DIY CIRCUITS

MAKING IT WITH THE

MAKE CONTROLLER

Our board does art, robotics, music, and more. By William Gurstelle

Photograph by Brian Jepson

The MAKE Controller Kit is a powerful and easy-to-use hardware platform that can interact with the physical world. It’s based on a microcontroller, which is essentially a computer-on-a-chip. Unlike general-purpose microprocessors, here the memory and device interfaces required to run a simple (or not-so-simple) application are integrated onto a single board.

The idea for the device was conceived amidst the fire and smoke that issues from the ramshackle compound where world-famous Survival Research Labs pursues its strange and violent mechanistic art. Anyone who has attended an SRL artistic review (also known as “the most dangerous shows on

Earth”) never forgets the experience. The actors are machines — big, powerful, and dangerous machines.

The MAKE Controller traces its lineage to the digital controllers used to control SRL’s robots and artistic weaponry. Engineers Michael Shiloh and David Williams designed much of the hardware that controlled the movement of SRL’s robots and gave the art its intelligence.

We asked members of the maker community to share some of their applications. We heard from people who use the device to do an amazing number of tasks: everything from building interactive video art installations with middle-school students, to streaming selected information from the internet,

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