This week on Maker Update: Secrets of the Zen Bot
Maker Music Fest
MakerBot marries Ultimaker, A 3D printed Bling Ring
an LED Matrix Cube and a centrifugal golf cart.
Hey, I'm Donald Bell
And welcome back to another Maker Update.
How are you doing?
What are you working on?
Me I am working on refreshing this whole workshop space here.
It is not working for me.
It should work -
A workshop should work for you.
This one is not.
It needs a re infusion of maker mojo and good purge.
I hope your spaces are working for you and you're just hungry for project ideas.
So let's get started with the project of the week.
Zenbot by David Covarrubias
is one of the coolest robotic instruments I've seen.
The design fits seven servo actuated
mallets around a handpan with 14 notes.
To play all the notes,
each of the mallets make use of a second servo, allowing it to twist its direction
and strike a secondary note.
The Zen Bot was featured in the most recent issue of Make: Magazine,
but the online explainer for the project only went up last week,
which is what I'm including in the description.
Not only does the online guide include far more detail,
but it also links to the 3D print files and a series of YouTube videos
David made that go into every detail of the project.
As I see it, there are only two notable downsides
to the project worth knowing about.
One is expense.
He's using these high quality Dynamixel servos,
which offer a great combination of power and quiet operation.
There are around $22 each, and you'll need 14 of them.
So that's $300 right off the bat.
The other limiting factor here is programing the song pattern
David is using an ingenious method of writing the song pattern
in the Arduino code, but it seems like a fairly
painstaking process to transcribe a song into this unique format.
That said, both of these problems seem fixable.
If you're willing to put in the work and get creative with part substitution.
With the right constraints, I suspect you could probably swap
the servos out for DC Motors and save some money that way.
But if money is no object, David's instructions
provide everything you need to build an exact replica of what you see here.
Not only is it amazing to watch, but it sounds beautiful.
Speaking of new and amazing maker instruments, this past weekend
was the launch of the New Maker Music Festival Online Experience.
The free site offers all kinds of new content for 2022,
Along with all the great music and instruments from last year.
If you haven't checked it out yet, I encourage you to give it a browse.
The whole setup makes it lots of fun to explore.
And if you're lucky, you may even come across my new instrument for the year:
The Glockenwheel.
In other news last week, 3D printer brand MakerBot
announced a merger with competing brand Ultimaker.
The deal is expected to close later this year.
And though both companies are known for making 3D printers
that are a bit out of the budget for the average maker,
The merger also involves Ultimaker's popular
Cura software for 3D model slicing, and MakerBot's
Thingiverse 3D model repository, which has been languishing for years.
It'll be interesting to see where this all goes.
Now for more projects on Instructables, Geek Mom Projects has a fun
guide on making your own 3D printed LED rings.
The design uses a single CR2032 watch battery and a clever design
that sandwiches it between the two LED legs that light up the ring.
The two part design snaps together and allows you to have
interchangeable tops that you can design however you want.
She includes a star and a heart design, but you could easily make a light
up logo design or any number of shapes or letters.
On Adafruit, the Ruiz brothers and Phil Burgess teamed up for this guide on making
this interactive LED cube with 25,000 pixels.
This is a rare advance guide, partly due to how expensive it is to pull off.
You're looking at $300 in panels, plus
another hundred or so for the Raspberry Pi.
Another parts.
The assembly isn't difficult, but a mistake would be very expensive.
But wow, what a cool thing to have.
And I love how the battery
everything have been tucked inside for a totally self-contained design.
Definitely a showpiece.
For something at a massive scale,
Check out this hand welded centrifugal car by Handy Geng.
This has got to be one of the craziest,
barely drivable art cars I've ever seen.
As the electric motor drives the wheels forward,
it also spins the cabin of the car upside down.
Half the time he's driving, it seems like
he can't see where he's going because he's backwards or upside down.
From what I can tell, though, he has a screen and camera system
mounted in front of him to help him be able to see at any angle.
The most clever part, I think, is that he's placed the steering column
on the side of the cabin in the center of rotation
so that it can stay still while he rotates around it.
Be warned, though, as you might imagine, it's a bit of a stomach churning ride,
and there are some unpleasant side effects near the end.
But there's also a reveal that he included a way to disengage
the spinning gear allowing him to drive it like a regular golf cart.
Now for some tips and tools for those of you with resin 3D
printers, Adam Bute created a database of proven printer settings
for various printers as well as different resins.
You can find it on MakerTrainer.com.
Hopefully it can save you from some of the heartbreak of a failed print.
On YouTube, Jimmy Diresta offers
a handy miter saw tip showing how to make a staggered stop block.
This way when you're making multiple cuts of the same length
the sawdust has a place to go and doesn't build up and throw off your measurement.
I thought that was clever.
Also on YouTube, Greg Zumwalt shares how he creates 3D printed gear trains
using Fusion 360 by setting two circles as tangents to each other.
They remain in contact with one another even as the circle diameters change
It's a cool trick.
For this week's Digikey Spotlight, check out their latest
quick tech video explaining reference designs.
When I was first starting out, I was blown away and frankly intimidated
by how engineers could seemingly whip up complex circuit designs from thin air.
Only later did I realize how heavily people
rely on reference designs to accomplish their goals.
So check out the video and spend some time poking through
Digikey’s reference design library just to see what's possible
And that does it for this week's show.
Be sure to subscribe, leave thumbs up or leave a comment.
Also, as part of my whole workshop, purge that I'm doing here,
I'm going to be giving away a few odds and ends to my email list subscribers.
So keep an eye on that and sign up for the email list if you're not already.
A big thanks to Digikey for making this whole show possible,
And thank you for watching. I'll see you soon.