I'm giving away 480 Raspberry Pis with this 'PIZ' dispenser at Open Sauce. And this video is sponsored by Squarespace. Giving away Raspberry Pis at Open Sauce involved buying 10 of these gun magazine springs, and I'm probably on some ATF watch list now. I'm not even sure I'll make it through airport security. See, a few months ago, I decided it'd be cool to find a way to give away 480 Raspberry Pis. Not Pi 5s, mind you. That'd be $30,000. 480 Raspberry Pi Picos on this reel. I was like, What's a fun maker way to give away Raspberry Pis? And I decided to do something I've never done before: mechanical engineering. And it's literally one week until I leave. It's Friday, June 7. My only constraint is I have to give away all 480 Picos using something I build that fits in my carry-on. First, I was going to build a backpack reel dispenser thing that's sliced off one Pi at

a time, and that would make it so I don't have to cut apart all 480 of these. I learned on the MrBeast set last year, you really don't want to do things hundreds of times when you're against a deadline. But that backpack design would need a knife or scissors. And hey, the TSA would never let that pass. And B, I know I'd end up killing someone. So killing people is out, and it has to get through the TSA. What's the most innocent-looking thing I could think of to dispense Raspberry Pis? A PEZ dispenser. Or well, a PIZ dispenser. Like just scale up a PEZ dispenser for Raspberry Pi Picos, and I'm done. There's gotta be a little AI tool to scale up a PEZ design, right? I even have the AI Pi I just built to do it. But no. And after getting to this stage in my procrastination, I just realized I'm building something that

looks exactly like a handgun magazine on x-rays. And I'm going to have 10 of them in my carry-on. But getting through security is a future-Jeff problem. Right now, I have 10 springs, a bunch of PEZ dispensers for inspiration, and a dream. Except I have a problem. You see this Venn diagram? I'm terrible at mechanical engineering. I can extrude circles and rectangles in Fusion 360, but the most complicated part I've ever designed was basically the bottom half of an enclosure. But hey, only one way to learn. It's time for a CAD design montage. I'm pretty sure they didn't design Fusion 360 for somebody that is like me. Because right now, I'm trying to get this, I'm trying to get a rectangle to move. You see this rectangle? When I try moving it, this little ball, which I thought was like a centerline ball thing, is like flopping around in there.

Like what? What? It seems to go, I don't even know, it's going in like an arc. I want it back down here. How do I, how do I get this ball down here, and how do I keep this the same size? I don't understand it at all. When I move it, it gets smaller, and then the ball goes up there. The ball used to be right in the middle like that. How do I, oh, here's the, oh boy, now I don't know what the ball's doing here. Now I've created a parallelogram. I don't understand Fusion. Okay, now I've made a line. I have come back full circle... to a line. It's Monday now, and from here on out, you'll probably hear a 3D printer going in the background. Over the weekend, I reworked the tray, made a pusher to push the Picos up to the top, and worked on a shell to hold everything together.

Now, if you've never seen the inside of a PEZ dispenser, it's actually kind of amazing how reliable they built this thing with just a few cheap pieces of plastic. There's a more delicate way to do this, but there we go. Okay, so there we have it. This is literally just an empty shell. You can see right through it. And the only point of this is to kind of give the front something to push against so that things don't fall out of it. Instead of here, the head has the mechanism that pushes the actual PEZ out. But I don't need the head. Okay, well, that's broken, but that's okay because we don't need it. And then here's the spring. So we have a little spring. And I also broke it too. There should be a retention on the back of the spring that holds it in this track. And that's what keeps it going up and down. You can see that the spring for a PEZ dispenser is also retained in the bottom of this.

And that's it. And if you look at this spring, which you can't see because you can't see macro on this thing, I bought the, what is this, the Ace Pro, thinking that it would be better for my macro shots, but it's like two feet away. So when I do this, it's just a big blur. There's that spring, and here's the big spring. So size comparison, you can see much bigger. I wish it were as easy as blowing up a 3D model of this PEZ dispenser, but it's not. The two biggest challenges are how thin the Picos are compared to a scaled-up PEZ and how thin and flimsy the little Pico tray is that holds it. This reel's fine for a pick-and-place machine, but it's not really made for PIZ dispensers. I'll talk about how I fixed that problem later. First, here's what I came up with over the weekend.

