This week on Maker Update, Ghost Rider, Prop-Maker, Particle Mesh boards, Simone’s Calendar, defeating DRM, MIT’s Fiberbots, an open source cat, and a library of printable Lego bricks.

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Show Notes

Project of the Week

Ghost Rider Costume by mikeasaurus
https://www.instructables.com/id/Ghost-Rider-Costume/

Fire effect flame simulation LED light kit
https://amzn.to/2JlSCLQ

News

Seeed Drops New ESP32-Audio Dev Kit for Audio-Related IoT Projects
https://blog.hackster.io/seeed-drops-new-esp32-audio-development-kit-for-audio-related-iot-projects-ad38d1f02637

Adafruit Prop-Maker FeatherWing
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3988

Particle MESH is Shipping
https://blog.particle.io/2018/10/23/particle-mesh-is-shipping-everything-you-need-to-know/

Introducing the Every Day Calendar by Simone Giertz
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/simonegiertz/the-every-day-calendar?ref=discovery

Hacking DRM to fix your electronics is legal
https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/10/26/breaking-news-hacking-drm-to-fix-your-electronics-is-legal-copyrightoffice/

DMCA Review: Big Win for Right to Repair, Zero for Right to Tinker

Fiberbots – Framework for cooperative (swarm) robotic manufacturing by Filip Visnjic
https://www.creativeapplications.net/robotics/fiberbots-framework-for-cooperative-swarm-robotic-manufacturing/

https://mediatedmattergroup.com/fiberbots/

More Projects

Robot Cat by Rongzhong Li
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/robotic-cat-petoi-nybble/

https://www.hackster.io/RzLi/petoi-nybble-944867

Tools/Tips

Tips of the Week
https://makezine.com/2018/10/26/tips-of-the-week-hot-gluing-strain-relief-japanese-pull-saws-covering-work-tables-and-designing-your-logo/

Print a Brick
https://printabrick.org/

Arduino vs Pi by Bob Clagett
https://youtu.be/c1R4TH6U9rc

Picking the Right Arduino by James Lewis
https://blog.hackster.io/picking-the-right-arduino-341a0a9550c7

MagPi 75
https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/issues/75/

LED Calc
http://ledcalc.com/

Maker Faires This Weekend

Taipei City, Zhongzheng District Taiwan
Rio de Janeiro, Gávea Brazil
Cleveland, Ohio USA
Wellington New Zealand

Find a faire near you:
http://makerfaire.com/map/

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, Ghost Rider, Prop-Maker, Particle Mesh, Simone’s Calendar, defeating DRM, MIT’s Fiberbots, an open source cat, and a library of printable Lego bricks.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell and welcome to the 99th episode of Maker Update. I hope you’re having a fun Halloween. I have another big show for you today, but be sure not to miss next week’s show, my 100th episode of Maker Update. That’s going to be fun, and I’ll have some things to give away. I recommend getting on the email list so you don’t miss it. Alright? Now it’s time for the project of the week.

It’s my last chance to show off a Halloween project, and this one doesn’t disappoint. On Instructables, Mikeasaurus shows how he made this 3D printed, smoking, flame-flickering Ghost Rider costume. It’s amazing.

It’s also such a great project to unpack and geek out on. Behind the scenes, Mike is using an e-cig vaporizer loaded with harmless vegetable glycol as a pocket fog machine. But to direct the smoke where he wants it, he’s putting it through a mini aquarium pump and tubing and running it through his jacket.

To light it up with a flickering flame glow, he’s using these 12v flame effect LEDs from Amazon that I’ll include a link to, plus a few extra single LEDs near his forehead.

Then there’s the skull itself, and Mike does a great job showing how it’s pieced together and how to sand and prep and bondo and paint it up to look realistic. I love it.

There’s a lot of news to share this week. Let’s start with project boards. Seeed Studio has a new IoT board out focused on audio, called the ESP32-A1S.

The board is priced at $17, and has a ton of features, including line-input and output, an SD card slot, two microphones, stereo speaker output, a JST battery connection, plus built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Adafruit released a new stack-on board for their Arduino and Python-compatible Feather boards. This one is $10 and it’s called the Prop-Maker FeatherWing. It’s a quick way to add light and sound and movement interaction to your project.

You get a snap-in Neopixel LED port, plus drivers for super-bright 3 watt RGB LEDs. There’s a 3-axis accelerometer for detecting basic movements, and a snap-in speaker connection for 4 or 8 ohm speakers.

