This week on Maker Update: the simplest way to give your walls some color,
A bomb-proof Raspberry Pi.
The most overengineered tally counter ever,
Saw guides, smooth gauges, and the fastest pin plotter in the west.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're all staying cool,
And doing great.
I'm pretty excited because I finally learned how to create
chamfer tool paths in Fusion 360.
That doesn't have anything to do with this week's show
other than I'm excited about that too.
So let's kick it off with the project of the week.
We could probably all use a little more color in our lives
and almost certainly on our walls.
Thanks to the latest design by Projects in Red,
That's going to be pretty easy, even for folks who are really indecisive
on their color scheme.
What they've come up with is their own design for a Nano Leaf,
a catchall term for geometric shapes that are illuminated
by a diffuse strip of RGB LEDs.
They can interlock in a number of
different patterns and can be controlled remotely through your smartphone.
Their shape for the nano leaf is no elongated hexagon.
It's actually pretty close in shape
to a single segment from a seven segment display.
More on that later.
It consists of two printable parts: the outer shell and the lid;
and the diffuser is made from frosted acrylic.
Inside each one is a short strip of RGB LEDs
with a pair of male and female dupont connectors
rounted out the back so they can connect to each other electronically.
There are ten connection points located around each segment
and those points are connected using this printable dovetail key.
The brains of the whole display is an ESP 32 microcontroller
and you can manage it using the WLED app from any smartphone.
And this was the real revelation for me.
For years I've been programing
LEDs manually, like a dummy.
This just works with a simple bit of code that you upload
to the microcontroller and everything else is part of the phone app.
The number of LED segments, the color, brightness, patterns,
it's all here, and it looks like it's a blast to play with.
But because each segment of Nano Leaf looks like
it's part of a seven segment display, you can also use it as a clock,
or a counter, or anything else that displays numbers.
There's a bit more code involved to pull this off,
but they take the time to walk you through all the steps.
There's a thorough video tutorial and an instructable,
all full of written instructions and plenty of photos.
If you've always wanted something
like this for your streaming setup or maybe for your home decor,
check out the link down in the description.
More projects!
You have to check out this gorgeous combination synthesizer,
sequencer, echo looper, and Theremin by Love Hulten.
He calls this the Doodle Station, and every part of this thing
looks like a love letter to the entire history of electronic music.
There's a Moog synth,
The echo loop is an actual tape loop
you can see through a clear window.
There's a patch board, and the theremin arms
look like a classic pair of television rabbit ear antenna.
The best part, though, might be the display.
As you play various notes, the character barfs out rainbows
And not just any rainbow,
but one that shows the waveform of the note you're playing.
Like so many of Love's other projects,
this one is a little light on details for you to build your own.
But it's worth checking out just to sit back and appreciate what's possible.
Prom season may have already come and gone,
but it's worth seeing this color changing dress by Kellechu.
This dress is made of a fiber optic bodice with a white tulle skirt,
and the entire thing is full of embedded RGB
LEDs to add a colorful glow.
Of course, no gown is complete without an accessory,
and part of this design is a magic wand.
The wand can scan the color of objects in the environment
and enable the dress to match that color.
That's pretty cool.
Also, this is Kellechu's first sewing project ever.
So it's a great testament to jumping in feet first and just getting it done.
There's a full instructable for the project
if you want to make your own or just borrow some notes for your own
tech-inspired garment.
From IV Projects comes this high-speed pen plotter.
There's a lot of DIY plotter projects out there,
but very few that can rip through a drawing like this one.
To make the plotter as fast as possible,
they're minimizing the amount of mass on the Y axis by
just moving the paper, and they're using grit rollers to move the paper.
The whole
thing runs off of a 24 volt power supply, which also allows it
to run a cooling fan to control the temps of the stepper drivers -
which are running at maximum current.
This thing is insanely cool and there's a full Git repo of 3D printed design files
If you want to make your own.
And finally, Sam from Look Mum No Computer has built
an electromechanical counter to count up visitors to his museum.
Of course it could just be any old counter.
It's made up of an array of uniselectors: these wonderfully
clicky, solenoid-driven electronic components to represent each digit.
Each of those
selectors drives its own Nixie tube for the display.
He could have maybe stopped there, but he really couldn't, could he?
Nixie tubes are subject to burn in, so there's another uniselector
to make sure each tube cycles through all of its digits every minute
and one more unit selector that helps generate a unique
melody for every single person that comes through the door.
If you love all things clicky and blinky, it's hard to not love this project.
We've got a few tools and tips before you go.
First up is this smooth Arduino gauge on a 16x2
matrix display by Upir.
16x2 displays are generally pretty cheap for a large format display,
but it's hard to display a progress bar like this one.
The real trick here is creating a custom character set
so you can have all the elements
you need to create a smoothly filling progress bar.
If you've ever wanted to extend the capabilities of one of these displays,
check this one out.
From Hacker Day, I learned about the good USB project from [Josh].
This is a hardware key for two-factor authentication.
You can just plug in this USB dongle instead of punching in the secondary
number key.
Depending on your situation, this can be more secure than a one time code.
And what's best is that you can make your own for around $5
Commercial versions of these can go for ten times as much.
[Josh] provides a Git repo with all the code you'll need to program
it as well as the companion app to use it on any computer.
On YouTube, I saw this Magnetic saw Guide for Japanese
pull sawsby Kiwi Workshop.
This is a chunky T-shaped jig with a handful of neodymium magnets
along the face.
Perfect for setting up your saw for perfectly aligned cuts.
The shape of it means that you should have an easy time
bracing it for cuts in just about any orientation.
He walks you through the whole process of making this out of wood,
but I can imagine this would be a good candidate for 3D printing as well.
And finally, Jeff Geerling has a wonderful guide to the world
of industrial Raspberry Pis.
Industrial Pis come in a variety of shapes and sizes,
but they all pretty much universally use
the Raspberry Pi 4 compute module.
This allows the manufacturer to route the ports so they can all be on
one side of the enclosure.
And the enclosures can easily be mounted to a variety of industry standard.
infrastructures like rack mounts and DIN rails... even Euroracks.
Jeff saves the best part for last with the bomb-proof Raspberry Pi.
Surprisingly, this isn't to protect the PI from hazardous environments.
Rather, it's to prevent the PI from creating a hazardous environment.
Sparks from static electricity can be very dangerous in combustible environments,
and this elaborate enclosure prevents that from happening.
It's a cool look at some unique applications for the raspberry Pi.
For this week's Digikey Spotlight,
Shawn Hymel has a helpful guide on how to calibrate a magnetometer.
If you've ever compared a magnetometer out of the box
against an analog compass or your phone's digital compass,
you probably found that the indications didn't quite line up
You get to learn how these sensors work,
the way your environment can add distortions to the readings,
as well as any interference contributed by nearby electronics.
He then walks you through the code and software you can use to calibrate
the electronic compass.
If you're looking to add one of these to an upcoming project,
give this one a watch.
All right,
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
I hope you all enjoyed it.
If you did, be sure to subscribe,
Give us a thumbs up and leave us a comment; It's always great to hear from you all.
As always, huge thanks to everyone at
Digikey Electronics
for giving us the chance to share all this cool stuff with you.
And thank you for watching.
Take care. We'll see you soon.