The tray inside took about five revisions, the pusher about eight, and the shell, well, somehow miraculously, the first version I built worked perfectly, which is crazy. I also added an embossed Pico on the side. It's subtle, but it makes the thing look a lot more finished. And I admit, Fusion 360 is growing on me, except I still hate that it's a web app. Web apps do dumb things, like the sidebar is always resizing or sometimes it just disappears entirely. I'm finally getting productive, but I'm an expert beginner right now. I know enough I think I can do a lot more, but in reality, I have a long way to go. A lot of people learn something and think they're experts once they reach some early milestone like a working part. But I know I'm a complete noob, and I have a long way to go before I'm actually going to be good at any of this.

I barely made this stuff work after a full weekend of tinkering, and I already have a list of things I could have done better. The bigger problem I have now is time. It takes six hours to print the tray, ten hours to print the shell, and two hours to print the pusher inside. I'm four days from boarding the plane to open sauce, and I have a lot of prints left to make room for 480 Raspberry Pis. And I don't even have a working head yet. I've been procrastinating watching YouTube. Now speaking of procrastination, I'm okay pausing this video to go to redshirtjeff.com. Check out the beautiful listings for classic shirt designs like It was DNS or Cosplaying as a sysadmin. Or buy one of my handcrafted little Cosplaying as a sysadmin sticker packs. While you're there, savor the pixel-perfect, blueprint-powered design I used from Squarespace. That, and advanced features like Squarespace AI make building your new website or store

easy and quick. It only took me a few hours to build my entire merch store, and that's with payment integration, an inventory system, and a design that looks and works great on any device. I'm excited to finally have my new merch store up and running. Thanks to Squarespace for making it easy. Go to squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/redshirtjeff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. But back to the PIZ dispenser. I put all the parts together, and immediately I ran into a problem. The Picos were almost impossible to push out. The thin plastic trays were jamming into each other, so I had to figure out a way to make them slide out. So I found out that I could cut poster board down to size and put these between them, and it gives it just enough, like, gliding and structure that it will slide the Pi out.

But I need to make 480 of these, and I asked on Twitter and Mastodon, like, what's the best way to cut out 480 of these, because it's going to take forever. And people mentioned a paper guillotine, which sounds very cool. I always heard it as a paper cutter growing up. But apparently my wife has one down here in the sewing room. So I'm going to try to cut 480 of these little pieces of paper out of some poster board, wish me luck. First, I have to cut the poster board to size so it will fit inside of our little guillotine. So now the pieces slide out pretty easy, but I'm still nervous about designing a head that will be able to push them. I'm going to try making a wider pusher. The ones on the Pez dispensers don't have to be that wide, because it doesn't matter. The candies are really rigid. So that's my task for now.

Hopefully, I can crank out a design that works this morning, and I'll probably procrastinate by watching Apple's WWDC keynote while it's printing. It's Wednesday now, and I have two new things. This is a package of AR-15 magazine springs I overnighted from another gun shop. These springs should hopefully fit better since they're a bit wider for my large caliber Picos. That could also cause some other problems, but one thing's for sure, I'm definitely on some sort of list now. I've gone through 7 tray revisions and 5 head revisions, and the print times have been killing me. It's nighttime, and I'm coming back to the office really quick to switch out prints. I'm going to do another one of these shells. I have one printing at home, I have another one at home that I printed yesterday, and I only have like 45 or 50 hours left. So I think I'm going to have to call up some friends in St. Louis and see if I can get

a couple more printed, or maybe I'll find somebody that's going to Open Sauce that could print one or two for me. I called up STL Denise 3D because I needed a lifeline. She lives here in St. Louis, and thankfully she had a couple of printers that were free. I'm Denise, STL Denise 3D, and I review printers for Tom's Hardware, and I also have a little YouTube channel. And you were extremely gracious and printed off all of these guys for me to take to Open Sauce. Yes. Without this, I would not be able to give away half of the Pis, so thank you very much. We have, I think I got three of each color. So these are ProtoPasta, I think it's Ooze. I think this is Polymaker, just plain old red. Yep, and what kind of printers did you print them on? Well, I did the green ones on a Prusa XL, and then these on a Bamboo Labs P1P.

