My colleague Julie Steele wrote in to let me know about all sorts of cool Maker talks at PyCon 2012. You can check them out yourself with these video links:

• Jason Huggins’ Building a Robot that Can Play Angry Birds on a Smartphone (or Robots are the Future of Testing): BitbeamBot (pictured above) is an Arduino-powered open-source hardware CNC robot that can test any application on any mobile device.
• Thomas Smith’s Project Gado: Building an Open Archival Scanning Robot Using Python and Arduino: Project Gado is an initiative which aims to create an open-source archival scanning robot which small archives can purchase for $500 and use to autonomously scan their photographic collections.
• Peter Kropf’s Python Meets the Arduino: Learn how to use Python to communicate with an Arduino and interact with sensors, solenoids and motors.
• Hugo Boyer’s Python for makers: This talk is a walkthrough from 3D models to machine motion, that shows how we can use Python to write GCODE generators that create endless form.
• Kurt Grandis’s Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes: Learn how to use Python to tap into computer vision libraries and build an automated sentry water cannon capable of soaking intruders.
• Dino Viehland’s Building a Kinect game with Python: This talk will show you how to develop a game using Kinect from Python.

You can find lots more PyCon video at pyvideo.org