This week on Maker Update: virtualizing your detents
the Raspberry Pi Pico gets a W, holographic jewelry,
a time-warping Walkman, silent steppers, and crafting a tiny miracle.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're all doing great
and staying inspired with cool projects.
We've got a super fun show this week and I can't wait to get into it.
So let's check out the project of the week.
You could be forgiven
for thinking that this is a product demo for a smart thermostat.
It isn't.
But what it is is a haptic input knob created by ScottBez1.
This is an input device that uses motor torque
to give positive physical feedback to the user, coupled with a round screen.
This is a simple user interface that can function
for just about whatever you want to program it for.
Whether you want to have a torqueless knob that can spin forever
or one with positive stops for distinct feedback.
the motor behind all of this clever design
is this brushless gimbal motor with this six millimeter shaft down the middle.
And here's where we get to the bad news.
You can't actually buy this motor anymore.
It seems like it was an overstock on AliExpress and they're all sold out.
The community around
this project has been voraciously trying to find a good replacement.
The way it works is that it uses torque to pull
the motor towards one of the software defined detents.
The further you get from the detent, the stronger the torque
until you get halfway to the next detent and then it pulls in that direction.
He makes use of that opening in the center of the motor
to run the wires for the round LCD, and he's made a custom PCB for the base
that houses an ESP32 Microcontroller for wireless connectivity.
There's also these cutouts around the base of the PCB.
This will allow the PCB to flex just so slightly
and it can detect that flex using a couple of strain gauges.
This allows the knob to be pressed like a button to confirm selections,
and he's also generating haptic feedback for button presses
by having the motor provide a slight kick.
I'll admit this one is pretty nerdy,
but I've always had a huge interest in haptic feedback
and its uses in DIY projects, and this one seems like a huge leap
forward in creating user Programable modal user interfaces.
Scott has provided a Git repo where you can find
the code, the design files and the Gerber files for the PCBs,
and you can join the discussion to find a suitable replacement for the feedback motor.
Time for some news, If you missed it.
Last week Raspberry Pi announced the Pico W
this is the same RP2040 powered microcontroller you know and love.
But now with an added Wi-Fi antenna providing wireless connectivity to your projects,
this is using the Infineon
CYW43439 wireless chip,
giving your projects Wi-Fi connectivity over 2.4 GHz.
This chip can also support Bluetooth and Bluetooth low energy,
but at the moment,
these features are disabled, but they could be enabled in the future.
The Pico W is just $6 and if you can find one,
it's available for purchase both with and without pre-soldered headers.
More projects!
We've got another fantastic crafting tutorial from Stetson Studio
and this time it's the Casita from Encanto.
He doesn't waste any time getting into the clever techniques.
The texture for the adobe walls is created using foam core with one of the sides
torn off, and then texture is pressed into the bare foam
using crumpled tinfoil.
As always, this video is a king's ransom of tips
for reusing materials to get just the right look.
Ornate toothpicks for balcony details, drinking
straws for roof tiles, and tiny clothespins for roof details.
It's great.
There's also a cool painting technique called pre-shading
where he goes over shadowed areas with a darker color first,
which immediately gives the model a more detailed look.
over on Instructables.
Penelope Bulnick has a guide for making these 3D printed
holographic rainbow jewelry pieces.
She's able to get this look by printing directly onto Rainbow Diffraction film.
The result is that these pieces are not only
in their original filament color, but also have a bright rainbow
sheen to them when they catch the light just right.
This looks like a ton of fun to experiment with.
It seems like the whole squad over Adafruit has been obsessed with hacking
portable tape players to make them into unique music instruments.
John Park has created what he calls the Walkmellotron
The original Mellotron is an electro mechanical piano
that plays back samples that are stored on magnetic tape.
What the Walkmellotron is doing
is carrying a single continuous sound on a short tape loop.
When John plays a note, the feedback speed on the tape
To pull this off, He's using the QTPy RP2040 to interpret MIDI signals
coming from the keyboard and then using a DAC board
to turn the digital signals into analog voltage to manipulate
the speed on the cassette deck.
Since the boards are small, they don't add a ton of extra bulk
to the tape player and adding the boards and the wires to the outside of the player
give this thing a unique cyberpunk kind of look.
There's a few other cassette player projects on Adafruit,
so if you got inspired by this one, there's more to play around with.
Time for some tips and tools.
In a recent video from Tested, Adam Savage gets a CT scan.
Not of his body, but of his Curta mechanical calculator.
He did this with a company called Lumafield
who are developing small scale CT scanners for engineering.
The purpose of this is to be able to see inside your engineered objects
to see how the parts work and fit together while they're still assembled.
Not only is this tremendously useful from an analytical perspective,
but seeing these rendered images of electronics and motors
all fitting together like a sculpture are really quite beautiful.
The machines, as you probably can imagine, aren't cheap,
but the video links directly to the objects Adam brought to be scanned.
So you can poke around with them yourself.
If you've been buying 3D printers for a number of years now, you've
probably noticed they've been getting noticeably quieter in the past few years.
This is mostly due to the TMC 2208 stepper driver.
In this great explainer video by Michael Klements, he breaks down why older stepper
motors are so loud and what makes the TMC drivers so much quieter.
It mostly comes down to how the coils energize to rotate the motor shaft.
If they use square waves,
the shaft turns more harshly and creates noisy vibrations.
The TMC drivers have something closer to a sine
wave to energize the coils, offering smoother and quieter motor movements.
Speaking of motor drivers and haptic feedback,
Adafruit now has a motor driver breakout
Specifically for haptic feedback motors.
This is more than just a simple motor driver.
Because it has a number of ready made haptic effects
built right into it, from short pulses to heavy clicks,
transition ramps, smooth hums and plenty more.
This seems like a useful little board whether you're looking to create a device
with eyes-free user feedback or something more creative.
There's a full demo walkthrough and libraries
for both Arduino IDE and Circuit Python.
And finally, Zack Friedman from VoidStar Labs has a new video
about his Gridfinity tool organization system.
Since open-sourcing the project, people have gone
a little crazy with their own designs.
Zack showcases a handful of his favorites by organizing them into various tasks:
soldering stations, battery holders, rotary tool organizers.
There's even turning the Gridfinity affinity system into a portable toolbox.
If you enjoy the process of people riffing off of other people's ideas,
This is a fun video and a cool community project to get involved with.
For this week's Digikey Spotlight, Lady Ada is looking for great oscilloscopes
for beginners and the latest video in the Great Search series.
If you've ever considered adding a scope to your electronics bench
and don't know where to begin, this video is where to begin.
She does a great job of helping you understand all the different variables,
how many channels you need, whether you should get an analog
or digital scope, and how much memory you should go for.
Even with the beginner scope, you're going to be making
a pretty big financial investment.
But at least with this video,
you can have a little more confidence that you're making the right choice.
All right.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
I hope you had a great time checking out these projects and with the show in general.
If you did give us a thumbs up, leave us a comment.
And if you love the show and know someone who would also enjoy it,
share it with them.
As always, big thanks to Digikey for making this all possible
and to you for watching.
Take care. We'll see you soon.