Hello everyone! I’ve been busy!! ...course I’m always busy. Since I left you last on the blog, I’ve traveled to the White House Maker Faire, Rome Maker Faire, Disneyland, and between every trip, I’ve been writing and finishing my very first book!

The book is called “Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Project Book: Super-Simple Arduino”. It’s got three awesome projects, bonus ideas for you to explore, and fun little doodles and robots to help you along! It’s based on the episode I did 4 years ago when I was 9, but it has a whole new project, tons more about programming, and its COOLER!! It also has some science project ideas, builder ideas, and artsy ideas too. The first of a series of books I plan on making about making stuff, the series even has it’s own dedicated website at superawesomebook.com. If you're wondering, I got my glasses only a month ago! Yes they're perscription, everything is IN FOCUS!!

This book was the most difficult project I have worked on yet. At first, I totally thought it would be easy...and it wasn’t. It took a lot of drawing, writing, revising, revising again... and again… It got quite frustrating. But I am super excited it’s finally done though!! I hope my book can be an opportunity for kids and adults to get into making and building, and to let their creative juices flow!

Anyways, for my second trip to DC: The White House Maker Faire was so cool (even though it was 95 fahrenheit with 90% humidity)! It was a flipping Maker Faire inside the White House! The robot giraffe was even on the lawn! I met amazing people, got to hear the president speak, and saw a lot of old friends. It was really great, and I was very honored to be there. Even though I didn’t get to present anything, I can’t wait for their next one.

Next up in September, I went to Rome in Italy, which was not only my first time to that country, but one of the most memorable trips I have ever been on. I got up on stage and talked about my adventures in making, then we walked around the HUGE Maker Faire there, which was AWESOME. There were a lot of aspiring makers that got to talk to amazing people, see incredible projects, and ask questions. Rome was beautiful, exciting, and a crazy trip. We walked around for hours around the city and saw all the ruins, and we got stuck waiting for a bus that never came and ended up getting soaking wet in a minor flash flood. We ate pasta, and pizza, and weird licorice gum. Italy was extraordinary, and even though we missed our flight on the way back, we got to stay an extra day outside of Rome, and I can’t wait to go again.

After that and just for fun, for the first time in my life, I got to go to Disneyland! I know that doesn’t seem like much, but I seriously felt like a 6 year old again, and I had a ton of fun. I went with my sister’s girl scout troop and I totally thought the whole trip was going to be boring...but I actually made some new friends. I went on a bunch of awesome rides and met a few princesses. Unfortunately on my last day, I sprained my ankle running around on pirate island! I was in crutches for 2 weeks, and I have to wear a brace for the next month... but I still had fun!!

SO! You’re probably wondering whats going on with my videos. Yea, I haven’t made any....in a really long time. Making a book, taking trips, 7th and 8th grade homework, doing talks and leading my younger siblings at home has taken all my time. But now since I’m older, the style of videos I made when I was eight doesn’t quite match up to who I am right now. I plan on changing it up. The videos will include more silliness, references to awesome shows and fandoms and stuff, and I may even try to get out video blogs more regularly. It’s very hard for me to make videos, with school getting in the way. If I don’t make a video, I will make a instructables or a blog post on what’s going on! =D

I hope you guys enjoyed your summer and have a happy thanksgiving/holiday season! Always remember... GET OUT THERE AND MAKE SOMETHING!!

HI GUYS!!! So, How have you been doing? Good, good. Oh really? Awesome!

Well, I have been doing pretty well, but I’ve been hecka busy. Sorry even though I keep promising new episodes it just doesn’t happen. School has been torture, I started Karate, and Girl Scouts has been fun but selling cookies is a chore, and I’ve also been working on secret projects (hee hee hee) and traveling the world for STEM and showing the WaterColorBot.

It’s been crazy. Everything is crazy. You’re crazy. I’m crazy! No, just kidding... let’s get on with the blog post!

GUESS WHAT: January 2014 was the first WaterColorBot anniversary! 1 full year of awesome progress and watercolor painting awesomeness. Yay! I wanted to make a birthday cake for it to paint.. but then got busy again. Geeez! February and March were boring catching up with school and stuff, but also some planning for April!

I was invited to go to Geneva, Switzerland to talk at the UN for International Girls in ICT day! The UN peoplez!! It was so cool, and I got to talk about ICT (Information and Communications Technology) and STEM and why I think it’s really awesome for girls to get into it and work it. Also talk had fun and made and made an awesome mobile app and showed off the WaterColorBot (which everyone really liked)! I’ll have to do a full post on that one day soon. Here's a quick video they shot to give you an idea of what it was like.

