This week on Maker Update, adding nuance to your LED projects, Teensy 4.0, machine learning for knitting, hello drinkbot, AI wearables, and toy hacking.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Week=-

Making a Great LED Triangle By Micah Scott (aka Scanlime)
https://www.instructables.com/id/Making-a-great-LED-triangle/

Processing sketches on Github
https://github.com/scanlime/triangle

Original project notes
http://www.misc.name/triangle-attractor

Introduction to LED art with Fadecandy
https://learn.adafruit.com/led-art-with-fadecandy/intro

-=News=-

The New Teensy 4.0: Big Brains, Tiny Body
https://makezine.com/2019/08/08/the-new-teensy-4-0-big-brains-tiny-body/
https://hackaday.com/2019/08/07/new-teensy-4-0-blows-away-benchmarks-implements-self-recovery-returns-to-smaller-form/

MIT Researchers Create Automatic Knitting Machine Software
http://news.mit.edu/2019/computer-aided-knitting-mit-csail-0806

-=More Projects=-

Hello Drinkbot! by Rich Gibson
http://hellodrinkbot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/602734573508700/permalink/643471709434986/ (Video)

Metro Mini and BlinkyTiles Combine for a Bit of AI Powered Bling by Stephanie Codes
https://github.com/traumverloren/blinkytiles-mini-metro
https://twitter.com/stephaniecodes/status/1159161535220125697?s=20
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/08/08/metro-mini-and-blinkytiles-combine-for-a-bit-of-ai-powered-bling-machinelearning-wearables-metromini-tensorflow-tiny-yolo-stephaniecodes/

-=Tools/Tips=-

Travel collection on Thingiverse
https://www.thingiverse.com/hopewithus/collections/travel

Is the Raspberry Pi 4 really that bad? by Thomas Sanladerer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOboAW5RqAg

Take Apart and Rebuild Toys By Colleen and Aaron Graves
https://www.instructables.com/id/Take-Apart-and-Rebuild-Toys/

East Bay Mini Maker Faire Sunday, Oct. 27th
https://eastbay.makerfaire.com/

Review: Tub O’ Towels
https://youtu.be/gVENlvUyO48

-=Product Spotlight=-

Sparkfun Papa Soundie | Maker Minute
https://www.digikey.com/en/maker/videos/2019-maker-minutes/sparkfun-papa-soundie

Little Soundie
https://www.digikey.com/short/p5842n

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, adding nuance to your LED projects, Teensy 4.0, machine learning for knitting, hello drinkbot, AI wearables, and toy hacking.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Maker Update. I hope everyone’s doing great. I had a lot of fun this past weekend showing off my electric go-karts at my local Maker Faire here in my hometown. I can’t encourage you enough to show off what you’re doing at your own local Faire. These things always need new makers to keep them fresh. I’m so glad so glad I did it. But now, let’s get started with the project of the week.

Here in the Bay Area we have a ton of incredible makers. One of them is Micah Scott, also known as Scanlime. She recently published a tutorial on Instructables for making this LED triangle made of smaller triangles. 

It’s a project that involves laser cutting out a frame and the acrylic triangles that diffuse the light. Inside the frame are a handful of Neopixel strips, wired together so that the power and data wires run out the back to whatever project board you want to use to drive them.

Now, we’ve seen a lot of pretty LED projects on this show. A few things make this one particularly great. First, Micah goes into some useful detail on how the design creates just the right space for diffusing LED glow. The only way to get this kind of even glow from just a few LEDs is to get smart on how you diffuse them.

The second detail here is that by limiting the number of LEDs used, you can run the entire project just off USB power. 

But the best part is that this guide is an invitation to learn how to use a Fadecandy LED controller. The Fadecandy board, developed by Micah and sold by Adafruit and Digi-Key, gives you the ability to get more nuanced colors and fades out of common Neopixel LED strip than you could from Arduino style boards. 

Of course, you don’t have to use a Fadecandy board, but if (like me) you’ve been dying to give it a try, this looks like a great project to get started with. I’ll also include a link to the older Github page for this project, which includes the code and a few more options for the design.

