Builds & Projects
360° GoPro Rig
I saw early how big 360° video was going to be, so before Insta360 and its peers made it easy, I built my own rigs — first a cube of GoPros, then a hexagon for more resolution, each camera recording its own stream to be stitched into one video later. It started as a handheld rig, but every shot came out with the back of my head in it, so I built a wheeled dolly and then a robotically controlled one to get myself out of frame. More on my YouTube channel — youtube.com/@travisclaypool.
Truck-Mounted Projection Screen
A guerrilla marketing build: a pop-up projection screen viewable from both sides, plus the frame to mount it on a truck bed. A generator, a computer, and a short-throw projector drove the whole thing; the screen itself was a translucent shower curtain. It worked.
The Connected Cactus
I designed and taught a TechShop class called "The Connected Cactus." Students walked in knowing nothing about plants or electronics and walked out with a cactus that tweeted whenever it got thirsty — an ESP8266 and a soil-moisture sensor doing the talking. Taught back before TechShop closed for good.
The Glowing Dictionary
A hollowed-out dictionary that reveals an infinity mirror when opened — lighting up on open, going dark on close, with a new light pattern each time. Battery-powered and USB-rechargeable. It turned out so well that I put it on display at an event, and someone stole it.
Live-Edge Coffee Table
A live-edge slab on hairpin legs — one of several carpentry detours, before resin river tables caught my interest to explore.
Branded Bread
I baked the loaf and I baked the cookie — I like every part of making, cooking included. Add a laser engraver to the mix, and custom-toasted graphics were a natural outcome.
Team Spirit Metalwork
Waterjet-cut college logos, welded to horseshoes and rebar, then powder-coated — made for an FFA charity auction. They're drink holders, specifically so your drink has somewhere to sit while you're throwing horseshoes.
Dual Extruder Upgrade
A customer's single-extruder printer, upgraded to dual for multi-material prints. Designed the new mounts in Fusion 360 around a BondTech extruder and E3D hotend, printed the parts, and got it dialed in.
Carved Pumpkins
A buddy and I have been carving pumpkins on the laser engraver for over a decade. We try to hand them out before Thanksgiving — laser-etched, they hold up clean through October and Halloween — and people genuinely love getting one.
Ducted Fan
3D-printed drone fan ducts and a ducted fan housing with a five-bladed impeller — designed as printable assemblies for UAV propulsion.
Tiny Forklift
A palm-sized 3D-printed forklift — forks, cabin, wheels and all. It did not stay singular. Somewhere past a thousand prints, I started bagging them by color and tallying boxes by the hundred.
Touch-Reactive LED Wall Installation
Conductive paint and copper tape traced across the wall as circuit-board artwork — touch anywhere along a trace and the logo lit up in LEDs. Custom PCBs built around an Adafruit MPR121 capacitive touch sensor drove the whole thing.
Walk / Don't Walk Signs
I bid on an auction for a couple of pedestrian crossing signals and it turned out to be a pallet of about forty. I wired up a bunch so you could plug them in and flip a switch to toggle between walk and don't walk.
Aransas Pass Screen Printing
A parody of the Aransas Pass water tower — the real one has a fish, mine has a mosquito. Anyone who's spent a summer down there knows why. Made for friends and family.
Laser-Cut Mask Patterns
Cut fabric mask blanks on my laser cutter in the early days of the pandemic, bundled them up, and handed them off to a team of church folks who sewed them into finished masks.
Micro FPV Quadcopter
91 grams of EMAX motors, a runcam, and questionable judgment. Small enough to fly indoors, fast enough to regret it.
Halloween Cardboard Builds
A cardboard megabox with three lives. It arrived holding a hot water heater, then got skinned into a wearable personal-space bubble at the peak of the pandemic — climb inside, head through the hole on top, and use the sticks tipped with tiny yellow virus balls to keep everyone six feet away. Finally it became a Magic School Bus–style rocket, complete with tinsel-lined nozzles that blew actual bubbles. Also in the frame: a Kraft Mac & Cheese costume built for a friend.
Cargo Datalogger
I was asked to build a data logger that could record accelerometer, gyro, and GPS data for hours on a single charge and save everything to an SD card. Built around an Arduino Mega and a u-blox M8N GPS module, with an MPU-9250 IMU for motion — all in a weatherproof enclosure built for a cargo payload.
