This week on Maker Update, a full-scale millennium Falcon cockpit, Jen Schachter’s Cricut Cart, a Google-controlled origami light show, a game of life table, and animating flip-digits.

++Show Notes [Maker Update #158]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Millennium Falcon Dashboard (Full Scale Garage Build) By kylegilbert
https://www.instructables.com/id/Millennium-Falcon-Dashboard-Full-Scale-Garage-Buil/

DIY Star Wars Millennium Falcon Cockpit Playhouse By kylegilbert
https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Millennium-Falcon-Cockpit-Playhouse/

Make a Millennium Falcon Playhouse – Massive Update By kylegilbert
https://www.instructables.com/id/Millennium-Falcon-Playhouse-Massive-Update/

Make a Large-Scale Star Wars AT-AT Walker By kylegilbert
https://www.instructables.com/id/Large-Scale-Star-Wars-AT-AT-Walker-Build/

-=More Projects=-

Custom Cricut Maker Vinyl Cutter Workshop Cart! by Jen Schachter
https://youtu.be/Dtkey7YUyPg

Cart Plans on Etsy
https://www.etsy.com/listing/771208385/cricut-cart-plans-vinyl-cutter-mobile

Serenity: An origami wall sculpture connected with Google Home Charlyn Gonda
https://charlyn.codes/origami-wall-art/

Game of Life Coffee Table by andrei.erdei
https://www.instructables.com/id/Game-of-Life-Coffee-Table/

-=Tools/Tips=-

Flipdigits Player: Processing Tutorial by Ksawery Kirklewski
https://www.creativeapplications.net/processing/flipdigits-player-processing-tutorial/

Adam Savage’s Favorite Tools: Pica Marker
https://youtu.be/hmEijVgUKkE

Buy-it-for-life Label Maker by Sean Michael Ragan
https://youtu.be/Bzq4MIbqlHo

How to Rotate Raspberry Pi Screen Output by PiMyLifeUp
https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-rotate-screen/

Correction: Gradient Filament by CNC Kitchen
https://youtu.be/hq53gsYREHU

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Product Showcase: SparkFun Qwiic Button
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W94Jyv0Xua8
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/sparkfun-electronics/SPX-15584/1568-SPX-15584-ND/10384561

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, a full-scale millennium Falcon cockpit, Jen Schachter’s Cricut Cart, a Google-controlled origami light show, a game of life table, and animating flip-digits.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell and welcome to another Maker Update. I hope everyone’s doing great. I’m having a pretty good week so far. I found some great projects to share, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

Kyle Gilbert has a thing for building Millenium Falcon cockpits. He’s taken a few runs now at building fun, kid-sized versions of the nose with scaled-down controls to play with. For his latest build, he’s gone full scale, with interactive cockpit controls.

On his instructable you can see how he worked from reference drawings and photos, made a prototype from cardboard and tape, and then started to make a finished design using MDF, christmas lights, hardware, and some 3D printed elements.

In fact, one of the coolest resources in this build are all the STL files for the greeblies and little dashboard pieces that Kyle designed. There’s over 30 files here.

I also like this little twist he added. For the navigation screen he’s just shining a light through some printed transparencies, which works, but looked a little sloppy when the lights were off. So as a final touch he added a layer of welding mask screen on top. This allows the transparency image to shine through when it’s lit up, but looks completely opaque when it’s turned off.

For another of Kyle’s awesome Star Wars projects, check out his large-scale AT-AT walker. You can find links to everything down in the show notes.

More projects! Last week we talked about Adam Savage’s portable soldering iron station. This week, we’re taking a look at Jen Schachter’s rolling cart for her Cricut vinyl cutter.

Made from baltic birch plywood, the cart includes space for the Cricut, plus little cutouts for the squeegees, cubbies for transfer paper and cutting mats, and rolls of vinyl hanging from the side.

It’s a useful cart, but honestly, what i’m most envious of is her ability to draw and detail all the aspects of her design. She created this set of hand drawn plans that you can get from her on Etsy if you want to build one for yourself.

Another one from Charlyn Gonda that I missed back in December is this internet-connected origami wall sculpture she calls Serenity.

Creating interlocking origami shapes and mounting them on a canvas was an idea she borrowed from Coco Sato. For Charlyn’s part, she backlit the pieces with Adafruit LED jewels connected to a Particle Photon IoT board.

And this is where things get interesting. The code for the board, which she has posted on her project page, connects up to an If This Then That account, which works with her Google Home. So when you give the command, your wall art turns on and provides a light show. I think that’s pretty rad.

Speaking of cool light shows, Andrei Erdei has a guide on how he made this stunning LED table that animates using the Conway Game of Life algorithm.

The bulk of the work here seems to be wiring up the 25 strips of addressable LEDs for a total of 625 arranged in a grid.

The code is interesting too. He’s made a little Wi-Fi connected server that runs on a Weimos D1 board, which is a Arduino-based board with an ESP8266 wi-fi chip. With it, you can connect up to the board like a local network and use a web browser on your phone or computer to define rules for how the game behaves. It’s a cool idea.

Now for some tips and tools recommendations. On the Creative Applications blog, Ksawery Kirklewski has a guide and code available for driving and sequencing flip-digit displays using the open-source Processing software environment.

Just like flip-dot displays, flip-digits use electromagnets to change how they look. What’s cool here, though, is that this system allows you to think of each 7-segment display as its own matrix of 7 flippable lines. The animation demos are mind-blowing.

Aside from the difficulty of getting your hands on the flip-digits themselves, the only other tricky bit of hardware is an Ethernet to serial converter. I would love to try this out.

Adam Savage has another video up on one of his favorite tools. This one is a long-reach marker that’s perfect for tracing the inside dimensions of holes or tight corners where a traditional Sharpie can’t reach.

On the Cool Tools channel, Sean Michael Ragan shows off his “buy it for life” recommendation for an inexpensive label maker. It’s just $20, and he has one that’s lasted 20 years.

On the Pi My Life Up blog, there’s a guide on how to rotate the screen layout of your Raspberry Pi. If you want to use your monitor in portrait orientation or you just need to flip your screen 180 degrees because of the way it’s installed, this guide shows you how to configure your screen using the command line, plus a sneaky way I didn’t know about where you can do in the desktop UI.

And a correction for last week’s show. I mentioned a blog post I saw by Gareth Branwyn on the idea of using gradient infill for 3D printing. I failed to properly attribute the video that was the basis of his post, a brilliant video by CNC Kitchen. I have it linked here in the show notes.

For this week’s product spotlight I’m actually going to talk about the new Qwiic Button from Sparkfun Electronics, one of the many awesome companies that are stocked and distributed by Digi-Key.

Sparkfun has a whole system of boards and accessories that use this Qwiic connector system for chaining things together that can communicate back and forth over an i2c protocol.

A button isn’t a terribly sexy product, but at around $4, this one comes with an internal LED and an onboard microcontroller that allows you to configure a number of behaviors, and can keep an internal record of how many times it was pressed. You can learn more using the links below.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up, or leave a comment. I love hearing from you guys. Let me know what your favorite project was this week. You can get on the Maker Update email list so you never miss a show. A big thanks to my Patrons on Patreon and to Digi-Key electronics for making this show possible. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next week.