We were excited to see Jarvon Moss (@Odd_Jayy) on the cover of Make:

Me and My Robot: Odd Jayy Interview

Jorvon Moss, known on Twitter as @Odd_Jayy, recently showed off his second pair of Magpie goggles with the tweet: “And this is why people called me odd growing up.” I reached out to him and he explained that the glasses were “a fun gadget that he put together really quickly over a weekend.” He programmed the 3D-printed mechanical device to open and close the irises and raise and lower separate eyebrows, using an Adafruit Trinket and two servo motors. More mechanical than digital, the goggles become part of a costume, and Jorvon becomes his own character. “Every sci-fi movie always had a really cool person with goggles,” Moss told me.

A video of him wearing the Magpie goggles “became a lot more popular than I thought,” he said. His Twitter followers, many of them makers he has gotten to know, cheered him on.

Moss began building robots about five years ago when he was in college. Like a lot of makers, he started doing it before he understood what he was doing, like artists who start drawing, even though they haven’t had a lot of training.

“Dexter is my personal favorite. And the thing about Dexter is that I’m always improving him. I’m always upgrading him. In a lot of ways, he’s growing up and a lot of people see him as my child.” Dexter is on V6, with over 160 components. He wants Dexter to become a wearable robot without the need of a backpack to carry various components. “I am designing a way for that to no longer be an issue,” he says.