This week on Maker Update: virtualizing your detents, the Raspberry Pi Pico gets a W, holographic jewelry, a time-warping Walkman, silent steppers and crafting a tiny miracle.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 290]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Building a Haptic Input Knob from Scratch by ScottBez1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q76dMggUH1M

-=News=-

Raspberry Pi Pico W
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-w-your-6-iot-platform/

-=More Projects=-

Miniature Casita by Studson Studio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iojNr30s0TY

Holographic 3d printed jewelry by Penolopy Bulnick
https://www.instructables.com/Holographic-Rainbow-Reflective-3D-Prints/

Walkmelotron by John Park
https://learn.adafruit.com/walkmellotron

-=Tips & Tools=-

Adam’s Curta Calculator gets CT Scanned by Tested
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n564Cw0lHLk

What Makes TMC2208 Steppers Silent by Michael Klements
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut3Mj0AX5T4

Haptic Feedback Breakout by Afafruit
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-drv2605-haptic-controller-breakout

3d print modular tool storage, soldering station & etc with Zack Freedman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd4NnHvTRAY

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

The Best Beginner Oscilloscope – The Great Search by Adafruit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1kLyEeAwtc

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: Virtualizing your Detents, The Raspi Pico gets a W, Holographic Jewelry, a time-warping walkman, Silent steppers and crafting a tiny miracle.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner, I hope you’re all doing great and staying inspired with cool projects. We’ve got a super fun show this week and I can’t wait to get into it, so let’s check out the project of the week.

You could be forgiven for thinking this is a product demo for a smart thermostat. It isn’t, but what it is is a haptic input knob created by scottbez1. This is an input device that uses motor torque to give positive physical feedback to the user. Coupled with a round screen, this is a simple user interface that can function for just about whatever you could want to program it for – whether you want to have a torqueless knob that can spin forever, or one with positive stops for distinct feedback.

The motor behind all this clever design is this brushless gimbal motor with this 6mm shaft down the middle – and here’s where we get to the bad news – you can’t actually buy this motor. It seems like it was an overstock on Aliexpress and they’re all sold out. The community around this project has been voraciously trying to find a good replacement. The way it works is that it uses torque to pull the motor towards one of the software-defined detents. The further you get from the detent, the stronger the torque – until you get past the halfway point to the next detent, and then it pulls in that direction.

He makes use of that opening in the center of the motor to run the wires for the round LCD. He’s made a custom PCB for the base that houses an ESP32 microcontroller for wireless connectivity. There’s also these cutouts around the base of the PCB – this will allow the PCB to flex just so slightly, and he can detect that flex using a couple of strain gauges. This allows the knob to be pressed like a button to confirm selections, and he’s also generating haptic feedback for button presses by having the motor provide a slight kick.

I’ll admit, this one is pretty nerdy. But I’ve always had a huge interest in haptic feedback and its uses in DIY projects – and this one seems like a huge leap forward in creating user-programmable, modal user interfaces. Scott has provided a git repo where you can find the code, the design files and gerber files for the PCBs – and you can join the discussion to find a suitable replacement for the feedback motor.

Time for some news, if you missed it, last week Raspberry Pi announced the Pico W. This is the same RP2040 powered microcontroller you know and love, but now with an added wifi antenna providing wireless connectivity to your projects. This is using the Infineon CYW43439 wireless chip, giving your projects wifi connectivity over 2.4ghz. This chip can also support bluetooth and bluetooth low energy, but at the moment these features are disabled – but they could be enabled in the future. The Pico W is just $6, and if you can find one, its available for purchase both with and without presoldered headers.

More Projects! We’ve got another fantastic crafting tutorial from Studson Studio, this time its the Casita from Encanto. He doesn’t waste any time getting into the clever techniques – the texture of the adobe walls is created by using foam core with one of the sides torn off, and then the texture is pressed into the bare foam using crumpled tinfoil. As always this video is a kings ransom of tips for reusing materials to get just the right look – ornate toothpicks for balcony details, drinking straws for roof tiles, mini clothes pins for roof details its great. There’s also a cool painting technique called preshading where he goes over shadowed areas with a darker color first, which immediately give the model a more detailed look.

