This week on Maker Update, cardboard trees for cats, an LED pixel clock, a pocket disco, Molecules for your neck, a light river for your kitchen, a solar heart, and an 8-player NES.

Show Notes

Project of the Week

How to Make a Christmas Tree for Cats
https://youtu.be/B98MvPHJPGI

News

MakerBot Method
https://www.makerbot.com/3d-printers/method/

More Projects

Lazy Grid Clock by parallyze
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3241802

Pocket Disco by lonesoulsurfer
https://www.instructables.com/id/Sound-Controlled-LEDs-Pocket-Disco/

Molecule Necklaces by Penolopy Bulnick
https://www.instructables.com/id/Rhinestone-and-3D-Print-Molecule-Necklaces/

Ornament version
https://www.instructables.com/id/Molecule-Ornaments/

Designing And Building An 8 Foot Long River of Light by Caleb Kraft
https://makezine.com/2018/12/04/designing-and-building-an-8-foot-long-river-of-light/

Solar LED Heart Ornament by Antalife
https://www.antalife.com/2018/11/project-solar-led-heart-ornament.html

Hackaday writeup
https://hackaday.com/2018/12/06/solar-heart-engineered-to-beat-for-decades/

Octopad by Patrick Lemieux
http://shakethatbutton.com/the-octopad/
http://patrick-lemieux.com/projects/Octopad/

Tools/Tips

Maker Spaces: Kinetic Sculpture Artist Nemo Gould
https://youtu.be/2xntfsLWlDg

Gareths Tips of the Week
https://makezine.com/2018/12/07/tips-of-the-week-cosplayers-project-notebooks-silicon-molds-from-caulk-recip-saw-tips-fire-starting-and-more/

Thingiverse Holiday Prints Collection
https://www.thingiverse.com/AnaErwin/collections/holidays

Reindeer card kit by shink
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3213535

Hackaday Circuit Sculpture Contest
https://hackaday.com/2018/12/04/the-circuit-sculpture-contest/

ElectroMage Pixelblaze V2 – WiFi LED Controller
https://www.tindie.com/products/ElectroMage/electromage-pixelblaze-v2-wifi-led-controller/

The Official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide (free PDF)
https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/issues/beginners-guide/

Cool Tool Review: Makey Makey

Makey Makey on Amazon
https://amzn.to/2JzJ7It

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, cardboard trees for cats, an LED pixel clock, a pocket disco, Molecules for your neck, a light river for your kitchen, a solar heart, and an 8-player NES.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell and welcome to another Maker Update. Happy Holidays! Hope you’re all warm and toasty. I have a fun show for you today crammed with 8 projects. Let’s start with the project of the week.

Check out this cardboard Christmas tree for cats from Bob Clagett. Now, I’m allergic to cats, and I have no genuine interest in building this. But I’m giving it project of the week status because 1. A lot of people have cats; and 2. You have to see how Bob and Josh layer up cardboard to make this.

By gluing up sheets of cardboard in alternating directions, they’ve basically created a kind of cardboard plywood. From this they use a CNC router to cut their design, but in the end they show how cutting the design with a jigsaw actually leads to cleaner results.

Bottom line, if you want to make a quick, cheap, temporary structure — for cats, humans, or just something to look at — the techniques outlined here for designing and executing with cardboard are super useful.

In news this week, Makerbot announced a new $6,500 3D printer called Method. They’re billing it as a “Performance” 3D printer geared towards business customers.

The big claim here is a faster print time, which they say is twice as fast as conventional 3D printing. The design features dual-extruders and an enclosed print bed with heating elements to maintain a consistent temperature.

It looks interesting, but I’m a little skeptical and would love to see it in a head-to-head challenge.

On Thingiverse, Daniel Cikic has a guide up on making a color LED pixel clock with a 3D printed structure. The framework is designed for you to neatly snake NeoPixel strip around the inside, but also block out the light bleeding over from each pixel. There are 83 LEDs in total, all linked up to an Arduino Pro Mini and a real-time clock module to keep precise track of the time.

It’s a good looking payoff, and there’s even a little enclosure for the Arduino on the back to keep things tidy.

On Instructables, Lonesoulsurfer has a project he calls Pocket Disco. It is a down and dirty, old school breadboard project that links up a series of LEDs to a 4017 decade counter and a cheap electret microphone.

When the mic hears sound, is cycles the decade counter and creates a blinky light show with the LEDs. It’s a fun little perfboard project with no programming required. I especially like the look of the cigarette case enclosure.

Penolopy Bulnick has some more 3D printed jewelry designs up on Instructables. These ones are all modeled after different molecules, including Dopamine, Adrenaline, GABA, and Caffeine. The prints are quick. You add some rhinestones to the intersections and a chain on the ends, and the result looks great.

But if you don’t see a reason to make a necklace, Penolopy also has a version of the guide up on making these into Christmas tree ornaments, minus the rhinestones.

Over on Makezine, Caleb Kraft has a great build diary that covers how he made this wooden river of light as an under-cabinet light fixture for his kitchen. Included in the writeup is a 2-part video that covers the design and execution and the trouble he ran into along the way. Definitely worth a look, even just to peek at what’s involved in the process.

Through Hackaday I learned about Antalife’s solar LED heart ornament. The project uses a custom circuit board and a 3D printed enclosure. The crazy part is, he designed it to run for up to 30 years, with no battery.

Instead, he has the small solar cell charging up a supercapacitor hiding inside the box. His writeup goes into some deep detail on what components to use if you’re trying to do something similar.

Finally check out Octopad by Patrick Lemieux. This is a hack for the original Nintendo game controller that splits a single controller out to 8 seperate controllers, but each with only one of the 8 buttons. So one player has up, the other has down, someone has B another has A. You get the idea. Looks like a wacky modification, though I can’t imagine it’s much fun to be start or select.

I have a bunch of tips to share. Over on Tested there’s a great interview with kinetic artist Nemo Gould and a tour of his workshop. Nemo talks about his methods for organizing project materials, the art of hoarding scrap, and reasons to avoid digital fabrication.

Gareth Branwyn’s Tips of the Week column talks about shaping foam with a soldering iron, creating molds with silicone caulking, and a cool cosplay project notebook from punished props.

On Thingiverse I found an updated collection of holiday 3D print designs, including this reindeer kit from Shink that I printed up. I think I may include it in some holiday cards this year.

Hackaday has announced a circuit sculpture contest inspired by the freeform circuit work of Mohit Bhoite and by Eirik Brandal. If you’re into freeform circuit design and point-to-point soldering, this could be for you.

Through the Tindie blog I found this LED controller board called the ElectroMage Pixelblaze V2. The $29 board works with a variety of LED strip, including Dotstar. The neat trick is that is has an ESP8266 on board hosting a web-based LED animation editor that you can log onto and change how your LEDs look and behave. It seems like a neat idea.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has published a new official beginners guide to Raspberry Pi. It’s available in print but you can also download it for free.

And for my Cool Tool recommendation of the week, check out my video on the Makey Makey. I thought of it when I saw that Octopad controller. For $50, this board breaks out any computer’s keyboard to a set of capacitive touchpads that you can wire up with alligator clips to buttons, switches, or bananas. It’s like a swiss army knife for interaction design.

So 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 have show notes emailed out to each week. A huge thanks to my Patrons on Patreon. And you may have noticed that we’re releasing these on Friday now. I hope that’s alright. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next week.