This week on Maker Update, blinking with the black mage, a record-breaking student rocket, the art of audio hacking, a Pi controlled golf course, and experiments with LED matrix displays.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Week=-

Final Fantasy Black Mage Cosplay by Cody Sass
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/05/21/this-final-fantasy-black-mage-cosplay-has-all-the-feels/
https://github.com/dukeofdummies/BlackMageEyes

Remote Controlled LED Eyes & Costume Hood By bekathwia
https://www.instructables.com/id/Remote-Controlled-LED-Eyes-Costume-Hood/

-=News=-

Student Rocket Makes It To Space (via Hackaday)
https://hackaday.com/2019/05/23/student-rocket-makes-it-to-space/

-=More Projects=-

Rotor by Vtol
http://vtol.cc/filter/works/rotor

More info on CD Circuit Bending
http://www.thosewhomakewaves.com/home/2016/8/8/cd-circuit-bending-sound-art

Indoor golf setup using arduino and pi – virtual moving floor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdoDEWQDy_4

-=Tools/Tips=-

How I Learned To Build With Metal by Kevin Dupzyk
https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/tools/a27309619/build-with-metal/

Long-Reach Deburring Tool review by Jordan Bunker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdM9LgNwbJw

A Communal Table Made From Up-cycled Construction Aluminum by Ammar KALO
https://www.core77.com/projects/88377/A-Communal-Table-Made-From-Up-cycled-Construction-Aluminum
https://ammarkalo.com/After-Pressure

 

Physicalising a Pixel – LED Matrix Display Tutorial / Document 1. Workshop written by Filip Visnjic
https://www.creativeapplications.net/processing/physicalising-a-pixel-led-matrix-display-tutorial-document-1-workshop/

Github examples
https://github.com/ertdfgcvb/MamaMatrix

Magnetic Tape Roll Holder by Sam Vandenbulcke
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3521967

Tips, Tools and Shop Tales #3
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/garethbranwyn/issues/gareth-s-tips-tools-and-shop-tales-issue-3-178375

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

LED Matrix Workshop Materials

RGB LED matrix 32×64 5mm pitch
https://www.digikey.com/short/p4dfmt

Teensy 3.5 or 3.6 development board
https://www.digikey.com/short/p4dfm8

SmartLed shield
https://www.digikey.com/short/p4dfmq

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, blinking with the black mage, a record-breaking student rocket, the art of audio hacking, a Pi controlled golf course, and experiments with LED matrix displays.

Hey everybody! I’m Donald Bell, and welcome to another Maker Update. I hope you’re all doing well. I’ve been having fun trying to add some speakers in my garage for playing music. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I’ve got another great show for you, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

In a video that’s been making the rounds, you can see Cody Sass cracking up an audience with his Final Fantasy Black Mage costume.

The key element is the animated glowing eyes which seem to perfectly change and emote with Cody’s routine. Everybody’s been wondering how he pulled this off, and he now has a series of guides that walk you through it.

Under the hood (literally under the hood) he’s using a cut up strand of Adafruit’s edge-lit Neopixel LED strip mounted inside a pair of goggles with the outside lens popped out. Because the LEDs on this particular strip are mounted facing the side, Cody could string them up on their edge and see right through them.

A small Adafruit Trinket board manages the LEDs and stores all the different animation patterns. The Arduino code for it is posted up on Github.

Now the trick to controlling the eye animations is a custom handheld remote molded from thermoplastic or Sugru. From the code’s perspective, the remote is like a vintage Nintendo controller. It has an up, down, left, and right, and two buttons. Using a combination of direction and one or both buttons, Cody has 16 different eye expressions that he can trigger. The hard part has got to me remembering what combos do what.

There are a lot of awesome ideas here you can pull apart for your own costume projects. I’m excited to see how people riff on this one. I also recommend checking out Becky Stern’s remote controlled eyes project, which is a similar idea, but uses an inexpensive wireless remote to pull it off. You can find links to everything down in the description.

It’s time for some news. The students of the USC Rocket Propulsion Lab shared a video of their latest rocket launch. The rocket, called the Traveler IV, reached an apogee of 339,800 ft breaking the world record for the highest altitude ever reached by a vehicle entirely designed and built by a college rocketry team.