So yep! That was fun. Oh! And hey, I’m making this awesome- wait! It’s secret!!! I almost told you what my super secret project is. Phew! If I did, you would know all about-OOP! I almost told you again! Well, I guess I could just say that we will be announcing something incredibly super awesome on Saturday at Maker Faire Bay Area 2014! And, soon after we will blog about it and how its about- ARG. Anyways...

This summer, I really want to take charge and own my time. Here’s my goal list for the next four months:

• Make 5 episodes or more, changing to format of the episodes a bit: More humor, easier editing! :D
• Try and build more stuff and explore new fun ways to make the shows.
• I want to make at least 100 different projects
• Aluminum casting my own sword with lost PLA casting from 3D printed thing!
• Begged parents for Ukulele, earned money from WaterColorBot, got it, learning right now! YAY!
• Mostly built an electric Go Kart for my science faire project, but couldn’t find the right parts in time, argh! I want to finish that puppy NOW! (Well, not now, but as soon as possible. ;) )

But before all that... Come see us at Maker Faire!

We don’t have a booth this year (I need my time to go see the faire!), but I will be doing fun demo stuff with the WaterColorBot and an Arduino at the Make live stage in the Expo hall on Saturday at 11:30 with the special announcement at the end. On Sunday at the education stage at 11:00am, we will be talking in detail about the announcement, and you can ask questions and stuff then too! Also I’ll be hanging around the Atmel Truck both days and building simple Arduino projects with kids for a bit. Hope to see ya at Maker Faire!! :D

EDIT: Oh! Almost forgot, my latest fun project with my dad and @MakerBlock is MakerBingo! Print your own bingo card for Maker Faires everywhere! Share it with your friends, give em to family! Go out and have fun!!

TV show appearances, Multi-Maker Faires, and Crazy Robot Adventures? All part of a regular summer for us here at SSAMS.

When we last left our heroine “Super-Awesome” Sylvia, she had just started to recover from a whirlwind trip from RoboGames to the White House with her Watercolor painting CNC platform, the WaterColorBot. Now in only a short 2 and a half months, we’ve gone around the country and back again. Here’s the highlights, in reverse chronological order:

July 16th: Sylvia launches her very first original product, the WaterColorBot, as it’s own educational kit on Kickstarter. Supported and manufactured by the incredible staff at Evil Mad Scientist, this one is sure to be a game changer, not to mention it’s fun and incredibly educational, but we’ll have to make our goal of $50k before August 15th! Can we make it? Check out the widget on the front page, or just tell all your friends, family and teachers to go to watercolorbot.com for more info.

July 16th: Sylvia and Lenore of Evil Mad Scientist will appear on Maker Camp! Sylvia will be driving up to Makezine HQ and talking all about the bot, and taking questions from viewers around the world. Check the Maker Camp event page to ask questions and see them in action!

July 11: To New York, for a quick appearance on the Katie Couric show, airing Tuesday July 16th, 2013! Sylvia shows off a few awesome science demos, and the WaterColorBot tries to draw the Katie show logo. To a nation looking to improve their science and engineering literacy, hopefully this will help to inspire them all. Check out more and some web exclusive content from Sylvia on KatieCouric.com

July 6: Sylvia turns 12! This anniversary also marks the beginning of her fourth season of Maker Show, this year is going to be spectacular.

June 29: To Missouri, for Sylvia’s third year at the Show me state’s greatest show and tell, Maker Faire KC! Sylvia and her bot painted over 35 portraits over 2 days, not to mention we had a great time at Hammerspace, playing with the robots, and playing around at Science City.

June 19: To Atmel, microchip headquarters of the world! Sylvia was featured at their bring your kid to work day, celebrating education, engineering of all kinds, and awesome experiments, most involving microprocessors like our favorite, the Arduino. Read more about Sylvia's jaunt into integrated circuit fame on the EMSL blog post.

May 18: Maker Faire Bay Area, and incredible bustling non-stop exciting amazing everything at once kind of thing. Lots more makers this year, so much to see. Sylvia manned the booth for a while, but still got a chance to escape and really enjoy the faire, always a good thing. Thousands came to see the bot, and almost everyone walked away with a smile.

To the future!

This summer isn’t over yet, Sylvia will be co-leading an Extreme Engineering camp July 22 to 26 with Gary Stager, then off to Space camp in August thanks to the amazing support of fans. Not to mention so, so much more to come, like new episodes (really, we mean it!), books, and things we can’t even imagine. See you all soon, and don't forget to breath... and get out there and make something!

