This week on Maker Update, magnetic animatronics, a photo frame with a dark side, a conductive paper dragon, keyblades, a Star Trek desk, and gaming with a PyBadge.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Month=-

Robotic Creature by Ruiz Brothers
https://learn.adafruit.com/robotic-creatures

-=News=-

Learn Hardware Programming with CircuitPython. The perfect introduction to electronics and programming
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/15/learn-hardware-programming-with-circuitpython-the-perfect-introduction-to-electronics-and-programming-codecademy-adafruit-circuitpython/

https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-circuitpython

-=Adafruit Projects=-

Twin Peaks Light Reactive Picture Frame by Liz Clark
https://learn.adafruit.com/twin-peaks-light-reactive-pyportal-picture-frame

Color Spinner Camera Ring Light by Dano Wall
https://learn.adafruit.com/camera-ring-light-with-CPX

PyPortal Tides Viewer by Carter Nelson
https://learn.adafruit.com/pyportal-tides-viewer

Light Up Paper Dragon Wall Sconce by Erin St Blaine
https://learn.adafruit.com/light-up-paper-dragon-wall-sconce

Keyblade 3D Kit by Ruiz Brothers
https://learn.adafruit.com/kingdom-key-keyblade

Prop-Maker Keyblade by Ruiz Brothers
https://learn.adafruit.com/propmaker-keyblade

-=Contributed Projects=-

Star Trek replica desk build by Dave Harvey
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/17/from-the-forums-a-star-trek-replica-desk-build-startrek-replica-adafruit-startrektos-adafruit/

-=Tools/Tips=-

Create wearable tech with Sophy Wong
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/24/new-book-out-create-wearable-tech-with-sophy-wong-wearable-wearables-books-raspberry_pi-sophywong/

EduBlocks
https://edublocks.org/

Adafruit Metro M4 Express AirLift (WiFi) – Lite
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4000

Unleashing BEAST MODE on Adafruit M4 boards
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/23/unleashing-beast-mode-on-adafruit-m4-boards/

PyPortal Animated GIF display improved from overclocking
https://learn.adafruit.com/pyportal-animated-gif-display

Making Screw-Threaded Parts for Cosplay Props by Ruiz Bros.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/20/making-screw-threaded-parts-for-props-3dprinting-fusion360/

Knurling Textures in Fusion360 by Ruiz Bros.
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/15/new-tutorial-knurling-textures-in-adskfusion360-3dprinting/

JOHN PARK’S WORKSHOP LIVE 4/25/19 PyBadge Pixel Art
https://youtu.be/z-xYCgxtQiQ
https://learn.adafruit.com/makecode-arcade-pixel-art-sprites

-=Product Spotlight=-

Adafruit PyBadge for MakeCode Arcade, CircuitPython or Arduino
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4200
https://youtu.be/n2rzrYRAPYI?t=762

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, magnetic animatronics, a photo frame with a dark side, a conductive paper dragon, keyblades, a Star Trek desk, and gaming with a PyBadge.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell and welcome to another Adafruit edition of Maker Update. It’s great to be back. The Adafruit crew has been very busy, so let’s catch up with my pick for the project of the month.

Check out this guide from the Ruiz brothers on making 3D printed creatures that seem to move on their own.

The trick is in the platform, which uses a Circuit Playground Express and a Crickit expansion board to move a pair of magnets back and forth with a servo motor. By using a magnetic filament in your 3D print, the creature on the platform is invisibly brought to life.

For an extra touch, they’ve wired up UV neopixel LEDs in the base, which helps give an eerie glow to the translucent elements of the 3D printed creature.

It may be a little early to start thinking about Halloween projects, but I’d at least bookmark this one. I mean, can you imagine using this to animate a floating head in jar, or some fighting tarantulas.

It’s a great trick to know about, and as always, the Ruiz brothers have an exceptionally detailed guide with all the code and resources you need.

It’s time for some news. CodeAcademy has teamed up with Adafruit to launch a course for learning to program with Circuit Python. The 2-part course is open to beginners and leads up to creating three projects, including a bike light, a plant monitor, and a drum machine. The course is available now to all CodeAcademy Pro subscribers.

Now for more projects. Liz Clark from Blitz City has this guide on making a light-reactive photo frame that quickly switches between two photos depending on whether it’s dark or light in the room.

As a Twin Peaks fan, her particular spin on this project has a photo of Laura Palmer when it’s light out. And when it’s dark, it switches to a photo of the woodsman and plays an audio sample.

Again, I think this is a great project to put on your future Halloween project list. It’s using an Adafruit PyPortal board, a power switch, a small speaker, a rechargeable battery pack, and a PowerBoost board for recharging it.

Dano Wall has this clever project that allows you to change the colors on a Neopixel led ring by spinning a printed color wheel.

