This week on Maker Update: Text for your chest,
a robot that writes on tape, thumb actuated throttles.
Hot glue gem charms, threaded inserts, and beer crates for your batteries.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're all doing great
and your projects are coming together without too many snags.
We've got another great show for you.
So let's check out the Project of the Week.
Closed captions are a wonderful way to enhance
your viewing of movies and television.
I know some people find them distracting, but really, they can help
fill in the gaps of dialog
You may have misheard. Sometimes seeing the spelling of a proper
noun can help clue you into its cultural origins.
And most importantly, they can help bridge an accessibility gap
for any deaf or hard of hearing friends you might have.
But the biggest problem with captioning is you don't get them for conversations
you have in the real world with real people.
Until today.
Everyone's favorite Internet Cyborg, Zack Freedman, has modified
this hoodie with a delightful lime green-framed screen,
A shoulder-mounted Raspberry Pi and a Lavalier microphone
to try to bring real time captioning to in-person conversations.
The brains of this project is a cloud based
real time speech to tech service from a startup called DeepGram.
They've done all the heavy code lifting to detect and parse the speech,
but that doesn't mean Zack's coding job is done.
He needs to parse the speech into manageable chunks
that can be handed off to the DeepGram API so they can be turned back into text.
And the returning text needs to be displayed
on the screen long enough that it can be read easily.
With everything bolted together, he was able to take the real-time.
captioner on its shakedown run at the local micro center.
The single biggest issue he found was that the Lavalier
microphone was a lot less isolating than he planned on.
But that just meant the folks he was chatting with got to be captioned as well.
It's a fun project.
And should be pretty easy to pull off on your own if you wanted to give it a try.
More projects!
On Hackaday, I discovered this masking tape pen plotter by michimartini.
Presented as a label maker whose expendables are nearly free,
This is a 3D printed armature that advances and retracts
a spool of masking tape
and moves a pen on the y axis to write whatever you want on the tape.
The whole thing runs on an Arduino Nano with a CNC Shield.
An ODroid C1 handles the hard computational work,
but you could probably replace it with the Raspberry Pi.
Like a lot of small pen plotter projects,
The linear system from a DVD drive moves the pen
and a micro hobby servo moves it up and down.
This seems like a fun one to build.
You can get all the code and the files by following the link down in the description.
On Instructables,
I found this project for making wire-wrapped hot glue charms
by Randomona.
These are cool little jewelry pieces and you can make them pretty easily.
She begins by creating a boundary out of craftwire and then placing it over
a backing material. That backing material is where you can get really creative.
Aluminum foil works great
since you can color it with sharpies and show off different textures,
but you can also use craft paper, or paint, or experiment
with whatever you have on hand.
You then flood the wire with the clearest hot glue you can find.
The surface can fog up over time,
But you can preserve the shine with a bit of clear nail polish.
It'll help seal up the back as well.
And on the 3D printing Facebook group
I found this thumb throttle modification for a mobility scooter by Ray's Fix.
Ray's father recently had a stroke and needed to be able
to use the scooter with just one hand.
Normally the throttle is on one side and the brake / reverse is on the other.
Fortunately, the two levers are connected,
so he designed and 3D printed this mechanism to make it easy
for his father to control the scooter with just his thumb.
The bonus feature of the mechanism is tailoring the top speed of the scooter
by modifying the length of this push rod.
After a few iterations, he was able to nail down an appropriate
top speed, and a good reverse speed too.
Check it out.
Time for some tips and tools.
On Tested, Sean Charlesworth has a comprehensive guide
on adding threaded inserts to just about any material.
Wood, 3D printed plastic, acrylic, even metal.
Sean covers everything from
the humble T-nut, to Helicoils and rivet nuts.
And he shows a ton of helpful techniques for working with each of them.
I thought I was familiar with most of these, but I'd never seen
these knurled, press-fit inserts before, that have a split-flared collar
that expand the first time you thread a screw in.
If you need to add machine screws to any project, give this one a watch.
This one kind of got lost in the excitement of the
Ultimaker / MakerBot merger news, but Cura 5 was released a few weeks ago.
It might not seem like a huge update, but this video from Lost in Tech shows
that it's actually a pretty massive upgrade.
The biggest changes are in the back end of Cura engine.
The slicer now has the ability to solve for line widths
that are narrower than the diameter of your nozzle.
This will make printing fine details with an FDM printer
a lot more possible than it was before
It's not all perfect though.
Since it's an early release,
There are a lot of UI bugs and there's a number of plugins
that haven't made the transition yet.
So it might be worth a wait before installing.
Or, if you can live with those limitations, check it out.
On YouTube, Thomas Sanladerer has a video on the best adhesives for 3D printed parts.
I see this question get asked all the time,
and while there's a handful of go-to answers,
Thomas is making a comprehensive test of
Hot glue, CA glue, two-part acrylic, JB Weld and VHB tape.
With all the test probes glued up,
he then unleashes a couple of torture tests on them to see
which is the strongest.
I suppose it isn't too surprising that CA glue
and the two-part glues held the strongest and did the best at filling any gaps.
while some of the others barely held at all.
Granted, these tests are a worst case scenario for this kind of glue joint,
and he explains where some of the other adhesives can still be useful.
If you're into model making or painting, Bill Making Stuff's
recent video about DIY flocking is full of great little hints.
A painted miniature just isn't complete
with a bare base. In this video, he'll get you through the whole process
of making a proper base without breaking the bank.
From thrift store wooden coasters, aquarium gravel,
grass, and foliage made from chopped up twine.
All of this stuff can really add up when you buy it
from the hobby shop, but it can be a lot more affordable.
If you buy it elsewhere.
And finally, there's no small number of 3D printable organizers for batteries.
But I've really been enjoying these beer crate battery holders by Jarda K 66.
The AA battery crate holds 12 batteries,
and AAA holds 20.
They're a fairly quick print, batteries are easy to get out,
and they look great.
I enjoyed them so much.
I designed my own extra long crate for my Panasonic camera batteries.
For this week's Digikey Spotlight, they've got a new video in their
Another Teaching Moment series about inductors.
Inductors are nothing more than coils of wire that generate a magnetic field.
The clever part is they can store electricity in that magnetic field.
These can be helpful because it allows them to resist changes in the circuit.
If you want the voltage of your circuit to rise gradually
when you connect a power source, an inductor can do this.
Or they can stabilize the circuit if power is briefly disconnected.
They sound super useful And the best part is you can make them yourself.
All right.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you enjoyed it.
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Big thanks to Digikey for making this all possible.
Take care. We'll see you soon.