It’s a great, inspiring video, and from a maker perspective you get a little peek at the custom rocket build, the PCB designs, and even making their own rocket fuel. It’s crazy.

Now for more projects! The artist VTOL has a post detailing some of what went into hist latest interactive sound sculpture called Rotor. The foundation of it is a Sony portable CD player that has been heavily modified to become an instrument all it’s own.

There’s a joystick for shifting the pitch up and down, a little one-octave keyboard for sampling and playing the glitchy output. And a whole array of switches and dials for teasing out all kinds of crazy sounds.

The aesthetic here is incredible, with all the choices he made for materials and highlighting the motor movement. But my favorite takeaway here is that there’s a known hack for these particular Sony CD players that unlocks and unmutes all of the audio artifacts that weren’t meant to be heard, by forcing the laser to continue reading data at all times.

To learn more about that hack, he points to another article on circuit bending CD players that has more information.

Another project that’s short on details but too cool to ignore is this moving indoor putting green by High Voltages. Using an Arduino Mega, Raspberry Pi, I2C compatible relays, and ultrasonic sensors for each of the 24 motorized jacks under the floor, you’ve got a computer-controlled floor that you can make lumpy like a realistic golf course.

What’s interesting here is that he’s using the ultrasonic sensors to measure the height of each jack. This way, he can send out a command for a jack to rise until it reaches a specific height measured underneath the floor by the ultrasonic sensor and reported back. It’s neat.

I have some tips and tools for you. On Popular Mechanics, Kevin Dupzyk has an article I liked that talks about his experience getting started with working with metal. What I like about Kevin’s story is that he comes to welding as a complete novice out of necessity, needing a custom roof rack for his Jeep. He’s also open about how he was able to find help and learn the ropes from a local professional.

Speaking of which, I’ve got a video on Cool Tools talking with my own welding guru, Jordan Bunker. Jordan and I talk about a long-reach deburring tool and how it helped him fabricating parts for Battlebots.

Through the Core 77 blog I learned about this table made from upcycled aluminum construction scraps made by designer Ammar Kalo. By compressing and shaping and shearing the bales of raw aluminum you get this weird, beautiful material. I think it’s really neat, and cool to see a new way to recycle material.

On the Creative Applications Network blog, Filip Visnjic has a great resource that looks at different approaches to coding animations and interactions to a RGB LED matrix.

The workshop was originally performed at the UAL Creative Computing Institute in London. Students all used the same components to run through a series of code examples, starting with Arduino and moving on to Processing.

In the writeup, you can see exactly what hardware was used, along with all the example code used in the workshop. If you ever wanted to do cool stuff with and LED panel, this is a great place to start.

On Thingiverse, Sam Vandenbulcke has this design for a 3D printed magnetic tape holder. It’s a two piece design with a magnetic pocket clip and a magnetic hub for the tape roll. If you’re someone who keeps tape on them, this could be something worth checking out.

And on the latest Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales newsletter, Gareth Branwyn talks about adding threaded inserts for 3D prints, understanding servo horns, and testing glues for XPS foam.

Finally, for this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, let’s take a look at the materials used for that RGB LED matrix coding class, all of which are available on Digi-Key.

First, there’s the matrix itself, which is 64 pixels wide by 32 pixels tall with a 5mm pitch between the LEDs.

Then there’s the Teensy 3.5 project board that runs all the code. There’s also the SmartLED shield, which makes it easy to connect up the unique cable coming off the matrix to the Teensy.

Now, here’s what so great about Digi-Key. The matrix is from Adafruit, the Teensy and the shield can come from Adafruit or SparkFun, but you can find all of it on Digi-Key and put it in one order. They have the world’s largest selection of components available for immediate shipment, which can save you time and money.

Alright, and that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. Thanks for all the encouraging comments last week. You can also sign up for the Maker Update email newsletter so you can get links and show notes emailed out to you automatically. I especially recommend for next week’s show, which won’t be here, but over on the Adafruit channel for my monthly Adafruit edition of Maker Update. So don’t miss it, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you soon.