It’s a great honor for me to be able to use this Maker Birthdays forum to offer up an entry-day shout-out to one of my favorite living makers, Jeri Ellsworth.

If ever there was someone for whom the fire for making appears to have been blazing since birth, it’s Jeri. She seems to live for the diverse pleasures of deconstructing, learning about, and re-engineering the world around her. She’s lived several impressive careers already: dirt-track racer and race car designer, computer-chain store owner, self-taught computer chip designer, creator of the C-One and C64-DTV systems, and Internet streaming video star (as half of Fatman and Circuit Girl). Of all of the things that amaze me about Jeri Ellsworth, I’m most inspired by the depth of her curiosity and her enthusiasm for sharing her discoveries with others.

Happy Birthday, Jeri, from all of your pals at MAKE! We actually got you a little something. We hope you like it. (It’s after the jump…)

BTW: The picture on the right is Jeri showing off her singed index finger after an unfortunate encounter with some homemade rocket fuel.

It’s robotized Jeri, courtesy of robot portrait artist Ben Rollman. Jeri had commented on the Ben Rollman portrait of me on my Facebook page, so I thought it’d be fun to have him do a Jeribot as a birthday present.

You can get your own commissioned robot portrait by Ben. You just send him a picture of yourself and he’ll send you back a hard copy illustration of the robotized you. For a few extra bucks, he’ll also send you a link to a video of him doing the drawing.

More:
Read all of our Maker Birthday tributes.