December was a blast! TEDx San Jose let me meet amazing people, and listen to their amazing talks. Olympic Gold winner Dana Vollmer showed me her medal, and we became best buds!

Susan Fonseca had a really good talk about losing her father, and how 3D printed organs might help lots of people soon because of work done by Singularity University. Maybe with a little luck we'll get to work together on something amazing too.

Afterward, Megan Keely performed some great music for the audience with her band, and even gave me an acorn necklace once we were done! Check out her music, it really is awesome, her dad helps her make it too.

Adam Steltzner (who works at NASA!) was just an awesome guy, and gave an AMAZING TALK about how he and his team helped land the incredible curiosity rover!! (totally jealous)

Jeannie Kahwajy helped me a whole lot with my speech, giving me tips on ways to speak, how to show big points, and a LOTS more. Jeannie’s talk was really good too, she describes ways some people can try to be helpful but sound mean, and how to recognize and help change that.

At lunch, we did a giveaway to a random selection of people by putting vouchers under seats. Super-huge thanks to Sherry at Makezine for coming through at the last minute and getting us the super-awesome books and kits for the giveaway like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi starter kits from the Maker Shed, and the beautifully illustrated Make: Electronics Book and Encyclopedia of Electronic Components

Fans of the show and kids of all ages came up to talk and get autographs. So many cool people there that I could have talked with them for hours. It's probably the best thing you can do at things like this, to talk to interesting people and share ideas, thoughts and inspiration. I had a really good time. :)

2012 was crazy busy for me and my family. Running all the country, over 15,000(!) miles, and lots of local conferences too. We didn’t end up making any more than 2 episodes this year (except this year's holiday gift guide), but we were still busier than ever. Sorry we couldn’t do a bit more, but it’s just me and my family.

In 2013 we will be going to even more Maker Faires, and we’ll be getting back on track with making the new season of Sylvia’s Super-Awesome maker show!! Our next episode will be on Joey Hudy’s SMT LED matrix board for the Arduino, and the next will come soon after. Also, I want to say to all the awesome people who contributed to my New York trip this last September, I am sorry for the wait on getting perks out on time. I promise that by this February, we will have all of those perks out there and sent! Again, I am really sorry.

We’ve got big plans this next year, and with help, I know we can make them happen. See you out there on the road, and remember to get out there and make something!

While we were at Bay Area Maker Faire 2012, out of nowhere, Robotgrrl came up to us and asked if I wanted her one and only, WaterBrrd! Of course I said yes!

I bet you're wondering what this RoboBrrd stuff is all about....

RoboBrrd started out as an interactive robot made of felt, popsicle sticks and an Arduino. Now, Robotgrrl is making it into an easy to solder board and lasercut kit for making your very own open source RoboBrrd!

The kit isn’t quite done yet (it’s hard to put together a kit!), so I just got the wood parts that she made using the laser at Evil Mad Science Laboratories!! Muahahaha!

To make the wings flap, we used paper clips as armatures connected to little blue servos mounted in the rectangle holes behind the eyes.

For the beak, it was a lot trickier! With the top and bottom beak parts loose, I figured out that with some cardboard and a paperclip triangle, you could keep it steady and open and close it. The servo at the back just pushes and pulls the cardboard.

When its fully completed, I want to make my WaterBrrd say my tweets by chirping and flapping its wings twice, or have it tell me the weather and current temperature. The possibilities are endless!

For right now, its flapping its wings, beaking around, blinking its eyes, and talking with an old android phone my dad hooked up. The programming was all done by me.

I used an Arduino Uno and programmed it very easily. It is just like scratch, except with words and semicolons. The robobrrd will be a great kit and I can’t wait till it comes out! GO ROBOBRRD!!!!!

(Continued from Maker Faire: Day 0) In no time, the first real day of Maker Faire was upon us, and we were as ready as we could be for the onslaught of wonders.

First things first, we set off to the Fun Bike Unicorn Club racing area to prepare our pedalcar. The D, our driver for the "Flying Fishmonger", was out in spades right off the bat, ready for the qualifying run. Once brakes were checked and the chain stayed on long enough to run around the track a few times, we were ready for our first race! Even though we'd only spent about $80 and 2 weeks building it, we thought it held up pretty well. Even though by the second race our rear drive tire completely blew out, it was still a lot of fun and we wouldn't trade it for the world. The overlapping CD fish scales were also very popular with the crowds of people coming to ogle the incredible pedalcars.

