This week on Maker Update stopping to smell the abstract paintings,
elevating your shop storage, bubble wrap bling bags, precise sheet metal parts,
automatic wire cutting, and reverse engineering a 3D scan.
Hello everyone and welcome back to Maker Update.
I’m Tyler Winegarner, I hope you're all doing well and staying cozy.
Hopefully you've got some fun projects to tackle for the winner.
I've been busy with the rest of the team getting all the last minute stuff
ready for Maker Faire Rochester
that's coming up this weekend.
If you're in the area, come check it out.
But if you're not, we've still got a great show for you.
So let's check out the project of the week.
There's a lot of great projects coming up in the show, but the one
I just couldn't stop thinking about is this wearable light painting
visualizer that turns scents into abstract paintings by 4Eyes6Senses.
We do love a good generative art project,
and then ideally, the weirder, the better.
And I just adore the idea of using an AI nose to make art.
This project is a sort of remix, or mash up of two other projects:
Benjamin Cave's 3D printed AI Nose, which uses an electronic gas sensor
to detect scents, a tiny ML neural network to process the data,
and a WIO terminal to display the detected scent.
The other is Shawn Hymel’s Sensor Fusion
AI Nose Project, which uses a number of different gas sensors
and a temperature sensor to detect a broader range of scents.
This version uses the Grove Multichannel Gas Sensor in a 3D printed nose
that's attached to the wearer's finger. As it detects different scents,
Abstract patterns are displayed on the WIO Terminal’s screen.
The color changes depending on the scents detected.
and the circle increases in size as the identification confidence grows.
He's then using a light painting app to capture the output
and turn them into abstract paintings.
It's a weird sort of combination of inputs to create generative art,
but it's fun and ripe for future adaptation.
I saw in another video on his YouTube channel that he's built a similar device
to visualize electromagnetic fields and turn those into light paintings,
almost like a video version of the classic Elektrosluch project
that turns electromagnetic fields into sounds.
There's no Instructables for that one, but
you can find a full bill of materials and project instructions for the A.I. Nose
visualizer down in the description.
We've got some more projects for you.
Whether you have a big workshop or a small one,
the thing that always seems true is that you never have enough wall space
for storage.
In a recent video,
April Wilkerson made use of her shop's high ceilings to build a shelving unit
that can lift up and out of the way to reveal more storage behind it.
Almost like those racks of your hardware store.
But vertical.
It uses an electric hoist to lift up the shelf
and it stays on track using rollers from a garage door.
The shelving unit itself is modular.
So if she wants to make changes to it down the road,
it shouldn't be too difficult.
It may not be practical for everyone's space, but she has plans for it,
if you want to build your own.
On Instructables,
CMoz has a guide to making a clutch “Bling Bag” out of bubble
wrap fabric and a short strip of RGB LEDs.
Bubble wrap fabric is a sewable material made of several layers
of heat pressed bubble wrap.
It's sturdy.
It has a unique look, and it makes great diffusion material for colored lights.
An Adafruit Gemma M0 controls all the lights,
While some patches of conductive fabric add touch interactivity
like turning the LED strip on and off and cycling the animation.
She also has another Instructables that shows you how to make the bubble
wrap fabric. So give that a look as well.
I was also super impressed with this DIY wirecutter by MrInnovative.
At the start of the video,
You see the control interface where you can set the length of the wire you want
and how much insulation to trim off at each end
and how many wire segments you need.
There's a stepper motor to control the wire feed and another
to manipulate the cutter.
But I think my
favorite part is, for as high tech as this looks
how decidedly lo fi the cutter mechanism is.
It's literally a cheap wire cutter and stripper hand tool.
There's a servo that moves the wire from the cut position
to the notch to strip the insulation off.
Despite all that, it looks really well built and cleverly thought out.
There's even a turnbuckle to help you fine-tune
the depth of cut for Your wire.
There's a link with the wiring diagram, code,
and 3D printed files down in the description.
Time for some tips and tools, on his channel.
Ben Krasnow has a thorough video detailing his process of DIY
photochemical machining.
This is a process that you can use to chemically etch metal
to create incredibly detailed, thin metal parts.
Unfortunately, there aren't any vendors
offering this type of fabrication for hobbyists or small businesses.
So Ben developed his own process.
It's still fairly complex with a number of custom built machines
for each step of the process, but it looks like you could probably follow his work.
If you need to make parts like this.
Ben also offers a ton of great tips
in this video for making really effective transparencies,
which is useful for everything from screen printing to circuit etching.
Caleb Kraft has a video out on how he used a fairly cheap diode laser
to create a DIY SLS printer using powdered sugar.
This sort of machine has existed in a few different iterations for a while now,
but this was something Caleb just needed to try out, so it's pretty hacky.
He 3D printed a box with a lifting tray for the sugar
and just lowered the bed and added the sugar by hand.
The real process of discovery is figuring out the right
arrangement of power and speed and the right material.
Powdered sugar reflected too much of the laser light,
but hot cocoa mix works pretty well.
It's not exactly going to replace any of your purchased
3D printers, but it's a fun experiment.
Great Scott has a video about a versatile charging board that enables you
to create your own custom high powered battery banks
that can deliver a variety of voltages and wattages.
His first step with it is to do a bit of exploration,
to understand the supplied datasheet, which was in Chinese.
and then did a bunch of testing to verify everything before
trying to create his own power bank.
I know that working with large battery packs like this can be
an iffy proposition,
but it seems like a handy board to know about if you know what you're doing.
Since most store bought battery banks can't supply 100 watts.
And finally, Making for Motorsport has a fascinating video on how you can use
a 3D scanner to reverse engineer a part, so you can model it and re-design it
In Fusion 360.
This is a multistep process that begins with scanning the part.
He's using an off the shelf scanner, but you might be able to pull this off
using photogrammetry if you took enough photos.
His next step is to clean up
any unnecessary details using Meshmixer.
Stuff like manufacturer stamping,
or sprues from the casting process.
Next up is aligning the part to the desired coordinate system,
but the real work begins after bringing the model into Fusion.
One of the coolest tools he uses, which I'd never heard about before, lets
you create a sketch from a cross-section of a mesh
and then uses that sketch to create parametric geometry.
There's a ton of great techniques throughout this video.
Give it a watch.
For this week's Digi-Key spotlight.
We're coming all the way back to machine learning with this helpful
guide to feature selection by Shawn Hymel.
Feature selection is just a fancy way of identifying which data
your machine learning model needs to track to correctly identify your subjects.
That way, you can simplify your project.
It's especially handy for embedded machine learning,
since it will reduce computation, which saves power
and it can even reduce the number of sensors you'll need.
There's a lot of heady concepts in here, but if you're already stuck
in with machine learning and you're ready to optimize,
this seems like a useful video.
All right.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
I hope you had a great time with this one.
If you did, give us a thumbs up.
Leave us a comment.
Maybe even hit subscribe.
Maybe.
As always, big thanks
to Digi-Key for making this whole show possible.
And to you for watching.
Take care, We’ll see you soon.