This week on Maker Update, a dress with a pulse, a portable soldering station, LED art, modding industrial sewing machines, and 3D printable inventions.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 264]++

-=Project of the Week=-

HeartBeatDress by Anouk Wipprecht
https://makezine.com/2021/12/17/anouk-wipprecht-teams-with-swarovski-to-make-a-heartbeat-dress/

Anouk’s Instructables
https://www.instructables.com/member/anoukwipprecht/instructables/

-=News=-

Hackaday’s 555 Timer Contest
https://hackaday.com/2021/12/01/the-555-timer-contest-returns/

-=More Projects=-

My New Clever Soldering Station by Laura Kampf
https://youtu.be/BnNstxggP9A

Tetrakis Square Tiling With WS2812 LEDs By andrei.erdei
https://www.instructables.com/Tetrakis-Square-Tiling-With-WS2812-LEDs/

YouTube Makers Secret Santa
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBsfTOjKcQe-dxiUtDUMUkOL3bXDowADb

-=Tips & Tools=-

10 Cool Inventions Anyone Can Print by Zack Freedman
https://youtu.be/1XVcix5n8x8

Industrial Sewing Machine, Basics Mods for your Beast! by Eric Strebel
https://youtu.be/7xf7v8GM738

Danilo Olim’s Interlocking Plywood Shapes for Custom Shelving Units
https://www.core77.com/posts/111191/Danilo-Olims-Interlocking-Plywood-Shapes-for-Custom-Shelving-Units

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Ice Cream Cone Cooler – Potentially Genius™
https://youtu.be/TpouWIJfjgc

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update, a dress with a pulse, a portable soldering station, LED art, modding industrial sewing machines, and 3D printable inventions.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, back with another Maker Update. I hope the new year has been treating you well. I’ve got plenty to catch you up on, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

One of the most unique projects in the past few weeks is Anouk Wipprecht’s HeartBeat Dress.

Like most of Anouk’s creations, this is a wearable interactive dress. The key element here is a crystal pendant that lights up and pulses in response to your heartbeat.

The dress is incredible, don’t get me wrong. But I can’t really offer you any advice on how to make it. I will include a link to her collection of Instructables that offer some insight into how she works.

The best writeup I’ve found on this particular design though is on Makezine. Anouk shares a ton of photos around the prototyping process.

The end result is a custom circuit board with an integrated color changing LED. The LED is reflected and diffused through the crystal on the font and gets its power from a small lipo battery sandwiched into the design.

One interesting design detail is that it recharges wirelessly using induction. In some of the photos you can see the induction coil exposed on the back. I imagine this helps to save space, but also looks neater than having a USB port sticking out the side.

The pendant can be worn on its own, and lights up. But to really take advantage of the heartbeat interaction there’s an ECG element that runs out the back, but I’m not super clear if it’s self contained or connects to sensors that stick to your body.

Either way, it looks great, and it’s always inspiring to see how Anouk weaves together fashion and technology.

Now for some news. Hackaday and Digi-Key are running a new contest, all about 555 timer chips.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the ubiquitous chip, and ten years since Hackaday first ran this contest.

The good news is that all you need to enter the contest is a documented project that uses a 555 timer. The bad news is that entries need to be in by January 10th – so maybe bake something up over the weekend.

Now for more projects. Check out Laura Kampf’s DIY portable soldering station.

Inspired by Adam Savage’s soldering station from last year, Laura created her own take on the idea using a section of I-beam, a power tool battery, a tin storage bin, and a USB soldering iron.

There’s some luck here with how the battery, the beam and the bin just magically nest together, but there are also a bunch of little ideas here to steal.

I particularly like the little magnetic helping hands she fashioned out of hooks, and the gooseneck lamp so that you always have some extra light on what you’re doing.

Now that portable USB soldering irons have become powerful and reliable enough for most tasks, I’d love to see more makers showing off customized setups like this.

To put your soldering skills to use, why not try Andrei Erdei’s latest LED art. This piece is based around Tetrakis Square Tiling, and uses a 3D printed grid that perfectly fits over a weave of addressable LED strip with a common spacing of 60 LED per meter.

The animations are programmed in Arduino and make use of the awesome FastLED library. He’s using an ESP8266 board, but I think any relatively fast Arduino board will do, since there’s no networking involved here.

One of the underappreciated aspects of making these look so great is how Andrei is diffusing the LEDs. Smoked plexiglass on the front helps to knock down some of the vibrancy, but placing a thin sheet of white wrapping paper between the plexiglass and the LEDs provides just the right amount of diffusion and texture to give it an organic feel.

Finally, in case you missed it, a who’s-who of YouTube makers exchanged homemade holiday gifts a few weeks back and it was amazing.

From Becky Sterns’ desktop New York hot dog cart experience, to Tested’s Keyboard Butt from Hell – Allen Pan’s soda smuggler, Estefannie’s Tarot robot – the holiday maker stocking was positively stuffed with weird, fun projects. If you missed any of them, I’ve included a link to a playlist that collects them all.

Now for some tips and tools. On YouTube, Zack Freedman covers 10 of his favorite 3D printable inventions.

These are perfect for anyone new to 3D printing looking for something fun and functional to print, but really, even for someone who’s been at it awhile there’s lots of fun stuff on here I’ve never seen before. He saves the best for last, so stick around to the end.

Eric Strebel has a great video explaining why you should pick up a used industrial sewing machine instead of a new consumer model. There are some tweaks and upgrades you’ll want to make, such as swapping out the motor for a slower brushless upgrade – but Eric walks you through all his tips and tricks.

And I had to share this modular shelving system I saw, designed by Danilo Olim.

These plywood hexagons and cubes have strategically placed cutouts that slot together. It’s a cool look, and it seems like an idea you could apply to other materials or scale up or down for different solutions.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out the latest episode of Potentially Genius with the Tomorrow Lab crew.

This episode dropped on December 15th, so it was easy to miss. It’s also all about trying to invent a container that will keep an ice cream cone cold longer. A super fun idea, but maybe not one you want to think about in the middle of winter.

Still, I love seeing this team work and there’s some great information here on Peltier coolers and phase change materials. It will make you hungry for ice cream though, so maybe skip it if you’ve got some resolutions to keep.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up, or leave a comment. We’ve been getting some nice spikes in views recently, so whatever you’re doing, keep it up. You can also get on the Maker Update email list to keep up with each week’s show. A big thanks to Digi-Key for making this show possible. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you soon.