This week on Maker Update:
A pizza compass, taking Groot for
a walk, wooden rockets,
lemon keyboards,
pet eyes and the downfall of duct tape.
Hey I'm Donald Bell,
welcome back to another Maker Update.
I hope you're all doing well.
May is a bittersweet
month for me, because locally,
it's always been the month
of our Maker Faire here
in the Bay Area which is no longer.
I still miss it, though it has been nice
getting something together for
the upcoming Maker Music festival.
And I'll update you on that shortly.
But first.
The project of the week.
Wired has been doing
a series of maker project
videos recently, including
a Tetris microwave from Alan Pan
and this awesome Pizza compass from
Joe Grand of Grand Idea Studios.
The idea is to make a device
that no matter where
you are in the world,
can direct you to the nearest pizza.
Now sure this is something any
of us could do with a basic smartphone,
but that's actually what
makes this project so interesting.
How can you accomplish this trivial
smartphone task without a smartphone?
Joe walks you through the
whole process and
in ways that I haven't even
seen done before.
And really, it's this peek at
the creative process that
makes this video worth your time.
You get to see how
he breadboards the circuit using
a particle Boron board for
the cellular data
along with a neopixel ring, a GPS
module and a magnetometer.
He then moves on.
To the code and you get to see
him tackle each function 1 by 1.
How do I get the ring to light up?
How do I get a compass
reading from the magnetometer?
How do
I get that represented on a ring with
only a few LEDs?
How do I use the particle board to
pull down a Google
search result for pizza?
How do I get location data
from that search result?
On and on, in a way that I find
wonderfully candid and entertaining.
Then he moves on to designing a printed
circuit board layout,
and this is hard stuff to communicate to
a layman audience of wired subscribers.
But Joe explains badge
life PCB art in a nutshell.
Well, and before you know
it, you're looking at a
result that's hard to argue with.
What I found interesting is
that not only did Joe get his boards
made through a third
party service, but he also
had them assembled off-site.
I know a lot of you
are thrilled to populate and bake your
own circuit boards, but
I was happy to learn
that there are companies that will handle
that for you for a price, of course.
In the end, pizza was
located successfully and
Joe was kind enough to share the code,
the schematic, the bill of materials,
the Gerber files, all on his website.
You can find the link in the description.
Now for some news, Disney
research has revealed the results
of Project Kiwi, an effort to
create a freestanding animatronic version
of Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy.
A multi year effort that started in 2018,
little Groot here seemingly
spent most of his life as a headless
robotics project focused on
creating a lifelike natural movement.
The end result is incredible.
I wish the video
included some of the process
of creating the animatronic head, but
I suspect Disney's had that aspect of
the design pretty well figured
out at this point.
Can you imagine seeing this little
guy walking around?
He's going to need bodyguards to prevent
it from being hugged to death.
Also, I want to remind you
that the Maker Music Festival
is coming up on the weekend
of May 15th and 16th.
It's a free online
event that's really like
a self guided directory
of cool projects and performances
that exist at the
intersection of music and
the DIY maker world.
You'll see Electro acoustic stuff,
electronic stuff,
but also performances on
weird handmade instruments.
There are presentations and workshops.
I've got a performance piece
in there with my new drum bot
and also a presentation
hopefully on my work
adapting motors and
solenoids for percussion.
Don't miss it.
Now for more projects.
Xyla Foxlin has a
highly entertaining
video on how she built a wood veneered
high powered rocket in five days.
Xyla has been working on
her rocketry certification and needed to
whip together a design
on a tight deadline.
I have to admit I had no
idea what went into
making rockets like this, but
it's a fascinating amount of
fiberglass and epoxy and laser
cutting fins and fillets and parachutes.
I now understand the appeal and
I'm grateful to Xyla for
showing the whole journey.
Her enthusiasm is
infectious and it's a great story.
Go watch it.
On Adafruit, the Ruiz
brothers show how they
were able to create this lemon
shaped mechanical keypad.
This is a 3D printed
macro keypad shaped like a lemon or
lime or orange or your citrus of choice.
Under each slice is a cherry
MX style mechanical switch wired
up to the latest Adafruit QTPy
Board which can act as an
HID device over USB.
There's also a small neopixel
jewel to give it a nice glow.
The code is all done
in circuitpython and there's not
much to it that you
wouldn't find in any other custom
keyboard project on Adafruit.
What really caught my eye was
the 3D printed enclosure.
Aside from being cute and
all snapping together
without any
hardware, there's a cool technique
here to give it a fuzzy texture.
This uses a feature inside of Cura
that's appropriately called fuzzy skin.
It's all done in the slicer, so
it's not a texture you have to model.
For the right project, it's actually
a cool way to conceal layer lines.
You have some control over
whether the effect
is applied on the interior or
exterior perimeter of your design.
If you're going for
something that's
organic looking, this seems
like a great new option.
I also got a kick out
of Emily Velasco's little
retro arcade project called Your Pet Eye.
It's a little digital
eyeball that you control
with the joystick.
There's a button to make
it blink and a light sensor
that can dilate the pupil.
The whole thing has a kind of 80s Apple
II educational software vibe to it.
The crazy part is
it's using an Arduino to handle
all the animation and video output.
It's barely able to
keep up, but it works.
Emily has the code over on GitHub.
Now for some tools and tips by way
of Tiffany Tseng, I learned about a free
lecture series from MIT all about working
in the kind of Linux command line
environment that you'll
find on Raspberry Pi.
They call it the missing
lecture series, and
I'm only a few episodes in, but
it's already illuminated
some fundamental stuff that
I wish I'd understood earlier.
We've already mentioned
a few of these, but
I've been enjoying the new Collins
Lab Note series from Colin Cunningham.
These bite sized videos cover a
fun range of topics from the history
of resistor markings to
the world of hidden potentiometers.
I encourage you to browse the collection
using the link in the description.
And in one of the latest videos from Adam
Savage on Tested, Adam reveals
how much he loves duct tape, which
is to say not at all.
He hates this stuff and
it's fun to hear all the reasons why and
what adhesives he prefers
in different situations.
The TLDR here is to go
get yourself a good roll of gaffer tape.
For this week's Digikey Spotlight,
check out the latest great
search video by Lady Ada on Adafruit.
She's looking to add a
high current latching relay option for
a featherwing add-on board.
She explains the benefits of latching
relays, especially for power consumption,
and shows you how to find them on DigiKey
and narrow your search for
just the right kind of
relay for your needs.
In her case, she's looking for
a relay that can operate on the
3.3 volts coming from the feather
or a connected Lipo battery.
She needs something with
the coil voltage of three volts or
less, and this actually makes
it a surprisingly difficult search.
But if you hang in there,
she finds a winner.
And that does it for this week show.
Be sure to subscribe,
leave a thumbs up, leave a comment!
Thinking back on that Pizza Finder,
what kind of compass would you make?
What would you have it find?
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A big thanks to my patrons on
Patreon - you know who you are
and to DigiKey Electronics for
making this whole show possible.
Thanks for watching and
I'll see you soon.