This month on Maker Update: A Python Powered Camera Slider, Two new PyPortals, iOS notifications for your Circuit Playground, Goggles, Gift hunts, baubles, and thermal vision for your projects.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Month=-

Motorized Camera Slider
https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-motorized-camera-slider

-=News=-

Two new pyportals! Titano/Pynt
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4444

CircuitPlayground on Tested
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E7sfTkjdPg

200 CircuitPython Libraries!
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/12/10/200-circuitpython-libraries/

-=Adafruit Projects=-

Bluefruit TFT Gizmo ANCS Notifier for iOS
https://learn.adafruit.com/ancs-gizmo

Sister Night Goggles
https://learn.adafruit.com/watchmen-sister-night-circuitpython-neopixel-goggles

Hide & Seek ornament
https://learn.adafruit.com/hide-n-seek-bluefruit-ornament

-=Contributed Projects=-

Neopixel Christmas Tree
https://learn.adafruit.com/wooden-neopixel-xmas-tree

-=Tools/Tips=-

CircuitPython Libraries and Jupyter Notebook on any Computer with MCP2221
https://learn.adafruit.com/jupyter-on-any-computer-with-circuitpython-libraries-and-mcp2221

Bluefruit Playground App
https://learn.adafruit.com/bluefruit-playground-app/overview

S is for Soldering Iron
https://learn.adafruit.com/circuit-playground-s-is-for-soldering-iron

-=Product Spotlight=-

Adafruit MLX90640 24×32 IR Thermal Camera Breakout – 110 Degree FoV
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4469

Transcript

This month on Maker Update: A Python Powered Camera Slider, Two new PyPortals, iOS notifications for your Circuit Playground, Goggles, Gift hunts, baubles, and thermal vision for your projects

Hello and welcome to the first Adafruit edition of Maker Update for the dark and cyberpunk future of the year 2020. I’m Tyler Winegarner, I’m still waiting for my cyberdeck, but we’ve still got an awesome show jam packed with projects, tips and tools to get your year started off right, so let’s jack in with the project of the month.

By the time they’re ready for the world, a lot of maker projects still very much look like works in progress. But this motorized camera slider, designed by the Ruiz Brothers and coded by Liz Clark looks like a great example of polished engineering. The frame is made of 2020 aluminum extrusion used in a lot of 3d printer builds, and the slider itself is made of a 15mm linear slide bearing rail. Aside from the motors and pulleys, everything else is 3d printed.

The brains of the build are based on the feather platform – An M4 express handles all of the circuitpython code, while a featherwing drives the stepper motor and a mini TFT display with joystick is the perfect choice to provide the UI. You can set the slide duration from 5 minutes to up to an hour, and when the motion is completed, you can opt to return to the main menu, or repeat the program in the opposite direction.

There’s a small lipo battery to power the featherwing, and a 12v battery pack offers ample power to the stepper motor. I’ve said before that any maker and videographer almost inevitably tackles this sort of project, and it makes sense – the professional versions of this can set you back several hundred dollars. But this one looks robust enough for everyday use – and with an additional panning head, you can get some really sophisticated movement. More than that, the design is really a testament to the level of engineering we can achieve with a really solid design.

Time for the news, PyPortal, the IoT magic screen for CircuitPython now has a family! There’s two new PyPortal products: the embiggened Titano and the pint-sized… Pynt. Titano measures in at 3.5” with double the pixel density, and is powered by a SAMD51J20 processor. It’s fully compatible with the original, but before you go hacking the gibson, you’ll need to update the graphics code to account for the new pixel density. Pynt is the newer, smaller version of the PyPortal. It’s just 2.4” on the diagonal, but everything else is the same as it’s bigger sisters. Both of the new portals do without the temperature sensor, so if your projects need it, go for the original.

Jeremy Williams over at Tested gave a nice mention to Adafruit and Circuit Playground in his favorite things of 2019 video. He recommended it as the best place to start if you want to start building projects with microcontrollers – celebrating the huge amount of sensors and outputs available on the board, and the spectrum of languages you can use to program it. I have to agree, I’m constantly blown away by the amount of power at your fingertips in such a tiny package. It’s like we’re living in the future.

