Since the day I started calling myself a maker, I thought about showing some of my projects to a larger audience. This year, I finally decided to do so. I registered as an exhibitor for the second biggest maker fair in Europe and the third biggest on the planet, the “Maker Fair Hannover 2026”.
When I sent in my application, I was surprised that they accepted my proposal within 20 minutes. I was immediately hyped and started planning. Luckily for me, it was not my first fair. During my first job in Berlin, the company I worked for participated in a lot of trade fairs and I was usually involved with the organisation, packing and exhibiting. Therefore I had a good idea on how to prepare and what to bring along.
The project I decided to show off is the biggest one I’ve ever worked on. The Dot-Bot. As support for the fair, the artist from Hanover, Jascha Müller, supported me as well as the initiator of this project, Falko Krause. We got further support from Michael and Luisa. Thanks a lot for your help.
The first To-Do for the fair was that I wanted to have something to hand out to visitors. Therefore I decided to design and order business cards.
Some time later, as an evening project, I decided to address a pain point I usually had while testing on site with the full robot assembled, which was that I had to walk a lot between the computer and the robot, e.g. for calibration purposes. I came up with a companion app that I can open on my smartphone which allows me to control the basic functionalities that I need to calibrate the robot and control the automation.
In the days before the event, I spent a lot of time prepping the hardware, and completing maintenance on parts such as ball bearings and pulleys. I replaced the wooden back boards with new ones that have only the required mounting holes and look nice and clean. I also decided to print lots of spare parts, for everything that I figured could use a replacement after hours of plotting.
When the day finally arrived, we packed the bot, a 3D printer, all the necessary tools and materials into a rental car and headed to Hannover.
On site, we first started building our canvas, a huge 5x3m wooden wall that we could mount the Dot-Bot to.
After a first coat of black paint, we immediately started with the initial tests.
Then we wrapped up for the setup day and went to socialize with the other makers. To kick off the next day, we started with more tests to dial in precision and calibration.
We then decided to paint the canvas over, to have a nice and uniform background for the first mural. However, we were surprised by a summer storm which caught us off guard, and we had to watch everything getting soaked. We were only able to pack our laptops in our bags and stash some objects away before we headed for cover as well.
But then, the real fun began. Our first mural. It was split up in 3 passes, that we each drew first with the bot, then filled them in. After those 3 passes, we added the final outlines one last time and the mural was complete. But before that, we had to wrap up all of out gear one last time, because more rain was coming.
The next day, we finished the first pass, the infill and then added one final pass of outlines to wrap this mural up.
Since the next mural for the event was not quite ready, we decided to add the outlines of another WIP mural on top of this one, which resulted in a chaotic wall spelling out the text LOVE.
Next, we painted the canvas one last time completely, to start with our final mural. The main sponsor of the event, Stanley, offered to feature us on their social media channels if we create a Stanley themed mural for them. We therefore quickly designed a new piece and started with the outlines
… again, some manual infilling was done …
… and a final pass of outlines to wrap up this artwork.
The final result then looked like this:
And only minutes after completing this mural, we had to start packing out gear since the fair was about to close. Here is one last image with the side wall and the Dot-Bot already disassembled.
Thanks a lot to the organisation of the maker fair, and to all the people that helped bringing this project to the fair and making the entire journey a success.
If you need a custom robot, something designed in CAD or a huge mural, please feel free to write me an email using this address!
