This week on Maker Update, capturing lightning in a bottle,
a finger tapping automaton making your perfect sketchbook,
tough relays handwavey details and turning a logo into an animated sculpture.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update,
the show where we keep you up to date on all the cool things makers are making.
I'm Tyler Winegarner. How you y'all doing?
I hope you're all doing well and staying creative.
We've got another great show for you,
so let's get into it with the project of the week.
You've probably seen something like this before:
A lantern filled with electronic fireflies.
Maybe it's just a mason jar with those fairy string lights.
Or maybe there's even a motor to add a little bit of motion to them.
But YouTube's grumpiest electronics teacher, ElectroBoom,
has made one where the fireflies actually fly.
Look, Mom! no wires!
If you're familiar with those wireless LEDs,
you know the concept going on here.
The fireflies light up through induction.
There's a big primary coil on the driver
and a smaller secondary one on each of the fireflies.
That's what allows them to light up.
Of course, there's a pretty broad gulf between concept and execution,
Especially in a project like this.
There's a delicate balancing act, trying to get enough voltage into the fireflies
to drive the LEDs on each one;
while keeping the secondary coil light enough that the fireflies can still take flight.
After a few months of experimentation, he ended up with a wider
diameter coil with fewer turns that solved that part of the problem.
The next part is designing the enclosure and managing the aerodynamics of everything inside it.
An unmodified fan would just create vortices through the chamber,
which would pin the flies to the sides of the lantern.
So he printed up these fins to help straighten out the airflow from the fan.
But they worked a little too well
since they just ended up getting stuck to the roof, instead.
He found that ball shaped objects would tumble around better.
So he used this shape for the fireflies. Ideal for keeping them light,
broad enough for the coil and with adequate surface area to be lifted by the fan.
The final result is a delightful
rave of flitting fireflies trapped in the glass enclosure.
With the effort that went with the effort that went into this one,
It's easy to see why so many manufacturers
just went the easy route to a minimum viable product.
But to me, the extra mileage on this one is worth it.
And it's a testament to persistence or maybe just stubbornness.
Whatever it takes to get your original vision over the finish line.
More Projects.
Uri Turchman has built this
typing hands automaton for a museum exhibit in Tel Aviv.
He already built a similar automaton with a single finger tapping motion.
But this is a much larger expansion on the original design.
The motion is created by a cam and a cam follower
that controls the tension on each finger.
With the tension released, the finger drops into the keystroke
before lifting back up again.
It's gorgeous- and I know this hand is carved from a block of wood,
but it still makes me feel a little uneasy
seeing him cut through the knuckles with a coping saw.
Plus, I love how approachable everything in this project seems.
I know there's a ton of craftsmanship involved,
but it all seems fairly approachable
Once you have a good design in mind.
While editing last week's
show, in the segment about the Hackaday OpAmp competition,
I came across this analog LED wave array by Chris at LuLabs.
This is a panel of LEDs connected together into an expandable grid.
when you wave your hand above it, a wave of light propagates across the grid.
The amazing thing about this circuit is that there's no microcontroller.
All of the computation is being handled in the OpAmps themselves.
There's a lot more math involved here than I can really follow along with,
but the resulting effect looks like a really satisfying piece of interactive art.
JBV Creative's brother
designed this logo for his final year graphic design project.
and then asked his big brother, To help him create a 3D sculpture of it.
JBV noticed that when parts of the logo overlap,
they create some really interesting moiré interference patterns.
To turn this into a sculpture, though, requires a pretty elaborate mechanism.
It's great to see Dr. Thang’s library of mechanisms on YouTube be used as a reference,
And that's how JB came across this chain driven mechanism.
But there's some real devil in the details work going on here.
The mechanism just kept jamming up when moving around the sprockets.
But if you look closely at the animation,
there's this little wiggle going on at the extremes in the motion.
That's not on accident.
And perturbing the movement with this little screw helps
it get around the horn gracefully.
Time for some tips and tools.
Eric Strebel has a video showing his process
of making his own perfect sketchbook.
It's easy to get lost in the details of his own process of making these;
the particular paper he uses, the covers and the binding.
But I think the real tip here is identifying
what kind of sketchbook or notebook works best for you.
Since this is generally is your first step in your creative process,
you want to eliminate as many friction points in that process as you can.
It might seem awfully tedious to roll your own sketchbooks,
but when you have one that's perfect for the way you like to work,
you're probably going to use it a whole lot more.
From Adafruit, I learned about the Tough Relay by Digital Loggers.
this is a multipurpose relay created by the same folks who made that user-friendly
four outlet relay that you can control with a microcontroller.
Not only is this a high load relay with a 12 amp fuse,
but it also works as a current monitor, a circuit breaker,
energy logger, power meter, and event scheduler.
As a bonus, you could also mounted directly to a DIN Rail right out of the package.
Over on Makezine, I found this collection of tips about making your own custom
textiles by Kitty Yeung, Jenn Costillo and Bleeptrack.
Kitty recommends the use of Spoonflower, which is an online service that allows you
to design your own custom fabrics right on their website.
There's no minimum order amount, and they use an eco-friendly color fast dyeing process.
Bleeptrack goes one step further in this process by using JavaScript
to create procedural designs based on flowers and Fibonacci spirals.
And Jen uses processing
to create generative designs based on sound.
It's a ton of great ideas to get access to textiles
that will make sure your next project won't look like anyone else's.
And finally, we've got a shop tip from Jimmy Diresta:
Oil your clamps.
Honestly, this is one I never thought about,
But if you use screw or F-clamps, keeping the screw thread lubricated,
can make it that much easier to do that next big clamping job that you have coming up.
And I bet it would probably extend the life of your clamps as well.
For this week's Digi-Key Spotlight,
We've got a new video from Shawn Hymel about Matter
a few weeks ago, Shawn introduced us to Thread,
which is a networking standard developed for
IoT and other smart home devices.
and this week he's got a video about Matter.
Matter is an open standard of communication between devices
that allows them to interact with one another,
regardless of who the device vendor is or
whether the devices were ever intended to work together.
Shawn finishes the video with a quick demo of building a matter network
using the Raspberry Pi and a pair of Silicon Labs dev boards.
All right.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
I don't know about you,
but I can't stop thinking about Jimmy's tip on keeping your clamps oiled.
I wonder how many other not-so-obvious tool maintenance tips
I haven't been thinking of.
If you know of any,
Share them down in the comments below.
And if you enjoyed the show, give us a thumbs up and hit that subscribe button
So you don't miss the next one.
As always, huge thanks to Digi-Key for making this show possible
and to you for watching.
Take care. We'll see you soon.