By mounting the color wheel over the light sensor of the Circuit Playground Express and flashing a series of colors off it from a nearby LED, the board can determine what color isn’t reflecting back and signal the color change to the LED ring.

It’s a cool trick. I don’t need it on my camera, personally, but I could see this being applied to other projects.

Carter Nelson shows how to display local tide levels on a PyPortal display. It’s a relatively simple project that makes use of an existing web service by the NOAA, so there’s no API keys or anything to work out. You just need to figure out your local tide station ID and plug it in.

Erin St Blaine has a fun project up showing how to combine paper and LEDs to create a dragon-themed wall sconce. The project is equal parts craft and electronics. One detail I particularly like is how Erin made a symbol on the front out of copper tape that acts as a capacitive on/off switch.

Next, check out the amazing Kingdom Hearts-inspired Key Blade props from the Ruiz Brothers.

There are two versions of this guide. One is for a simplified kit where all the elements screw into each other. The other is for a more advanced and detailed version with lights and sound effects.

The simplified kit is nothing more than a series of meticulously made 3D print files. Given the size of the final piece, the design is broken into many pieces that are printed individually and assembled together.

With the exception of 8 machine screws used to sandwich the handle together, everything else is 3D printed with built-in threads to fit together perfectly. Best of all, the design also makes it easy to break down and fit into a backpack or suitcase.

The advanced keyblade prop uses a lot of this same printed thread, modular design but adds LEDs and electronics into the mix, along with some extra design details.

The heart of the electronics is an Adafruit Feather M4 Express and a Prop-Maker Featherwing. This combo, along with some Neopixel LEDs, a rechargeable battery, and a speaker, allows you to create light and sound effects that react to your movement.

Both designs are a testament to the constantly evolving skills of the Ruiz Brothers and worth a look, even if it’s just for some inspiration.

From the Adafruit community, you have to see this other inspired prop by Dave Harvey. This is a replica of a Star Trek Original Series quarters desk, complete with a monitor, imbedded switches, and sound effects.

The switches connect up to an Adafruit Sound FX board and audio amplifier board, along with a pair of speakers mounted underneath the desk. As you might expect, Dave rigged these switches trigger Star Trek sound effects. I love it.

Time for a few tips to share. Maker and friend of Adafruit, Sophy Wong, has a new book out called Wearable Tech Projects. A lot of these are projects collected from her work for HackSpace magazine. There are 30 projects in here with beautiful pictures, and costs around $13 with free shipping worldwide.

This week I learned about EduBlocks.org, which is a free tool designed to make it easier to transition from Scratch-style, blocks programming over to Python. The idea is that the blocks show more of the code elements, so you can get a better feel for it.

Adafruit has come out with a new version of their Metro M4 Express board called the Metro M4 Express AirLift. This version adds a dedicated ESP32 certified Wi-Fi processor to the board, giving your project a wireless internet connection in a way that takes care of your security needs, and also has root certificates pre-loaded.

The Lite version of the board is available now, but there will eventually be an even beefier version.

Phil B has a post detailing how to unlock “Beast Mode” for version 1.4.0 of the Adafruit SAMD Boards, including Metro M4, Grand Central, PyPortal and others. By overclocking, you can get a significant speed boost. One project in particular that’s already benefited from this is Lady Ada’s PyPortal GIF player, which can now be setup to playback GIFs at full speed.

For a glimpse into the process that led to the Ruiz Bros. Key Blade designs, they’ve created two new Layer-By-Layer videos providing details on Fusion 360 design techniques.

The first video demonstrates how to create threads on 3D printed designs so that you can break up large pieces into prints that screw together.

The second video goes over the process they went through to create knurling textures on the  sword grip. That’s a cool one you could add to all kinds of projects, especially anything with a handle.

And don’t miss the episode of John Park’s workshop video and companion guide where he shows how to make pixel art. It’s an especially useful skill to have for our Product Spotlight.

Adafruit just recently unveiled their PyBadge. It’s a $35 board with a 1.8-inch color screen, direction pad, game control buttons and 5 Neopixel LEDs below the screen.

It’s powered by an ATSAMD51 processor, allowing you to program it using MakeCode Arcade, or Circuit Python, or even Arduino.

As the PyBadge name implies, it’s a great platform for an animated, interactive conference badge, and you could easily use the loops at the top to hook in a lanyard. But when I look at this it just screams gaming platform and the MakeCode Arcade compatibility makes it a slam dunk.

Check it out, and if they’re still out of stock, be sure to sign up to get notified when it’s back in.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a comment or a thumbs-up. When I’m not here, you can catch Maker Update on the Digi-Key YouTube channel. You can also just sign up on the Maker Update email list to get each week’s show emailed out to you directly with a few bonus projects. Alright? Thanks for watching and I’ll see you soon.