And finally, there are now over 200 libraries written for circuitpython that are ready to use in your next project to help you use anything from touch sensors to lidar modules. Its a huge milestone for the language.  You can browse through them or download the whole pack over on the Adafruit blog.

Time for more projects, we’ve seen a lot of cool stuff built with the TFT Gizmo lately, but John Park takes it to the next level with this notifier display for his iPhone. Built on the circuit playground bluefruit, it taps into Apple Notification Center Service to display the corresponding app icon when a new notification comes in.  Clear the notification, and it disappears from the gizmo. It’s probably obvious from the name, but the Apple Notification Service Center isn;t supported on Android, and it’s a safe bet that this project isn’t coming to that platform any time soon. Still, pretty cool to see projects like this working in the walled garden. John takes you through the entire build in a stream on his twitch channel.

Cosplay and replica props rank up there with some of my favorite projects, and these Sister Night goggles from HBO’s Watchmen series by the Ruiz Brothers are fantastic. They fitted a pair of 16x neopixel rings to these costume goggles and added a rotary switch to select the different modes. A trinket m0 runs the code, and some 3d printed parts make up the rest of the build. If you need a prop for all tomorrow’s parties, this one looks like a great place to get started.

We’ve still got a little bit of a holiday hangover here, and there were some really festive projects from the past few weeks that deserve some spotlight. John Park used the Circuit Playground Bluefruit to make ornaments that are part of a christmas day treasure hunt. Pluck it off the tree, and use it to find the hidden presents. The closer it is to the gift, the more LEDs light up. It’s a great idea, and a cool reveal for that “one more thing” gift for your loved ones.

Liz Clark from the Adafruit community not only wrote the code for our project of the month, she also created this neopixel-powered christmas tree display. The project combines some clever 3d printed parts, circuit python, electronics, and some really good onomatopoeia. The project is also one of Liz’s first forays into woodworking, so if you’re intimidated by all the master woodworkers on youtube and want to get started with the basics, this is a great project, and a fun result. 

Time for some tips and tools, last month we talked about the FT232H breakout that adds i2c, spi, gpio and all the other microcontroller goodness to your desktop computer.  Now there’s a full set of tutorials to get them to work with Jupyter notebooks so you can use these breakouts to interact with sensors and graph the results in real time. There’s a few other breakout boards that will work with Jupyter Notebooks, and they support circuitpython, so you’ll have access to all the different libraries to help get your project going.

The Adafruit Bluefruit app has been making it easy to interact with their bluetooth hardware for some time now, but there’s a new version specifically for the Circuit Playground Bluefruit. It’s just out for iOS devices for the time being, but there’s modules to control the neopixels, get realtime data from the accelerometer or light sensor, use the tone generator to make music, and more. You’ll need to load a specific firmware onto your circuit playground to use it, but its easy to swap back and forth. Go check it out in the app store.

There’s no shortage of soldering guides out there but there are few that are as comprehensive as this video from LadyAda herself as part of the Circuit Playground video series. She covers the science of soldering, all the tools you need to do it safely and easily, and the actual technique of soldering. Its easier than ever to get pretty far in learning electronics without ever needing to solder anything, but it’s a great skill to have, and this kid-friendly video makes it easy for anyone to pick up.

This month’s Adafruit featured product is a bit of a mouthful, but the MLX 90640 is a 32×24 pixel thermal camera compatible with just about any project. Really it’s just an array of thermal sensors with a 110 degree field of view, but when you couple that array with a screen, you can see the output of those sensors in near real-time at 16 fps. It communicates over i2c, and while it does have some cpu requirements for your controller, its fully compatible with m0 and m4 hardware. It reports on a temperatures ranging from -40 to 300 degrees centigrade, but conks out if the board itself gets above 85, so make sure to keep the board cool in hot environments. It’s amazing to see that we have tools like this at our fingertips.

And’s it for this month’s show! I hope you’ve had a fantastic holiday and the past few weeks have been restful. Give this show a thumbs up if you found it useful, or leave a comment. We’re going to be playing around with the schedule of these shows this year so start looking for it at the start of the week, but be sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss it. As always thanks to Adafruit for making this show possible, and to you for watching. See you in a month!