Over on instructables, Penelope Bulnick has a guide for making these 3d printed holographic rainbow jewelry pieces. She is able to achieve this look by printing directly onto rainbow diffraction film. The result is these pieces that are not only visible in their original filament color, but have a bright rainbow sheen to them when they catch the light just right. This looks like a ton of fun to experiment with.

It seems like the whole squad over at Adafruit has been obsessed with hacking portable tape decks to make them into unique music instruments – John Park has created what he calls the Walkmellotron. The original mellotron is an electromechanical piano that plays back samples that are stored on magnetic tape. What The walkmellotron is doing is carrying a single continuous sound on a short tape loop. When John plays a note, the playback speed on the tape changes, altering the pitch.

To pull this off, he’s using a QTPy RP2040 to interpret the midi signals coming from his keyboard, and then using a DAC board to turn the digital signals into analog voltage to manipulate the speed on the cassette deck. Since the boards are small, they don’t add a ton of extra bulk to the tape player, and adding the boards and wires to the outside of the player give this thing a unique cyberpunk look. There’s a few other cassette player projects on Adafruit, so if you got inspired by this one, there’s more to play around with.

Time for some tools and tips, in a recent video from tested, Adam Savage gets a CT scan – not of his body, but of his Curta mechanical calculator. He did this with a company called Lumafield, who are developing small scale CT scanners for engineering. The purpose of this is to be able to see inside of your engineered objects to see how parts work and fit together, while they are still assembled. Not only is this tremendously useful, but seeing these rendered images of electronics and motors and hardened pins, all fitting together like a sculpture, are really quite beautiful. The machines, as you can probably imagine, aren’t cheap, but the video directly links to the objects Adam brought to be scanned, so you can poke around with them yourself.

If you’ve been buying 3d printers for a number of years now, you’ve probably noticed that they’ve been getting noticeably quieter in the past few years. This is mostly due to the TMC2208 stepper driver. In this great explainer video by Michael Klemens, he breaks down why older stepper motors are so loud, what makes the TMC drivers so much quieter. It mostly comes down to how the coils energize to rotate the motor shaft – if they use square waves, the shaft turns more harshly and creates noisy vibrations. The TMC drivers use something closer to a sine wave to energize the coils, offering smoother and quieter motor movements.

Speaking of motor drivers and haptic feedback, Adafruit now has a motor driver breakout specifically for haptic feedback motors. This is more than just a simple motor driver because it has a number of ready made haptic effects built right into it, from short buzzes to heavy clicks, transition ramps, smooth hums and plenty more This seems like a useful little board – Whether you’re looking to create a device with eyes-free user feedback, or something more creative. There’s a full demo walkthrough and libraries for both the Arduino IDE and Circuitpython

And finally, Zack Freedman from Voidstar Labs has a new video about his gridfinity tool organization system. Since open sourcing the project, people have gone…. A little crazy with their own designs. Zack showcases a handful of his favorites by organizing them into various tasks – soldering stations, battery holders, rotary tool organizers, there’s even turning the gridfinity system into a portable tool box. If you enjoy the process of people riffing off of other people’s ideas, this is a fun video, and a cool community project to get involved with.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight Lady Ada is looking for great oscilloscopes for beginners in the latest video in The Great Search series. If you’ve ever considered adding a scope to your electronics workbench and didn’t know where to begin, this video is where to begin. She does a great job of helping you understand all the different variables: how many channels you’ll need, whether you should get an analog or digital scope, and how much memory you should go for. Even with a beginner scope, you’re still going to be making a pretty big financial investment, but at least with this video you can have a little more confidence that you’re making the right choice.

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show! I hope you had a great time with these projects and the show in general. If you did, give us a thumbs up, leave us a comment, if you love this show and know someone who would also enjoy it, share it with them! As always, big thanks to Digikey for making this all possible, and to you for watching. Take care, and we’ll see you soon.