Maker Faire festivals are a beautiful showcase of what modern technology makes possible. The whole maker world feels like a big playground for both kids and adults. It’s incredible to think about what anyone can create at home today, on a small budget, using programmable controllers and online resources. And there’s no need to be especially handy anymore—you can leave most of the work to 3D printers or home CNC machines.
The store Pájeníčko.cz specializes in DIY projects and offers all the equipment for them – soldering equipment, materials, measuring instruments, electrical parts and for fans of open-source tech, a game console Picopad, which you can assemble and customize yourself. It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico and it even runs Doom, although it’s estimated to only run at 10–15 frames per second.
Another of the small consoles, a GameBoy emulator with a Raspberry RP2040 microcontroller, was exhibited along with his other projects by Vlastimil Slinták under the brand
µArt.cz.
The young Matyáš Michalec showed off his small portable computer MAT built on ESP32, for which he programmed his own operating system MATOS, develops his own programming language, compiler and applications for it and plans to use everything in building smart devices for the home.
