Massimo Banzi is among the judges on “America’s Greatest Makers” a reality competition from Mark Burnett (the reality-TV king behind “Survivor,” “The Apprentice,” and “The Voice”) in partnership with Intel which debuted last week on TBS.

In a first of its kind competition, the tv show takes 24 teams of makers from across US and puts them in head-to-head challenges to invent disruptive projects and win $1 million. The team are composed by unique people from 15 years old to 59 with ideas going to inspire a whole new audience of potential makers.

In the first two episodes, each team pitched their device idea to the judging panel composed by Intel CEO Brian Krzanich; business and financial expert Carol Roth; comedian, serial entrepreneur and co-host of truTV’s Hack My Life Kevin Pereira; and one of the celebrity guests.

At the end of April during 4th episode guest judge Massimo Banzi joins the panel as the remaining makers compete in the “Make or Break” rounds for $100,000 and a spot in the million dollar finale. If you are not in the USA, watch the episode at this link after April 27th.

In the meanwhile you can also watch a beginner maker project to learn how to do obstacle avoidance using Arduino 101. Cara Santa Maria is the trainer who’s going to guide you into the tutorial about this really important topic for projects involving moving objects like robots and drones:

Follow the show on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and use hashtag #AmericasGreatestMakers

We love Star Wars and you probably do, too. So here's every Star Wars project we've posted over the last 10 years.

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Comelicottero is a quadcopter based on Arduino Yún created during the Master in Computer Science at the Universita’ degli Studi of Milan (Italy) by Simone Castellani, Giovanni Intorre and Andrea Toscano:

The idea was to build a drone able to be controlled through WiFi from any PC, tablet or smartphone . Comelicottero is equipped with an accelerometer and a gyroscope for the stability obtained by a PID-based control system. Since Servo library is too slow for the quadcopter dynamics, an hardware PWM was implemented to obtain a 400Hz PWM signal.

The communication between the ground station on a PC and the quadcopter relies on WiFi and, in order to get better results, Bridge library was replaced with an efficient python script on OpenWRT-Yun. On top of that all the code was written to maximise Arduino Yún capabilities. The Navigation System has been designed, simulated on PC, implemented and tested. The autonomous navigation is going through an additional testing due to magnetometer interferences with motors’ magnetic field.

The user can control and monitor data coming from the drone using a gamepad attached to a laptop with a custom software installed.

The sketch and all the documentation will be soon available on GitHub and released with GNU license. In the meanwhile follow their Youtube Channel for updates.

Ready to level-up your robot skills? ArduRoller is a self-balancing, inverted pendulum robot that’s also capable of autonomous navigation indoors or out. I created it as an entry for the annual SparkFun Autonomous Vehicle Competition: The goal was to create a nontraditional vehicle capable of quickly navigating an obstacle course […]

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Ready to level-up your robot skills? ArduRoller is a self-balancing, inverted pendulum robot that’s also capable of autonomous navigation indoors or out. I created it as an entry for the annual SparkFun Autonomous Vehicle Competition: The goal was to create a nontraditional vehicle capable of quickly navigating an obstacle course […]

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The post How to Build a Self-Balancing Autonomous Arduino Bot appeared first on Make:.

North Korean drones! Yes, your local hobby shop has the same aerial reconnaissance abilities as North Korea. Props to Pyongyang for getting v-tail mixing down.

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as the look of a well laid out resistor array, and the folks at Boldport have taken this to a new level. It’s an art piece, yes, but these would make fabulous drink coasters.

Here’s something even more artistic. [cpurola] found a bunch of cerdip EPROMs and bent the pins in a weird chainmaille-esque way. The end result is an EPROM bracelet, just in time for mother’s day. It’s a better use for these chips than tearing them apart and plundering them for the few cents worth of gold in each.

[John] still uses his original Xbox for xmbc, but he’d like to use the controllers with his computer. He never uses the third and fourth controller ports, so he stuck those in his computer. It’s as simple as soldering the controller port module to a connector and plugging it into an internal USB port. Ubuntu worked great, but Windows required XBCD.

[Kerry] has modified an FT232 USB/UART thingy as an Arduino programmer before. The CP2102 USB/UART is almost as popular on eBay, a little less expensive, and equally suited for ‘duino programming. It requires desoldering a resistor and soldering a jumper on a leadless package, but with a fine solder tip, it’s not too bad.

I was invited to speak at Tijuana Innovadora, a regional conference/expo. Mark Hatch of TechShop, Jason Short, an industrial designer by day and Drone programmer by night, as well as David Cuartielles of the Arduino team came as well to speak on an open source hardware panel. I must say that crossing the border into Mexico on foot the night before was an unexpected highlight of the trip. (The line leading in the opposite direction was unimaginably long.)

Our host for the event was Guillermo Montoya of Udrones.com, a Mexican company that is owned by 3D Robotics, which is run by Jordi Munoz and Chris Anderson. 3D Robotics is the business side of DIY Drones and sells the arduPilot controller along with planes and quad copters. It has a design and engineering center in San Diego and now does most of its manufacturing is in Tijuana, with plans to move all of it there eventually.

In the evening, after a tasty dinner at a Tijuana cervicheria, we visited the small manufacturing facility of Udrones on the outskirts Guillermo said they had been in the new facility for six months, after starting in his apartment. An electrical engineer, Guillermo is a childhood friend of Jordi Munoz, who is also from Tijuana and talked his friend into starting up this facility. They manufacture ArduPilot boards, cut body parts out on two CNC machines, and then assemble and test the quadcopters and ship them internationally.

The team of Udrones.com (from left to right, above) is Jesus Cain, Manuel Arriaga, Jose Guillermo Romero, Oscar Nunez, and Raul Montoya. Not shown is Lissana Lozano, who helped us find our way around the conference and the city. Raul and Jesus are also students at the university. They said it takes them about a half-hour to assemble a quadcopter.

Jason Short checks out a special black ArduPilot board.

One of the questions that Guillermo asked me was why there weren’t more signs of the maker movement in Spanish-speaking countries, particularly in Central and South America. He noted that there had not been a mini Maker Faire in those regions. There aren’t many hacker spaces either, although at World Maker Faire in NYC I met Tiburcio de la Carcova who had opened a makerspace in Santiago, Chile. I don’t have a good answer for Guillermo. David Cuartielles, who is Spanish, thought that the delays in translating technical information into Spanish is largely responsible. (MAKE is not published in a Spanish edition.) I would like to think that the example of Guillermo and his team might inspire others to see what’s possible.

DIY drones are the rage! Chris flew a quadcopter off the stage, and entertained droves of questions from how much weight the copters can carry, to FAA regulations, and announced that they would have a new ARM-based APM (Ardu Pilot Mega) by Maker Faire New York.