|  A few weeks ago, Bre Pettis had requested for a toasted cheese sandwich.
Instead of heading to the kitchen or a diner, though, the Brooklyn resident cobbled together a robot named Sammich.
The robot turns clumsy bread and cheese on a metal tray; jams the combination in the back of a jury-rigged toaster oven, and produces a completed sandwich, warm and melted.
Then, as the internet celebrity has in the past four years, he joined friend Adam Cecchetti in a short video about Sammich - with subtitles ( "Nom. Nom. Nom.") And like Nintendo music.
He posted the results on the Internet with instructions on how to create similar machines.
The video is part science and part of the skit - a hallmark Pettis.
For the do-it-yourself kit, which Mr. Hipster-style wizard is known.
His short works - to show how everything from a T-shirt cannon to a hovercraft, which almost cost him his head - have been observed around 17 million times, according to YouTube.
"I'm pretty sure that, the first week I worked with Bre, I said, 'You're going to be extremely popular,' " said Phillip Torrone, a senior editor at Make magazine, whose video podcasts of Pettis helped launch his cyber-fame.
"Bre isn't a master craftsperson. In fact, that's what's appealing: Some things fail; projects don't always work out. But that's the point. It's not polished."
Pettis, lauded by publications ranging from Wired to The Wall Street Journal, has begun to parlay his Internet fame into larger projects.
His latest endeavor: a hardware company called MakerBot Industries, which recently launched a mass-market 3-D printer that renders objects designed with 3-D computer programs in hard plastic -- and also decorates cupcakes.
All is part of a grand plan to have other people experience the feeling of accomplishment that Pettis gets from making things.
"If right now you're bored in life -- in this time in the world -- you're doing it wrong," he said.
Pettis was raised in a Seattle family in which the tech gene is dominant: His father studied under geodesic-dome creator Buckminster Fuller, and his grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project.
But Pettis' interest in making things was sparked by an uncle with whom he spent summers in Boston.
As a 6-year-old, he got up with his Uncle Joe at 4 a.m. and set out in a truck to find salvageable trash from the night before.
His uncle would take things home, fix them and sell them at a flea market.
"He showed me everything as he did it," Pettis said. "By the end, I was hooked.
"If you've ever fixed something, you know it's a powerful rush at the end -- the rush of completion."
In high school, he studied math and science and then went to Evergreen College in Olympia, Wash., famous for producing offbeat artists such as Simpsons creator Matt Groening and actor Michael Richards (Kramer on Seinfeld).
After graduation, Pettis spent seven years as an art teacher in the Seattle public schools. During a trip to New York in 2004, he discovered video art.
He started with a piece called The "I Love You" Project, filming people closing their eyes and repeatedly saying "I love you." He made a DVD and took it to art galleries, but nobody bit.
So he put it online and started watching statistics. First, 10 people he didn't know watched it. Then 100 people. Six months later, he saw that 40,000 people had watched it.
"I was, like, 'That's more than can fit in Mariners Stadium. There might be something to this.' "
So Pettis started video-blogging in 2005 and then filming interviews with people who created things.
Torrone, the Make magazine editor, met him at a tech event, checked out his independent work online and was impressed by his "Mister Rogers or Bill Nye the Science Guy vibe."
He hired Pettis to start the video-podcast series "Weekend Projects," making something new each week and capturing it on video. Less than a year later, millions of viewers were watching the videos each month.
Pettis quit teaching to pursue new projects -- from a weather balloon to custom-fit vampire fangs.
An Internet favorite is the episode in which he shows how to screen-print a T-shirt --a YouTube clip viewed more than 1.6 million times.
Fans are inspired by Pettis' broad range of projects and skills and ability to explain things simply.
"I don't know how to weld or program a microcontroller, but when I see Bre's videos, I think, 'Hey, this doesn't look that hard,' " said Joshua Sigman, an online-content developer in Modesto, Calif., who is a member of Pettis' Facebook fan group.
From Seattle, Pettis landed first in New York
in 2007.
That summer, he and a group of other technophiles -- including a former Project Runway contestant -- founded NYC Resistor, a "hackerspace" that occupies a floor of an old sewing factory.
Although the term hacker is often associated with malicious viruses, Pettis said, the word refers to people who like to take things apart.
Pettis' new hardware company, MakerBot Industries, grew out of the collective.
Last year, he stopped creating videos for Make magazine to work on other projects, although he still makes about a video a week on his own.
The videos and his Web site are sponsored by a Web-development company, which -- along with classes in soldering and laser-cutting that he teaches at NYC Resistor -- helps him pay his bills. |
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