This week on Maker Update: racing hand over hand,
circuit sculpture ornaments, BitBot 9000, bubbling cauldrons, jigsaw jigs
and the top ten cosplay shops.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're all doing great.
It feels like I haven't been here in a little while.
Maybe because that whole flip flop with Maker Faire and Thanksgiving,
I don't know.
Anyhow, I hope you're all staying busy and creative.
We've got a great show for you.
So let's check out the project of the week.
Sometimes you just have to marvel at someone's grand creation,
their magnum opus art installation that reflects light or breathes fire.
And sometimes you just have to be impressed at a fun two player
game made with parts that maybe they just had waiting for a rainy day.
This racing monkeys game
by Jegatheesan Soundarapandian seems like the latter of those,
and I love both how adorable this one is
and how easy it looks to pull off.
Of course, to make it
a racing game, you're going to need two of everything.
But that shouldn't be too hard to pull off here.
There's an ESP 32 dev board so you can connect it to your phone,
a cheap RC motor to move the arms some perfboard
to connect the parts and a transistor to complete the circuit.
There are some 3D printed parts to form the drive mechanism
and everything else is just cosmetics to make it all look more monkey-like.
When you put it all together,
driving the motor through this
rack-and-pinion mechanism produces this hand overhand movement
ideal for having the monkey climb along a tightrope.
To make it move, you connect it to your phone via Bluetooth.
The instructable walks you through the steps to build
your own custom app, connecting it to the ESP dev board
wiring the circuit and even some customization tips.
It looks like a fun afternoon project once you put it all together,
especially since you can have fun modifying your racing monkey
to make it look cooler and maybe even climb faster.
The instructable includes all the code bill of materials and 3D printed parts,
but I bet this is a fun mechanism to know about
for adapting into all kinds of other line crawling robot buddies.
Time for more projects on Instructables.
I found this guide
for making this soldered circuit sculpture ornament by 4Dcircuitry.
If you've been
admiring the circuit sculpture works of folks like Mohit Bhoite,
and wondered how to get started, this is a really thorough guide
for a fairly simple but really satisfying looking result.
There's a video that walks you through how to assemble one of the designs
and 3D printable jig files to make a handful of others.
I'll admit, I'm still intimidated by those tiny LEDs,
but maybe there's enough here to adapt the templates for larger LEDs.
James Bruton has been busy in the robot workshop again
and this time he's coming up with the BinBot 9000.
A waste bin that comes to you and lifts up its own lid to make waste management easy.
It all sounds a little silly and that's kind of the point,
but there's a lot of cool tech here that you can
probably fold into a ton of other projects.
The robot uses a Jetson Nano with a Raspberry Pi camera
to be able to navigate its environment visually so it can find its way around.
Imagine adapting the
same system for a tool cart in your workshop.
How cool would it be to be at one workstation,
realize you need a pair of pliers or some allen wrenches,
and you robot buddy just brings it to you?
And I know I said we're done with spooky season,
but it's never too early to start planning ahead for next year.
WannabeMadSci on Instructables has come up with this ingenious, miniature fogging cauldron.
What's best is it doesn't use fog juice, or dry ice or any of that stuff.
It makes the fog using an ultrasonic atomizer that can be bought
from just a number of vendors online for just a few dollars.
And the fuel to make the fog is just water.
He makes the chamber out of some cleverly cut PVC segments,
but there's probably a ton of ways you can make this.
And it's just so cool to see this little cauldron bubbling merrily away.
And finally check out Wyldcard by Jonah Steinnon.
This is a set of e-Ink cards with a separate plinth
that allows up to four cards to be reshuffled.
Each card connects to the base using an arrangement of pogo pins.
Press a button, and a new card face appears.
Then the cards can
presumably be dealt out for play where the image will stay on the card.
There's no build details available since this is still a prototype,
but it's a cool idea to riff off of, especially for tabletop gaming.
Time for some tips and tools on YouTube.
I found this great collection of jigsaw guides by Yasuhiro TV.
This is a collection of jigs.
Some simple, some complex that allow you to make a variety of cuts with a jigsaw
that would normally be pretty difficult to do free handed.
There's some really good stuff in here.
Straight cuts,
right agle cuts, and this sanding blade for tight spots.
There's a lot of great ideas here.
And as long as you don't mind transcribing the CAD file
from a screengrab, all the plans are right here.
If you've been watching this show
for a while, you're probably already aware of the work of Sophy Wong.
But she was the subject of a recent video on Tested,
showcasing a lot of her 3D printed garments and designs.
Most of these were the pieces she had on display at Sili-Con,
but she's able to talk in a lot more depth about her process
of designing and forming the 3D printed panels.
It's a wonderful, deep dove into the way she works and innovates with 3D printing.
Svetlana from Kamui Cosplay
has a video of her top ten shops for cosplay supplies.
Right from the jump,
I was surprised to learn that there even were dedicated cosplay shops.
I always just assumed that the supplies that went into everyone's projects
came from various craft supply stores across the Internet.
There's definitely some specializations like Arda-Wigs,
but some other delightful surprises, like cosplay-fabrics.com
for fake leathers and other unique textiles.
And it's no surprise that Adafruit is number 2.
All of these stores are online and most ship internationally.
So if you're looking to get
most of your orders done in one place, check out this list.
And finally, a few weeks ago, the Technology Connections YouTube
channel talked about the TV Guardian, an ancient television gadget
that would censor foul language in your programing.
Ben Eater went one step further to figure out how this device
actually works and what words it would censor out.
After a clever bit of reverse engineering, Ben was able to determine
that it reads the closed captioning data stream for blocked words
and then would replace them with a less offensive version.
It's a cool process to check out.
For this week's Digi-Key spotlight, the Potentially Genius folks are tackling
a device that, I'll be honest, I'm genuinely surprised doesn't exist yet.
A stroller with a built in power bank that can harvest energy
from the wheels of the stroller or from a solar panel
so it can charge your phone. After building a test rig,
They found that a stepper motor provided a more suitable voltage than a purpose
built dynamo and then it was just building housing and interface for it,
including an off switch,
If the user wants to ease off the resistance from the mechanical charging.
It's a great little project.
Check it out.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
I hope you enjoyed it or maybe picked up a few tips along the way.
I'm hoping to get time to try out some of the circuit sculpture ornaments
in the next week or so.
If you found a project you want to try, I'll let us know about it down
in the comments.
Maybe give us a thumbs up or hit subscribe.
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.