This week on Maker Update, a flip-out mic for your machine learning pocket project, a shark mask that moves when you talk, a light-up sound board, adding Neopixels to a backpack, and the Circuit Playground Proto Gizmo.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Week=-

PyBadge Case with Flip Out Mic by Ruiz Brothers
https://learn.adafruit.com/pybadge-case-with-flip-out-mic

TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers Kit Quickstart by lady ada
https://learn.adafruit.com/tensorflow-lite-for-microcontrollers-kit-quickstart

TRIPLE WORD reconfigurable TensorFlow Lite models!
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/07/19/triple-word-reconfigurable-tensorflow-lite-models-adafruit-tensorflow-tensorflowlite-machinelearning-arduino-microchipmakes/

More examples on GitHub
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_TFLite_Micro_Speech/tree/master/examples/micro_speech_json

-=News=-

Pete Warden from Google, Tensorflow, on Ask an Engineer
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/07/24/ask-an-engineer-7-24-19-live-special-guest-pete-warden-petewarden-machinelearning-tensorflow-tinyml-tensorflow-askanengineer-adafruit-electronics/

Circuitpython gets 10 out of 10 in Hackspace magazine
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/07/19/a-speedier-circuitpython-gets-10-out-of-10-in-the-latest-issue-of-hackspace-magazine-hackspacemag-circuitpython-adafruit/

-=Adafruit Projects=-

Sound Activated Shark Mask by Dano Wall
https://learn.adafruit.com/sound-activated-shark-mask

NeoTrellis Sound Board by Ruiz Brothers
https://learn.adafruit.com/neotrellis-soundboard

Playa Festival Bike by Erin St. Blaine
https://learn.adafruit.com/playa-festival-bike/overview

-=Contributed Projects=-

LED dog collar with JavaScript by Stephanie Nemeth
https://medium.com/@secretsquirrel/i-made-a-led-dog-collar-with-javascript-1c10ff973550

Monster Box by mendukt
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3633968

-=Tools/Tips=-

New Hallowing Coming Soon
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/07/23/100-days-to-halloween-time-to-make-a-hallowing-m4-adafruit-halloween/

Coming soon! Circuit Playground Bluefruit – Bluetooth Low Energy
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4333

Low cost accelerometer demo by Lady Ada
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/07/21/trying-out-the-ultra-low-cost-20-cents-msa301-accelerometer-with-the-arduino-plotter-arduino-sparkfun/

Adding Neopixels to a Backpack by BlitzCityDIY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa4SL32ICHs

-=Product Spotlight=-

Circuit Playground Proto Gizmo – Bolt-on Perma-Proto
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4320

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, a flip-out mic for your machine learning pocket project, a shark mask that moves when you talk, a light-up sound board, adding Neopixels to a backpack, and the Circuit Playground Proto Gizmo.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Adafruit edition of Maker Update. Did you miss me? I missed you guys, and I hope you’re all doing great, and maybe even starting to plan out your Halloween projects. But right now, let’s start the show with my pick for the Adafruit project of the month.

Last month I showed you a quick demo from Lady Ada of TensorFlow Lite running on an Adafruit PyGamer board. Now, Lady Ada has put together an official Adafruit guide and kit, allowing you to train your own machine learning voice model using an Adafruit PyBadge board.

You can train it to recognize yes or no answers. But diving even deeper, on the Adafruit Github account you can find example scripts for three-word voice recognition demos, such as telling the difference between the words cat, dog, or bird. 

To put a nice polish on the whole thing, the Ruiz brothers created a modified PyBadge case with a flip-out microphone holder, and space for an attached speaker and rechargeable battery.

Aside from being a great platform for making your own machine learning demos and devastating any local science faire, this is a promising start to any number of voice-controlled projects that aren’t dependent on Alexa or Google Home or Siri. And really, how cool is it to say that you’re experimenting with machine learning hardware?!

It’s time for some news. Last week on Adafruit’s Ask an Engineer show, Pete Warden from the Google Tensor Flow team joined Lady Ada and Phillip to demystify all the different flavors of the Tensor Flow machine learning software, including Tensor Flow Lite and Tensor Flow Lite for Microcontrollers. So, if you’re excited to get into this stuff but a little intimidated by the jargon and the different software, this could give you the confidence to jump in.

