This week, on Maker Update, an artificially intelligent coffeemaker,
a one button music remote, talking skulls, singing fish, and blinking bots .
Hey, I'm Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Makor Update,
I hope you're all doing well and finding time to work on your own projects.
I found some time to work on a little 3D printed tamp
for an espresso machine that I'm restoring. It's just a little thing.
But sometimes those little tiny easy
projects are a great excuse to focus in on the details.
It's also a great tie in to the project of the week,
Over on the Surfin Circuits blog, Mark Smith shows off how he turn his
Rancilio Espresso machine into an automated, Internet
connected, perfection seeking instrument of legendary coffee.
When you buy a machine like this for your home,
the dream is to be able to make espresso whenever you want.
But the reality is that these machines take a long time to warm up the water
and build up their pressure before they're ready to go. To solve this problem.
Mark gives his machine the ability to predict
when he'll want coffee, which warms up the machine 30 minutes ahead of time.
So it's ready to go.
To do this, he's using a Raspberry Pi zero and a machine learning algorithm
that's trained on when he typically turns on the machine.
But that's not all.
He also created a Web dashboard
so that he can track the stats of his machine from anywhere in the world.
And from here, he can also manually trigger it to start warming up.
He's added a PID sensor in the boiler
so that he can dial in the brew temperature within one degree accuracy,
and by harnessing this temperature sensor, he's also created an auto shop mode
that with a single press,
automatically brings the boiler up to a defined temperature
and pulls the shot without you having to do anything.
And then as a final touch,
he added a Nixie tube on the front of the machine that indicates
the level of the water tank, as well as the temperature of the boiler
and the progress of the shot while you're brewing. a
All of this, and he's still managed to nondestructively install
all the electronics and sensors into an already crowded machine.
You can find the instructions,
source code, 3D printed files and bill of materials all on his website.
Now for some news this
past weekend, Becky Stern gave a talk at Maker Faire Prague
and was nice enough to share some video clips that she took.
One of the highlights was this giant version of Jiri Praus's
mechanical flower sculpture.
Some of you may recognize Jiri's work
from the small circuit sculptures we've covered on the show.
It's great to see him continue to develop these ideas and go big.
Becky also showed some footage of a table clock called the xx0x.
It uses these retro electromechanical segment
displays that have these awesome split flap sounds.
You also get 20 alarm sounds,
It's USB rechargeable and it's smart enough
not to make all those split flap click sounds while you're trying to sleep.
Honestly, I'm just so happy to see a big Maker Faire like this happening again.
It gives me hope.
Hackaday and Digikey teamed up for Halloween hack fest contest.
And if you have a Halloween project or a costume that uses electronics,
you can enter to win
One hundred and fifty dollars in Digikey credit.
That amount is doubled if your project happens to use an Adafruit board.
You can find more details using the link in the description,
and the contest closes on Monday, October 11th.
In hardware news last week, vacuform manufacturer Makyu announced a new higher
resolution machine called the Multiplier.
The extra detail is possible because they've added
pressurized air into the chamber, which helps to push the
vacuformed material into all the nooks and crannies of your form.
Combined with resin casting,
you can get something comparable to injection molding,
but without all the complexity and expensive machining out of mold.
No word yet on pricing or availability, but it's neat to see some new tool
ideas out there.
Also, I have to say that for something that could have easily come out
looking like a panini press,
they put a lot of effort into making this thing look awesome.
Teenage Engineering, the design group that makes the
OP-1 synthesizer and all those fun Pocket Operators sequencers.
They're the ones that did the product design on this.
Now, for more projects, there's a great collaboration
between Sophie Wong and Liz from Blitz City DIY.
They made this one button Bluetooth remote control
that works as a play pause button for media playback on Apple devices.
The project uses
an Adafruit feather and blue fruit board and is coded in circuit python.
Liz has the code posted up on GitHub, which you can essentially drag
and drop onto your board.
But I'll be honest, I don't
really have a use for a dedicated play pause button.
What I'm sure to use, though, is this recipe for making a cool
one button enclosure.
It has all of the appeal of a custom guitar pedal,
But what you're seeing here is a 3D printed box
with a milled aluminum plate on top that steals the show.
If you don't have a desktop mill like Sophies,
I imagine you can get some mileage out of printer toner transfer,
creating a stencil or using something like a desktop vinyl cutter
to transfer graphics or mask and etch a design. n
On Hackaday, Aspiring roboticist has this early entry to the Halloween hack fest contest.
It's a Raspberry Pi based system for translating audio into servo movement.
In this case, it's being used to drive the mouth movement of a prop skull.
The instructions show how to create the interaction
either from recorded audio clip or using a microphone.
You can find other guides that give you a similar result using an Arduino.
But if Raspberry Pi is your comfort zone, this is a great way to bring
some animatronic life into your Halloween props.
Finally, as some of you know, I have a soft spot for the Big Mouth Billy Bass
singing fish, so I couldn't resist this project from Natasha Zurny.
She made her own cardboard version, animated with servos,
controlled by a Micro:bit plugged into a Crazy Circuits Bit breakout Board
for sound She's using an inexpensive MP3 player module
and a pair of powered speakers.
You can find the instructions, code and even a template
for cutting out the fish over on BrownDogGadgets.com.
Time for some tools and tips.
James Bredon has a great tip for your animatronic Halloween project.
His latest video demonstrates how to get a smooth ramping movement from servos.
This is one of those subtle details that separates beginner animatronic
projects from the pro level stuff instead of jerky robotic movements.
You get a kind of velocity curve that smoothly ramps up and down.
With just a few lines of Arduino code, James shows
how to make this happen with the simple sketch.
He also includes the 3-D design files.
If you want to reproduce the same model.
Have you ever considered getting into engraving,
whether it's for jewelry
or knife handles or enclosure lids for your Bluetooth remote controls?
Check out my interview with Caleb Kraft on the Cool Tools Channel.
He walks you through a great engraving set up for beginners.
If you've never seen an engraving vice before,
you're in for a treat.
For this week's digikey spotlight, check out this oldie but goodie unwire splicing techniques,
not just splicing, but also how to tap one wire into an existing line.
Tapping is a technique I rarely find myself doing,
but it's a cool trick that people rarely talk about. Be cool.
Check out the video.
and that does it for this week's show.
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Thanks for watching and I'll see you soon.