This week on Maker Update, a holiday town controlled with your phone.
Robots that twist.
Robots that hop a tool for flexvtures and supercapacitor earrings.
Hey, everybody, I'm Donald Bell.
And welcome back to another episode of Maker Update.
The show where we update you on cool things makers are making.
That's what we do here.
I've got a fun show for you
with a ton of great robot projects and a dash of holiday spirit.
So let's get started with the project of the week.
Check out this Raspberry Pi automated miniature
holiday village shared by omantn on Reddit.
Apparently, his wife has been collecting these Christmas village
ornaments for years, which make up each of the buildings in this diorama.
To display them he wired an addressable led into each building
and everything back to a Raspberry Pi 4 model B,
not only does the pi
handle turning each led on and off and defining the color of the led.
But it's all managed with a web app hosted on the pi
that you can pull up on any phone or computer on your local network.
He also added a model train which is controlled by the same app
and can be made to stop the little train station with the push of a button.
It's adorable, and I can only imagine how much fun it would be to play with that
holiday party.
You can find the recently published code for the project on GitHub.
The link is included
down in the description here along with the original Reddit post.
Even if you're not in a position to do something like this with
your holiday collectible ornaments, consider how this code could be adapted
for other projects. Maybe a tabletop game train or a school diorama project.
I definitely think there's more you could spin out of this.
Now for some news, Arduino has launched an interesting Iot kit
that includes guides for five different projects aimed at beginners.
The kit sells for $80, an Arduino Nano RP 2040 Connect board
is at the heart of the whole thing, bundled with a motor,
a servo, an LCD and all the components you'd need for the projects.
If you've been looking for a solid entry point for getting familiar with creating
your own Internet connected hardware, I don't think you can go wrong here.
Now for more projects,
This is an experimental robot design by Yunosuke Sato,
Ayato Kanada and Tomoaki Mashimo
And my apologies for my pronunciation there.
At first glance this looks like a wheeled or treaded robot design,
but those shiny metal wheels are actually hollow coils of spring steel,
with the two ends welded together to form a complete torus shape.
A piezoelectric stator drive is then used to either drive it forward
or backward or twist it clockwise or counterclockwise.
in essence is an omni wheel design, but a completely different approach.
It's also possible to use this in a single wheel application,
which you couldn't do with the traditional omni wheel.
There are no project notes on this.
This is more of an academic proof of concept.
But maybe there's enough here in the video to experiment with if you're motivated.
For a robot design that anybody can make, on Instructables.
Randy Serafin has a couple of new guides up on a series of simple bots.
These are taken from his latest book Bots Made Simple,
which is filled with awesome little robot projects made just with
items found at the hardware store, plus a servo or two.
He calls this one hopscotch.
And I love how simple, yet effective it is.
It's just a small broomhead, a battery pack, some zip ties
and a U-bolt attached to two continuous rotation servos.
But those ingredients can't convey
the magical little plip-plop motion it takes as it scoots across the floor.
It's perfect.
Now for some tips and tools.
You have some great choices when it comes to Diagraming basic
circuit designs between Fritzing and Tinker CAD circuits,
it's fairly easy to whip together a clear blueprint of your design.
But what if you want a 3D breadboard design
with a little more cinematic flair and a built in circuit simulation?
Well, you may want to check out Crumb.
This is a paid app available on iOS, Android or Steam.
I haven't tried it and I can't say if it's any good, but
if simulating circuits or representing them in a beautiful way
is a problem you're trying to solve for this could be the solution.
A group of researchers from the University of Singapore have created
a research article, and online tool for designing mechanically
haptic interfaces using laser cut sheet material.
There are some interesting prototypes shown in the research footage,
including modifications for existing tools,
swappable haptics for VR controllers, and even attachments for common
electronic components; adding detents to rotary or linear encoders.
The research draws from the Flexture experiments by Amy Qian of Amy makes stuff
who is acknowledged in the article and has some great videos
to check out on the subject if you want to dive into it.
But the cool part here is the online sandbox
they've created for modeling and simulating your own mechanism.
You can find at interactive-materials.github.io
I'll leave a link in the description where you can play around
with modifying the design and exporting the results.
While shopping around for interesting gift ideas,
I came across these supercapacitor LED earrings by California STEAM on Tindie.
They're sold out at the moment, and I'm probably not helping things
by mentioning them.
The LEDs have these switchable animations, but with extra unique here
is that they're powered by a rechargeable capacitor.
Instead of coin cell batteries.
These makers have a number of other LED earring designs
that are also worth checking out.
For rolling your own wearable LED project,
Adafruit has a new Neopixel driver BFF board
perfect for pairing with their super tiny QT Py board.
The BFF just stacks on and provides
a JST socket for easily plugging in a strand of neo pixels.
The data Pin defaults to A3,
which is a logical level shifted up to five volts.
But there are a bunch of pads included to make it easy to route the data
to another pin if needed.
The combo not only gives you a small footprint,
perfect for wearables or cosplay, but it's also extremely affordable.
With the QT Py around $8 and the BFF around $4.
For this week's Digi-Key spotlight,
I've included a link where you can learn more about their cross-referencing tool.
Need a substitution for a component that's out of stock or discontinued?
Instead of manually searching for one and jumping through filters,
just drop the manufacturer's part number into Digi-Key’s
Cross-reference tool.
With any luck, you'll get a sorted list of Digi-Key’s
Recommended alternatives.
With all the details you need at a glance.
To make a comparison, you can find the tool at digkey.com/crossreference.
All right. And that does it for this week's show.
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Let me know what you found interesting this week.
Big thanks to the Digi-Key Electronics as always, for making this show possible.
And thank you for watching. I'll see you soon.