In other news, version 4.1.0 of Adafruit’s CircuitPython platform was rated a 10 out of 10 in the latest issue of Hackspace magazine. The editors tested this version against version 4.0 and found a number of big performance improvements, including neopixel flash rate, and floating-point calculations. It’s a great win for Circuit Python.

Time now for more projects. Dano Wall has a great write-up on making this sound-reactive cardboard shark mask where the jaws move when you talk. 

The project uses the built-in microphone on a Circuit Playground Express board, along with a servo motor, a battery pack, some hot glue and some string or fishing line. That string connects from the servo horn in the head to the lower jaw and puppets the mouth up and down. 

It’s a fun project, good for kids, and relatively easy to code using MakeCode blocks.

The Ruiz Brothers also created this palm-sized, portable sound board project. It’s like a little sampler that you can load up with your own sounds, trigger with the LED lit buttons, and playback over the internal speaker. 

The project uses an Adafruit Feather M4 Express board paired up with a Prop-Maker Featherwing for driving audio playback and LEDs and a NeoTrellis RGB board for the matrix of LEDs under the silicone keypad. 

The enclosure is 3D printed, with custom pockets for all the components to fit in. Audio is loaded just by connecting the whole thing to your computer over USB and dragging and dropping 16-bit wav files onto the CircuitPy drive that shows up. There’s some sample audio to get you started.

Erin St. Blaine’s ongoing Burning Man bike project is coming along. Her guide shows how to plan your design, paint and decorate the bike, add lighting to the frame and an extra rad fiber optic tail flag that shoots out from the back. It’s a cool build, and a great reference for any kind of crazy bike lights you may want to try. 

From the Adafruit community there are two projects I want to highlight. The first is a guide by Stephanie Nemeth on making a Neopixel dog collar. It’s actually a few years old, but it’s new to me and a good reminder that dogs need wearables too. 

There’s also this fun Monster Box project by Tony Menduk that uses an Adafruit Hallowing board and a Feather M0. The Hallowing handles the eyeball animation, while the audio playback and servo animation is done by the Feather. You can find the code and 3D design files on Thingiverse.

It’s time for a few tips and tools. While we’re talking about the Hallowing, last week Adafruit announced and showed a quick demo of a new version of the board called the Hallowing M4. It comes with a better display, includes four built-in side-mounted LEDs on the back to give it an eerie glow, and an upgraded Cortex M4 chip. Other than that, though, it’s keeping the same footprint and features from last year’s board, making it easy to adapt to existing Hallowing projects. 

Also coming soon is a version of the Circuit Playground Express board with Bluetooth Low Energy support. It’s called the Circuit Playground Bluefruit, you can sign up for notifications now, but there’s no ETA yet on when it will arrive. 

Also on the horizon, Lady Ada has a video up showing some early tests with a new, 20-cent accelerometer called the MSA301. The results look promising so far, so don’t be surprised to see these accelerometers included on boards down the line.

And Liz from BlitzCityDIY has a new video up showing how she was able to add Neopixel LEDs to a backpack that she sewed together herself. 

The sewing pattern and materials all came from a kit and look really nice, so, that’s kind of a neat thing to know about on its own. But even if you’re adding Neopixels to an existing backpack or one that you’re modifying, it’s a useful video to see how she did it.

And finally, for a little Adafruit product spotlight, check out this new bolt-on perma proto board for the Circuit Playground or Circuit Playground Express. It’s called the Proto-Gizmo, and it gives you a semi-permanent way to mount your project components and breakout sensors. 

There are 12 M3 standoffs that are attached to the board and also act as electrical connections to the pads they screw down to. 

If you love using the Circuit Playground family of boards for prototyping projects or in a classroom setting where you want to avoid soldering directly to the board, these $8 add-ons are a great solution for creating projects that are more durable than just a loose breadboard. If they’re not in stock, sign up to get notified.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. For weeks when this show isn’t on the Adafruit channel you can sign up for the Maker Update email newsletter and stay on top of each week’s show. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you soon.