Due to a fluke of failed communication and our family in the middle of moving to a new house, we didn't have a schedule this Maker Faire, so we decided to head out and see as much as we possibly could. Out on the grounds, Sylvia found two of her favorite hackers/makers, Joe Grand and Zoz Brooks of Prototype This! Joe even recognized her and everyone got some stickers.

At the Craftsy "Make & Take" booth Sylvia made herself a stylin' star-and-ribbon-wrapped headband, then off to the FYFFH booth where we made our own "Freak Flags" to fly, then over to Autodesk to get a 3D head scan at their super camera photo booth. After a quick snap, we ran into Jeri skating around with her hard rocking Commodore-64 Bass Guitar, then we found our good friend Gever Tulley (we first met at DML). Sylvia and little sister Talulah sat down at his Brightworks booth to try the "Tinker your way out of this!" challenge. After totally winning (really!) we hopped around the corner where we learned all about simple binary computation with 8-balls and wooden flip-flops at EMSL's Digi-Comp II.

Outside, we ran into so many amazing sights, too numerous to count. A spiral sculpture of fire, a robotic band playing every instrument imaginable, a life-size Dalek from Doctor Who, a towering 50 foot tall flaming umbrella tree, electric vehicles galore, a giant rubber and steel fire breathing dragon, and then an EVEN BIGGER than life-size Dalek!

Throughout the day, Sylvia worked on collecting her "photoception" picture-in-a-picture shots with previous Maker Faire phenoms... Saturday got her John Park with his Arduino Grande (3 years), Dale Daugherty (2 Years), Jeri Ellsworth with her C-64 bass (2 years), and Lenore Edman of EMSL (2 Years)

Our first day of Maker Faire was outstanding, and we just couldn't wait to see what day two had in store! Learn all about our adventure in the next action packed blog post soon...

At Bay Area Maker Faire (BAMF) 2011 (and now at Maker Faire KC) one of our demos is how to build your very own laser tripwire to help guard your room!

Inspired by action_owl's version at instructables, Sylvia and I made up our very own version with audio feedback for calibration, and authentic alarm sounds!

Get the code at Github to copy and paste into your Arduino IDE right here!

More instructions, build details and the like to be updated after our Demo today.

Update: Alrighty, so our demo didn't go quite as planned, with our cheap laser diode falling to pieces during the presentation, but we did our best with what we had. We're quite sure that with more time we'd have had everything working great! Not that it matters to much, as there's always time for you to get out there and try it yourself!

As the code explains hints at, for this build you only need a few things:

• An Arduino (any version will do)
• A small cheap red laser diode (a small laser pointer will do)
• A small piece of mirror, or something else flat and reflective
• An infrared LED from a remote control (or something else to sense the light from the laser)
• and last but not least, a speaker (if you want a noisy alarm)

For the code as it stands, plug your laser's positive lead into pin 13, one lead of the speaker into pin 10, and the positive lead of the LED into analog pin 0. All the other leads go to ground. When powering up, the laser gets ~3volts from pin 13, which should be enough to light it and send it's photons off toward the mirror, where they will bounce off. If aimed correctly they should find their way back to the infrared LED.

When infrared light hits the LED, it sends very tiny (but measurable) voltage back through to analog pin 0. On our LED, this was read at around 115, or about 0.5v. Without the laser, this came down below 100 reliably, so we set the alarm threshold at 95. If the LED's value stays above that number for more than 5 seconds, the alarm is considered "Armed" (it gives a nice beep every second to let you know, then a double beep when it's armed). If the beam is broken (and the LED value drops below the threshold), Woop woop! Alarm!

A serial signal is sent at the same time, and if you have a program on a computer listening for this, you can trigger any action you want! Maybe a twitter message for every intrusion, or perhaps an email or text message silently alerting you!

We may just want to go ahead and do a quick video on this cool little project in a bit, with all the bugs worked out this time :)

Leave a comment if you've got questions! Thanks!

Update: For our Maker Faire KC demo, we took out the middle man mirror and replaced the Arduino powered laser diode (which gave us problems galore!) with a simple laser pointer pointed directly at the LED. This is an invisible modification and doesn't require any code change, so you can make yours either way.

Hey guys! After almost 2 months of waiting, my new favorite episode of Sylvia's Super Awesome Maker Show is here! Super Simple Arduino!

I show you how to build two super simple projects for Arduino with code I helped write! A Super Simple Strobe for looking at things in slow motion, and the Randomly Influenced Finger Flute (or, the RIFF). And with the help of our electronic puppet friends, we explore how the Arduino does some of it's magic. It was a blast to make and I hope you have a blast watching it. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Thanks for watching!