A couple of months ago, I jumped on an opportunity to build a Make: TV media dispenser for the May Maker Faire. The basic idea is that you plug in your USB stick, choose which episodes you want, and the machine will copy them to your USB drive. I thought this would be a great way for people to get Make: TV without having to download the files themselves.

The process has been slow-going. It took a while to design the user interface (big push buttons!), design a control circuit board, and set up a little Linux computer to run it all. Last weekend, we finally got to the step of building the cabinet. It doesn't look like much yet, but just wait…