Time for some news. The popular, Arduino-compatible Teensy development board has a new version out. Version 4.0 returns to a smaller size and uses a 600 Mhz Arm Cortex M7 processor, making it one of the fastest microcontroller boards available. It also has a ton of other little extras like a random number generator, cryptographic acceleration, CAN bus support — it’s crazy, and sells for $20.

MIT News has a post and video up talking about new research they’re doing on using machine learning to recreate and optimize knitted or woven clothing — which in a certain sense is all clothing. 

Really, there’s sort of two main parts of this announcement. The first is machine learning automation software called InverseKnit. Which takes 2-D images of something like a glove, and then sets an AI model loose on reinterpreting it as a set of instructions it can send to a knitting machine. Testing found that it could produce accurate results 94% of the time. 

The second part of the announcement is the development of a tool called CADknit, which allows casual users to customize digital templates for knitted designs. 

Taken together, it sounds like a promising foundation for a new branch of approachable digital fabrication that you can wear — something that could quickly revolutionize clothing and the industries around it.

Now for more projects. I’m embarrassed to admit that in my focus to create a cocktail robot last month, I completely missed out on the Hello Drinkbot project by Rich Gibson. 

In what he’s calling the Hello World of cocktail robotics, Rich has created an incredible online resource for making this Raspberry Pi controlled drink robot. You can find files for two types of laser cut enclosures and software forked from the Party Robotics Bartendro project. 

With this software, you get a web-based interface that you can customize for different drink recipes, modifying the pump times for each ingredient. It looks like a solid base to build on and I’m excited to play with it for next year’s robot.

I also loved this project from Stephanie Codes. It’s this necklace of LED tiles that turns on when another person is detected in the room and changes animations as more people are added. 

A custom ring on her finger has a button that reverses the script so that the tiles switch on only when the room is empty, and also allows some direct control over the brightness of the lights.

What I didn’t realize at first is that human-detecting aspect of this project is handled separately by TensorFlow machine learning software running on a Raspberry Pi computer — that’s she’s also wearing. Her choker is actually the Pi camera module that’s looking out for people in the room — not just motion, but people based on an AI model it’s working with. 

The necklace and lights run separately on an Adafruit Metro Mini, interfaced with the Raspberry Pi so it can read how many people are identified in the room and trigger LED animations based on that. It’s crazy. 

Now for a few tips and tools. On Thingiverse, there’s a collection of 3D printable travel accessories, including a toothpaste tube coupler for refilling those little toothpaste tubes. 

On YouTube, Thomas Sanladerer has an informative video out that looks at the latest Raspberry Pi 4. He talks openly about it’s drawbacks, but also some of it’s awesome benchmarks and it’s suitability as an OctoPrint server for your 3D printer. He’s using his for running a 4k-quality wall-mounted digital dashboard system. 

On Instructables, Colleen Graves has a great, teacher-friendly guide on taking apart old electronic or mechanical toys with kids or students and hacking them into new creations. I love toy hacking, so this one spoke to me.

This week, I got approved to show off some projects at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire in Oakland CA on Sunday October 27th. The esteemed maker Mike Warren, Mikeasaurus on Instructables, will be joining me and we’ll have a table of our projects there to show off. 

And coming off my Maker Faire experience last weekend, I have to say that the most valuable tool I brought with me were my Tub O’ Towels. I reviewed these a while back on the Cool Tools channel. They’re just like extra large, extra tough hand wipes. 

These are a godsend when you’re stuck booth, fixing up a messy project, shaking random hands, cleaning off your table, wiping away food truck grease, or dealing with a less than ideal bathroom situation… 

I’m now a convert, and I recommend having something like this handy if you’re ever exhibiting a project.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, let’s take a look at the Sparkfun line of Soundie boards. These are audio playback boards, available through Digi-Key, that you can integrate into your projects. 

For around $15 there’s the Little Soundie, which plays back audio stored on the internal 4Mb of built-in flash storage. It works with WAV or Ogg files, uses 3.3v logic and power. You load up files over the USB connection and they playback over the line output when the pins are triggered. If your files are numbered 0-5, the numbered pins on the board will trigger playback of the matching file. 

For more features, there’s the Papa Soundie for around $27. This one includes a built-in Arduino, and plays up to 32 files that you can store using the microSD card slot. Either one would be a great fit for any upcoming Halloween project.

And 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 newsletter to get each week’s show and show notes sent right to your inbox. 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.