This week on Maker Update: the echo you really want,
Low riding's new low,
And the Huggy Wuggy you may need to make for Halloween.
Hey, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Maker Update,
the show where we update you on cool things makers are making.
Hope you’re all doing well,
I have a lot to catch you up on, so let's get started with the project of the week.
On his YouTube channel Workshop Nation, Thomas Burns shows
how he turned a basic Amazon echo into this sci fi animatronic companion.
I have such an unreasonable love for this project.
It's important to me personally to unpack what's going on here.
On the surface, it's really a mash up of some common project themes.
You've got the Alexa hack angle, you've got the servo powered 3D
printed animatronic eyes courtesy of Will Coogley’s design,
And then you have the repurposed retro tech with the CRT TV,
and it all gels together wonderfully.
I Dig a little deeper, though.
As a maker, I'm always looking out for new tips and techniques.
So I love seeing how Thomas rewired the old
TV to display the audio output from the Echo.
He did it by hijacking
the deflection signals and connecting them to an audio amplifier.
That's the technique I'm keeping in my back pocket.
I was also inspired
to see how he gave the animatronic eyes a face tracking capability.
No Raspberry Pi, no OpenCV or TensorFlow.
Instead, he dropped in a $13 board from Spark Fun
available through Digi-Key called the person Sensor.
That and an Arduino is all he
needs for the eyes to be able to detect and react to what's in front of it.
That's another shortcut I'm sure to use in the future.
But more than all of that, the video itself has a lot of heart.
I can totally relate to his observation that the future we were
promised is here technologically,
but it's a little disappointing that it's all a bit flat and lacking in personality.
We wanted C-3PO and instead we all got AI in our pocket.
The good news is: as makers, we uniquely can take our vision for A.I. companions
that final step and I have a strong sense that that's going to be a theme
we see a lot of over the next few years.
More projects!
For weeks now on social media, I've been seeing uncredited
footage of this Fiat Panda that has seemingly broken the limit of low riding
and actually sunk into the ground.
It's click worthy, for sure, but the actual story behind it is worth exploring.
The car is a project from the Italian car hacker collective Carmageddon.
On their YouTube channel,
they have a two part video series that covers all the work
that went into making it happen.
Of course, it's all in Italian,
But here's the craziest part that you don't see in the social media clips:
This thing’s not remote controled.
There's an actual driver
laying down inside with a throttle and a steering yoke.
But because there's no visibility inside, they're using a wireless dashcam
to relay the view to their phone and using that as their view.
It's crazy, but I love it.
On their YouTube channel, Wicked Makers show how they made this giant
Huggy Wuggy animatronic for Halloween
The build is mostly made from PVC pipe
covered in fur with some extra attention paid to the head,
which is carved from insulation foam and then covered in fur.
Two great tips from this project that caught my eye.
First, take a look at how they're able
to create all this motion from a single DC windshield wiper motor.
Second, check out these 3D printed joints that they used
to connect all the PVC pipe limbs.
Some of these screw into fixed positions,
Some are meant to move and some flange out to get bolted down.
It looks like a great way to play around with PVC pipe sculpture
that allows you to make adjustments along the way.
So many tips and tools already, but here are some more.
This past week we saw the launch of the
Spark Fun Experiential Robotics Platform or XRP Kit, also available on Digi-Key.
The kit runs around $115 and includes everything you need to make
a pretty robust little programable robot with no soldering required.
Everything plugs together with pre-wired connectors.
The coolest bit for me is this controller board
which marries together a Raspberry Pi pico with a driver board
for four encoded motors plus two servo connectors
and inputs for the included ultrasonic rangefinder, a QWIIK port and a few extras.
On the programing electronics YouTube channel.
There's a new video up on integrating Chat GPT
into your next Arduino project.
In this particular example, they're using an Arduino compatible
ESP-32 board that can communicate over Wi-Fi
along with an OLED screen and a connected keyboard.
It's essentially a terminal
where you type in questions and get answers,
but there's no reason to believe that you couldn't build on this guide
to create your own Alexa replacement for your animatronic robot companion.
Arguably, a Raspberry Pi may be a better solution.
But if Arduino is your comfort zone, then there's a path here that works.
For this week's Digi-Key Spotlight, a reminder that the Digi-Key website has
a resources section filled with
every unit conversion calculator you could imagine.
Resistor Codes.
Temperature.
Ohm's Law, Battery Life, Force, Watts,
You can even calculate the pulse width of a 555 timer.
It's all there.
And like everything in this video, I'll leave a link to it in the description.
All right.
And that does it for this week's show.
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And thank you for watching. I'll see you soon.