This week on Maker Update, a robotic golf club, cheating at Scrabble, a tetrahedron for your head, a really long gripper, and see-through Arduino.

++Show Notes [Maker Update #182]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Robotic Golf Club by Shane Wighton
https://hackaday.com/2020/06/11/a-robotic-golf-club-to-possibly-boost-your-game/

-=More Projects=-

Winning Scrabble With Raspberry Pi by Wayne Covell
https://youtu.be/gcsv1fnDZzU
https://github.com/wazcov/devscover-youtube/tree/master/scrabble

Tetrahedral LED Hat (Deichkind Style) V1 By Kuchbert
https://www.instructables.com/id/Tetrahedral-LED-Hat-Deichkind-Style-V1/

This Robot Arm gets really REALLY Long by Allen Pan
https://youtu.be/33GQ2vgASBk

See-Through Arduino UNO By jiripraus
https://www.instructables.com/id/See-Through-Arduino-UNO/

-=Tips & Tools=-

MIT App Inventor
https://appinventor.mit.edu/

Adam Savage’s Favorite Tools: Awesome Circle Drawing Tools!
https://www.tested.com/art/makers/907945-adam-savages-favorite-tools-awesome-circle-drawing-tools/

Breadboard-friendly button from AtomSoft
https://blog.oshpark.com/2020/06/10/tindie-breadboard-friendly-button-from-atomsoft/

Making a Small Parts Storage Rack by Get Hands Dirty
https://youtu.be/iDJ-9dyQ4WY

Rotating Vise V shape jaws by revsin
https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/06/11/mini-vise-timelapse-3dthursday-3dprinting/
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4300167

Customizable revised Ultimate Box Maker by jbebel
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2938921

To Protect Drive-Thru Workers, a Simple, Mechanical, Extendable Window Tray
https://www.core77.com/posts/100089/To-Protect-Drive-Thru-Workers-a-Simple-Mechanical-Extendable-Window-Tray

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

WiFi – Tech Basics
https://youtu.be/aDIsMRZfh94

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, a robotic golf club, cheating at Scrabble, a tetrahedron for your head, a really long gripper, and see-through Arduino.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell and it’s time for another Maker Update. I hope everyone’s out there making the best of things. I’ve been in a kind of cleaning and organizing mode. I think a little chaos is good for me, but some of these piles have been around too long and it feels good to get things in order, sorta.

I have a lot of great projects to show you, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

DIY golf tech is not a category I’ve covered often, nor is it a game I know much about, beyond mini golf. But I can still appreciate the work that Shane Wighton put into this servo-adjustable golf club.

The basic idea is to allow a single golf club to function like multiple clubs. By using the rotary encoder and screen on the shaft of the club, you can select the style of club you want, which effectively adjusts the angle of the face of the club.

Because he’s using a nice servo and 3D printed parts to accomplish a lot of this, the trick was finding a mechanical linkage that would prevent the impact of the ball from transmitting back to the servo. His clever solution works like a lead screw, giving him around 25 degrees of adjustment while also keeping the club from flopping around. 

To take things even further, Shane includes a feature that can adjust the angle of the club to your swing to help you achieve a target distance. 

A precision IMU in the shaft measures the velocity and angle of the club. It’s not clear yet whether it has a real effect, but it’s a cool idea.

For another innovation in gameplay enhancement, Wayne Covell created this Raspberry Pi computer vision project that looks at your Scrabble tiles and gives you some word options.

Using a connected camera the Pi grabs an image of your tiles and then runs optical character recognition to determine what the letters are. 

Once that’s done, it determines what words can be made from those letters and presents them to you in order of the highest scoring words.

Now, you still have to figure out a way to play those words on the current board. And honestly, I have no idea how you conceal this whole rig from your opponent. Maybe if you’re sheltering in place with a scrabble genius, they’ll allow this a way to level the playing field.

Or, maybe you can take a different approach and distract them with this tetrahedral LED hat. On Instructables, Kuchbert shares his design for this animated LED pyramid that he insists on calling a hat — but I just think is a cool thing to put on a shelf.

His version uses milled plexiglass, but there’s no reason you couldn’t lasercut it, or use wood, or even drill it all by hand.

For the electronics, he’s using an inexpensive Arduino Nano, Neopixel strip, and a Bluetooth module. The Bluetooth module allows you to connect to your smartphone and change the different animation modes wirelessly.

There’s no code for this yet, but he says it’s coming. If it’s something you want, be sure to leave him a request on the Instructable.

On YouTube, Allen Pan shows how he made this really long gripper arm as a social distance tool. 

It’s way more silly than practical, but it’s fun to see his build process. One of the most interesting components is the material he’s using to extend the arm. It’s this flat roll of material is called a Rollatube, and it’s used by the military to create temporary antennas. Allen calls it a giant slap bracelet, and that’s essentially what it is. It’s a great video, and worth a watch.

Back on Instructables, Jiri Pruas shows how he created this freeform circuit version of a working Arduino board, using brass wire and individual components.

This is actually an older project from Jiri, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it all spelled out as an Instructable. It’s beautiful, it works, it’s completely impractical, but man it looks so cool.

It’s time for some tips. From the Tetrahedral LED hat project I learned about the MIT App Inventor site. This is what Kuchbert used to make a simple Android app to switch modes on his Arduino Nano over Bluetooth. 

It’s sorta like Scratch, but for building apps. It’s drag and drop, and free, and there’s a library in there for Arduino serial communication and Bluetooth.

On Tested, Adam Savage shows off some of his favorite tools for drawing circles. The star of the show is this brass compass by Makers Cabinet called Iris, that opens and closes like a camera iris.

Through the OSH Park blog I learned about the Atom switch. This is a tiny switch made to fit a breadboard. One half of it plugs into your power rails and the other plugs into a single row. 

Underneath the board, there are little jumpers you solder to define the switch as a pull-up or pull-down. For Arduino projects, it seems like a great thing to have handy, and they’re dirt cheap. 

On the Get Hands Dirty channel, there’s a great video on making this cabinet for storing small hardware, sandpaper, and drill bits. This is the kind of organization I dream about, and the look of the plywood and the floating drawer faces is outstanding. 

On the Adafruit blog I learned about this 3D printed vise for holding project boards. The design is by Revsin on Thingiverse with a remix by MickeyManu that adds a v-shape to the jaws.

Also on Thingiverse, check out this Ultimate Box Maker by Joel Ebel. It makes use of the Thingiverse Customizer feature to let you put in dimensions, add vents, text, mounting holes for electronics — all kinds of stuff. Customizer is sometimes a buggy mess, but this one seemed to work for me. 

And on the Core 77 blog, I got a kick out of this drive-thru delivery box that extends out to a car window. I don’t know if it’s a perfect solution for touch-free delivery, but I love seeing the ingenuity. And it’s a great reminder that we are, right now, living in a time where the world really wants creative engineering solutions from people like us.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out their latest video on wi-fi, what it really is, and how to integrate it into your next project. The demo uses the Arduino MKR1000 board and it’s companion app, which you can use for communicating to your board, and adding interaction and virtual buttons and timers. Check it out.

And that does it for this week’s show, be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. If you have a secret weapon for organizing your workbench, or old projects, components, I’d love to hear about it. A big thanks to my patrons on Patreon and especially to Digi-Key electronics for making this show possible. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next week.