I made some little caps for you. Thank you. I keep breaking the ends of these. I went ahead and made ten of them. I just kind of filled the plate, and so that way you've got some extras to play with there. All right. Well, this is the final thing that we're making. Okay. And it kind of works. And then you've got to put a head on that. Yeah. I'm designing a couple right now. Okay, so this is a... Yeah, that part's inside. Oh, good, good, good, because of my build plate—I got a textured bill plate. Yep. So, all right, so I didn't, you didn't ask me to print any of these. No, no, no. I just finished that design yesterday in the afternoon. We have an autograph on that one. Oh, look at that. Nice. Hold on, it's not focusing. There we go. Nice. All right, well, thank you very much.

That was huge. And if you think Denise is awesome, comment Thanks, Denise in the comments and go subscribe to her channel. Back at the studio, all my printers were tied up testing head and tray designs. Just trying to finalize this head version. Look at that. It's still... I need to adjust my Z-height offset just a tiny bit more because we're getting a little bit of stringing on that first layer. All right, well, I'm going to go home and start that printer on another job, too. The first design that I had for this only goes this far because the little, the little pusher that I built just runs right into the back of the tray like that. And then when you try to push out a Pi, it pops right off. The big problem is I only have a very small profile up here. I might need to heighten this so that I have a little more room for a hinge. I finally simulated that in Fusion and I came up with this, which goes up and down, but

there are two problems. One is it gets a little cockeyed because to get it on, I have to break part of it. So that's tolerances inside of Fusion are different than tolerances in the real world. But the other problem is that the pusher is now right where it needs to be there. But when I push it down, it goes right below the little edge of the Pico tray. So eventually, I came up with this design. It kind of works, but honestly, I'm out of time. I have to use every spare hour to print now, and I have Octoprint working at home, but I haven't gotten it going at the studio yet. It is so nice having Octoprint running at home and the fact that I have a VPN. I have my 3D printer back here that's printing a tray, the fifth, sixth, seventh revision of that. And I just kicked off a print at home through OctoPrint, and that one I can monitor from

here without having to drive home and check it. I need to set that up on here. I have that Raspberry Pi over there, and I have a camera, but right now, the Pi 5 is not 100% supported in OctoPrint. It's getting there though, but that's my goal for after this is over. For now, it's just I'm printing off the SD card. I also realized half of you watching aren't subscribed. So I made this custom stamp, and my son stamped all the hundreds of little cardboard pieces that will help the Pi slide out. Finally, the other new thing I have is the thing you're hearing over there. It's a Bamboo Labs P1S, and oh my gosh, I did not realize how far 3D printing has come. I ran out to Micro Center last night and bought this thing. Already, it's printed a Benchy, four trays, six heads, and all that while my Ender 3 S1 is still on a set of three trays I kicked off 20 hours ago.

Last night, I went and picked up a Bamboo Lab P1S with the AMS on top, which is kind of extravagant, but right now I'm just printing out one color. But look at this thing go. I have never seen a high-speed printer before, but this is like ridiculous. This one over here looks like it's stuck in molasses or something compared to it now. But now it's time to put everything together and head out to open sauce. Let's do it. [music] (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Everything is packed up and I'm gonna head to the TSA now. So I got through TSA, the attendant told me the one thing that he had to check was actually the lead-lined film bag. He didn't worry about the springs or the Raspberry Pis or anything, just the film bag because it hides what's inside on the scanner. So I'm glad I got through, I'm not arrested,

but I will see you in San Francisco. (upbeat music) So, the day before Open Sauce, Adam Savage invited all the creators to The Cave, his workshop/prop department. Almost every square foot was more densely packed and more organized than my entire studio. There's a video on Tested with a tour of the whole space, and Gerald Undone even did a studio tour a month or two ago. So, if you see anything you like here, go check out those videos. It's fun to see where Adam works, kind of like peering inside his brain with the way everything's laid out. And no matter what angle you looked, you'd find a detailed prop, like from a complete Han Solo in carbonite to guns from movies or even a full-on Iron Man suit. But on to Open Sauce, how do you describe it? It's like a maker faire, sure, but it's completely overwhelming, but in the best way. My dad and I spent hours walking through the aisles.

