This month on Maker Update, rolling your own slot machine, a robot pal, a mask that doesn’t hide your face, a brake light for your bicycle, and building your first game in circuit python.

This month on Maker Update: A Robot Xylophone, Adafruit’s Open for Business, Painting with Light, Teletyping with Clue, Texting with Blinka, and the BBC MicroBit grows a tail.

This week on Maker Update, rolling your own D-O droid, a heart sculpture that checks your pulse, a handheld sniffer, a magic chef, indoor swing, pferd files, and I’ll explain what this is.

This week on Maker Update, a desktop air tester, a drill press table lift, art from particle collisions, working with black & white TVs, EL Neon, and diffraction finishes for 3D prints.

This week on Maker Update, flipping switches, free boards for PyCon, shields, swords, robot music, purple rovers, LED legs, neon bikes, Lidar for dogs, and a look at PyPortal.

This week on Maker Update, an LED screen guitar, the Pi 3 Model A+, VLC for Raspbian, Kodak’s 3D Printer, a Pizza Slice Stream Controller, making Lithopanes, and testing servos.

This week on Maker Update, a MIDI compatible music box, alternative controller indie games at GDC, an Arduino for your knife, controlling your computer with zombie heads, free game developer software, and Hackspace issue 5. This week’s Cool Tool is the Makey Makey Kit.

The annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is a wonderfully outrageous, high tech fantasy land where corporations like Microsoft, Facebook, Sony and Google, hold court with their latest zombie-blasting simulators and VR headsets. But it has a secret.

Off in the back (technically in a whole separate building), away from the buzz and hustle of the main show floor, is a small cluster of 20 curated, one-of-a-kind games under a banner labeled “alt.ctrl”. Here, the creators of these games encourage people to come over and play their project. They call themselves Developers, but I see them as Makers like myself. People who take their fun from mixing equal parts Art and Engineering. 

This week on Maker Update, solar-power plant monitors, Dale and Naomi make up, a macro for your GoPro, and Make’s desktop fabrication guide. The Cool Tool this week is the DLI IoT Relay.

This week on Maker Update, a giant mechanical iris, a lightsaber, remote control Arduino, a micro torch, python boxes, Google HATs, Processing Spirographs, and Maker Faires. Support the show by purchasing this week’s featured tool.