There’s a ton of possibilities for this board. Already I can see that that Ruiz brothers are working out a 3D printed Lightsaber project that should be great.

Particle is now shipping their line of Mesh IoT boards. They actually sent me a few that I have right here. These use that same Adafruit Feather design, and work with FeatherWing add-on boards.

The three flavors include Cellular, Wi-Fi, and Mesh-only, but the cool thing is that they can all use wireless Mesh networking to communicate to each other. So you could have a garden full of these Mesh boards measuring moisture levels, and have them all trickle that information up to a Wi-Fi or Cellular board to send it to the cloud.

It’s a very polished and user-friendly system. If you’re looking for a way to quickly build an IoT product on a platform that can scale, this is the system.

For a product that isn’t internet connect (although I don’t see why it couldn’t be), maker megastar Simone Giertz has launched a capacitive touch LED calendar on Kickstarter.

This is due out in December of next year. It’s going for $300. And the idea is that the files for this will be open sourced at some point, which is cool.

The calendar has a really neat looking PCB design with LEDs lighting each date from behind the board. Simone says she’s been using a prototype of this to remind her to meditate, but the general idea is to have it be a cool/nerdy way make a ritual of some daily behavior.

Both Adafruit and Hackaday have information on the new ruling from the United States Copyright Office that gives consumers the right to hack DRM-protection on the things they buy in an effort to repair them.

It’s great news if you’re somebody who believes that you should have the right to repair your stuff. But as Hackaday points out, the ruling does not grant you the right to break DRM for the purpose of Tinkering or Hacking. There’s a lot to it, and worth a read if you’re wondering what’s still off limits.

And MIT’s Mediated Matter group has recently published the details on its Fiberbots project. These are little CNC bots that weave a trail of fiberglass tubing behind them, that they cure with their own UV light. They’re awesome to watch, and they could play a role in future of construction.

The published details are all behind paywalls online, from what I can see, but if you want to make your own, maybe you can get your hands on one of the print journals, or just piece together the general idea from the images online.

I have one more project to share with you. This is Nybble. It’s the latest version of the OpenCat project by Rongzhong Li. It’s a robotic cat based on the Raspberry Pi. The frame is made from laser cut wood, the joints all have servos in them, and the face has an Ultrasonic sensor that makes it look like it has adorable dilated eyes.

The project is being crowdfunded as a kit on Indiegogo right now, but there’s also a Github for the project that’s in development. It’s a cool idea, and I think a lot of people who would otherwise not be interested in robots could get sucked in with a cute robo kitten to play with.

I have a bunch of tips to share this week. Over on Makezine, Gareth Branwyn’s Tips of the Week roundup includes a tip from John Park on adding a dab of hot glue to any interlocking electronic connections, like JST. This helps strengthen the connection and makes it less likely to pop out.

While doing some research on 3D printed Legos this week I came across PrintABrick.org. It is a web catalog of downloadable, 3D printable Lego bricks. There are over 5,000 designs, and you can also browse by Lego set, just in case your missing a few parts from a specific set. It’s a cool resource.

On YouTube, Bob Clagett’s latest tips video ponders the differences between Raspberry Pi and Arduino. If this is a question you get asked frequently, maybe you can use this video as a shortcut for helping people out.

As a companion to this, James Lewis on Hackster.io has a piece on picking the right Arduino board—Uno, Mega, Nano, Zero, MKR—each gets an explanation of its pros and cons.

Issue 75 of The MagPi magazine is out and available for download. This one collects the 75 greatest Raspberry Pi projects. Definitely worth a look.

And through Mike’s Ghost Rider project I learned about a free online tool for calculating what kind of current limiting resistor to use on your LEDs. You can find it at LEDcalc.com.

Maker Faires! There are four faires this weekend, including Taipei, Taiwan; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Cleveland, Ohio; and Wellington; New Zealand. If one’s near you, go mingle with your people. You can also visit MakerFaire.com to find out when a Faire is happening in your area.

Alright, and that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up, or leave a comment. Get on the Maker Update email list to get show notes sent out to you automatically every week. And a big thanks to my Patrons on Patreon who help make it possible for me to put this show together. If you look forward to this show every week, consider supporting it for even just a dollar a month using the Patreon link down in the description. Alright? Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next week for episode 100. Don’t miss it!