 3 – Arduinos and Servos
In Episode 3, Sam Stokes turns to DC Micro Servo Motors and Pulse Width Modulation. These tiny controllers are inexpensive, cost less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks, and pack a powerful punch with 1.54 Kg-cm of torque, and weight in with a mass of 8.6 grams! Servo Motors were first conceived by Nikolai Tesla who designed the AC types of Servo Motors. He used an ingenious rotary sensor design that was used to create precision gyro systems that took humans to the moon! The servo motor will be a nice addition to your blinking LED that you created in the last show. With a little work, you could use a potentiometer to turn the servo motor. The show also takes to the beach where the design was tested successfully in the California surf.
Make sure to bookmark http://themakershow.io for new episodes every week, typicaslly posted on Thursdays in the morning. If there is a specific topic, product or tech you'd like us to cover on the show, let us know by tweeting to @TheMakerShow, commenting under the latest episode on Channel 9, or email us at themakershow@microsoft.com.
This post was originally posted on Nick Landry's Age of Mobility blog.