This week a Maker Update: putting spam to work.
LED filament for your finger, pencil sculptures,
and a See ‘n Say makeover.
Hey everyone I'm Donald Bell and welcome back to another Maker Update,
the show where we update you on what makers are making.
I hope you're doing well.
And let's get started with the project of the week.
Spam Bots by Neil Mendoza is an artwork that combines A.I.
mechanical keyboards and eight cans of spam.
Looking at the scene, all these little spam workers are sitting
at their little desks, each with their own unique four-key keyboard.
Collectively, there's enough keys here for a complete alphabet
and some punctuation,
if they all work together.
As they type, the screen in front of them is updated
with an A.I. generated take on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World,
modified to include more pork and piggy characters.
It's such a great balance of menacing and ridiculous.
I also like Neil's choice here, going with these small NEMA 17
stepper motors to move the spam arms back and forth.
Reflexively, I'd think to use servos here, since they're compact and inexpensive,
but they're also noisy, which would make a piece like this
a symphony of servo gears and sort of take the magic out of it.
By going with these relatively quiet stepper motors,
you can hear the clacking of the mechanical keys,
and even though you can see how it's all working, it's somehow easier to suspend
disbelief when it's quiet like this and all the wires are concealed.
I loved it.
I'll go as far as to say that this is probably the coolest
A.I. and canned meat project we'll see all year.
Prove me wrong!
More projects! Charlyn Gonda has a video out
on how she made this brass wire led filament ring.
She's shaping the brass using these jeweler's wrapper pliers
to get uniform results.
Each side is soldered to one
end of a coin cell battery holder which is positioned under the finger.
You really have to get the spacing just right for the length of led filament
you have.
But the results look super cool.
On Instructables,
Scott McIndoe has a new guide up on how to create a relatively easy
replica of George Hart’s 72 pencil sculpture using a 3D printed jig.
He includes three downloadable variations of the jig, one for hexagonal pencils,
one for round pencils, and one for crayons.
Looks like a fun afternoon project and a great one for kids.
Speaking of kids, on Adafruit, John Park shows how he updated this
classic Fisher-Price See ‘n Say toy with new sounds and images.
On the original,
There's an assortment of farm animals and animal noises,
but John wanted to make a version for city kids
with car horns, construction noise and ice cream trucks.
John's guide shows you how to mod the existing toy
and integrate an Adafruit KB2040 Board, which handles
input from the toy and plays back a stored selection of WAV files.
John also includes a graphics file by artist Brian Kesinger,
which you can print out or use as a template for making your own custom art.
Could be a fun project for making a custom See ‘n Say
for your own family or a friend with a baby on the way.
Now for some tips and tools,
on GitHub. Owen McAteer shares some software
he developed for controlling and designing flip animations.
The application runs within processing
and provides visual simulation of the output.
So even if you don't have a physical flip-dot display,
you can still use this to play around creating animations.
Through Gareth Branwyn’s Tips Tools and Shop Tales newsletter,
I came across this reader submitted idea
from Pretty Periwinkle, showing how they use a retractable badge holder
to keep their soldering iron cable up and out of the way through the course.
Through the Core 77 Blog, I learned about an Etsy seller
who goes by Artifact Design NC
who makes these laser cut wooden shelves for diecast toy cars.
It's cool in and of itself, but really it got me thinking about
other kinds of purpose built laser cut shelves that you can make for stuff.
Coin collections, action figures, tiki mugs, whatever you're into.
Maybe there's an opportunity to make a custom shelf like this,
and maybe it's something other people might buy too.
While searching Thingiverse for Servo holder designs,
I found this useful idea from Tokyo Bird.
It’s a 3D printed holder that fits a basic SG 90 type
hobby servo and straddles it across your breadboard.
How many times have you had to wrangle loose servos like these
When you're prototyping a project?
This looks like a smart solution for this week's digital
For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight,
in honor of Neil Mendoza’s Spam Bot stepper motors,
I'm linking to this stepper motor overview video.
It gives you a look inside the stepper motor and outlines the benefits
and disadvantages to using them in your projects.
You also get to see
an example breadboard a circuit for controlling a stepper motor
using an Arduino and a breakout driver board.
Check it out.
And that does it for this week's show.
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Big thanks to Digi-Key for making this show possible,
And thank you for watching. I'll see you soon.