There was something amazing around every single corner. One of my early favorites was the Big Mac, literally a giant-sized Macintosh with a full custom keyboard, a mouse, and the screen was actually ripped from an MRI machine. So it would be a proper four-by-three black-and-white display. But then you had the crazy stuff like a pumpkin keyboard, a 350-millisecond Rubik's cube solver, or this silly skeleton trike. And I brought a lot with me, but there were Raspberry Pis around literally every corner, like this one running an 8mm film scanner, or this Cyberdeck some students built with a Pi 400 that was signed by the Pi team. You had this Pi running a mini photogrammetry rig, the Pieca camera project, which is getting upgraded to a slimmer Pi 5 build, or even the Positron 3D printer powered by a Compute Module 4. Speaking of, I also found Voron and Prusa Labs,

and Joseph Prusa himself was there, being mobbed at all times by the thousands of 3D printing enthusiasts. And there were just tons of things that were fun to look at, like Scottbez1's split flaps or Saveitforparts' mini radar dish. And this was just on the preview day Friday. We didn't get through like even half the place. I had already given away around 100 Picos to people like Mitch3D, who I found out is actually from St. Louis. I also found out Gloop comes from St. Louis too, and now I have a sample to hold down stuff on my 3D print beds. And if William Osman ever questions inviting me back, just know that there's at least one person who came because of me. - What did you say? - The reason I'm exhibiting here is because of your Raspberry Pi video. - You hear that, William? - It was so cool meeting up with so many of you,

talking Pi, Ansible, and even some RF with my dad. At night, I reloaded all my PIZ dispensers and got ready for day two. After people got through a massive line, Saturday morning kicked off with Arc Attack playing a bunch of tunes with thousands of volts. It was so cool. And it was also cool seeing every age from all over the world. We worked our way around more halls now from this fun bubble iris to a Connect 4 clock. And I love seeing people fixing up their inventions right on the spot. And I was still giving out Pi's like candy. I ran through the 150 or so I brought, and I dropped off some at the Positron booth and some more with Kevin from Kev's Robots. CrunchLabs was at Open Sauce, of course. And like I said before, everywhere you look, there's some amazing creation that has no right to exist, like this giant keyboard or these insane musical devices.

There was even a booth where guys were cutting fresh vinyl and playing it back on an old record player. I also spotted Long Pong from This Is Not A Museum and got to talk to its creator for a few minutes. They had like 20 Galactic Unicorns wired together with Picos to play Pong, or you could watch the Game of Life play out. And my dad and I actually had a go. Also, the award for the most creative autograph receptacle goes to this guy who lugged around his own oscilloscope and got signatures from a ton of people everywhere, but of course not the screen. There were like 100 CNC-style machines, from this one built around a router to these pen plotters, which were sketching different YouTubers all day. And hey, that's me! Continuing the theme of Pi's everywhere, I found the Uboo Pod, which is like the ultimate home hub. I actually have one of the prototypes,

and I do want to test it out. Then one viewer had this compact little Pi Zero WiFi tool with an e-ink display and Pi Sugar power HAT. I kept giving out Pis to everyone all the time. And actually, I got caught up in a line a couple of times giving out Pis rapid fire like this time. At lunch, Ben Eater handed me his business card, and I'm still trying to decipher the seven-bit sequence on it, and of course, he also had his eight-bit computer in his bag. After lunch, I found this giant life-size PEZ dispenser, so of course, I had to pose by it. And don't tell Arm, but I signed the bottom of their monster Ampere 64-core motherboard, and while I was at the booth, I also was gawking at the cute cube-solving robots one of the engineers at the booth had on display. This is just a tiny, tiny slice of the brilliant insanity of Open Sauce. There was so much more,

but I had to finish giving out my Pis. I reloaded again for Sunday and passed them out all morning long. Someone even brought by a copy of my book, Ansible for DevOps, so of course I had to sign that thing. I rounded out the day with a tech talk with Jacqueline Dallas, Strange Parts, Technology Connections, and Luke from LTT, and everything was over. It was kind of a blur on Sunday. My little PIZ dispenser is silly and kinda useless, but hey, in the end, it worked. It's not as flashy as Michael Reeve's scooter car or this gargantuan bear trap, but the PIZ dispenser was a great way to learn something new, and it was also a great way for me, an introvert, to break the ice and talk to people. That's a big thing for me. And I was glad to share the experience with my dad on Father's Day. Thanks to William and the Open Sauce team, thanks to Raspberry Pi for the Pico reel,

Thanks to James Mitchell and all the open-source devs who build the tools that I use, and thanks to Squarespace and my patrons for making it possible to overnight a bunch of gun magazine springs. Until next time, and until I get my voice back, I'm Jeff Geerling. [Mark Rober tennis ball gun firing]

I gave away 480 Raspberry Pis at Open Sauce

I make things work. Often with Raspberry Pis—almost always open source!