This week on Maker Update, music from record sleeves, axe throwing for children, a 3D printed cat feeder, Belief-Based computing kits, and building your own battery packs.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Week=-

Playback your favorite records with Plynth by Jono Matusky
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/playback-your-favourite-records-with-plynth/

-=More Projects=-

How to Make Axe Throwing For Kids by I Like to Make Stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br2Q9gs0p-Y

Perpetual Motion Da Vinci Style IV By gzumwalt
https://www.instructables.com/id/Perpetual-Motion-Da-Vinci-Style-IV/

Fully automatic cat feeder by Der_Stihl
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3623148

-=Tools/Tips=-

BIY™ (Believe it Yourself) – Real-fictional belief-based computing kits by Automato
https://www.creativeapplications.net/scripts/biy-believe-it-yourself-real-fictional-belief-based-computing-kits-by-automato/
http://automato.farm/portfolio/believe_it_yourself/

 

Guide to Building 18650 Packs
https://hackaday.com/2019/06/12/an-exhaustive-guide-to-building-18650-packs/
https://www.adambender.info/post/lithium-battery-part-1-of-2

Wire Stripper Shootout
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FcCeBGYOGo

Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales #6
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/garethbranwyn/issues/gareth-s-tips-tools-and-shop-tales-issue-6-181298

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

How to Use Adafruit.io with Particle Photons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3OqfLYlrXw

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, music from record sleeves, axe throwing for children, a 3D printed cat feeder, Belief-Based computing kits, and building your own battery packs.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome to another Maker Update. I hope everyone’s doing well. I’m in the middle of some great weather and some great projects, so I can’t complain. I’ve got a short, fun show for you, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

Check out Plynth by Jono Matusky. This is a Raspberry Pi based music streamer with a camera attached to it. You put your record or CD or anything really in the dock so that the camera can scan it and identify what it is, and then it will start streaming that media.

Now, it’s a work in progress, and it may end up being a crowdfunded thing, so I’m not sure if we’ll ever see a full guide on how to make your own. But so far Jono has been really open with what he’s doing and how he’s doing it.

The gist is a combination of the Google Vision API and OpenCV for Raspberry Pi. These allow the camera to both identify elements out of your image and compare it to images online to come up with a good guess of what album it’s looking at.

After that, it currently pulls from Spotify to serve up the media stream, but there’s a lot of potential here for other media and services.

More projects! On the I Like to Make Stuff channel, Bob Clagett goes over how to build this axe throwing practice system for kids. That’s right, it’s not quite juggling chainsaws, but if you ever wanted to give your family the thrill of hurling axes at a tree, without the whole life-threatening injury part, Bob has you covered.

The trick is to create a target out of tightly packed bits of pool noodles and kid-friendly axes from a sandwich of thin wood and rubber floor mats. It honestly looks like a lot of fun, and a great backyard project for summer.

Greg Zumwalt has yet another Da Vinci inspired 3D printed perpetual motion trick. I know I showed off two of these last week, but look at this thing! How can I not talk about this?

And what I failed to mention last week is how the whole trick of this design is that there’s no obvious cables or batteries or switches. It looks like they just take off on their own, but what’s really going on is that Greg conceals a little reed switch in the base that he can switch on or off with a magnet. It’s an illusion that will probably fool a lot of people.

I also thought this 3D printed cat feeder from Der Stihl was pretty cool. The system uses a scale under the bowl to detect when it’s empty. If it is, an Arduino inside will spin a stepper motor each day to release more kibble. It looks very well designed.

Time for a few tips and tools. A design firm called Automato is releasing 3 Raspberry Pi-based add-on boards they’re calling BIY or Believe it Yourself.

I took it as a joke at first, but this is real hardware. It’s soft of a riff on Google’s AIY kits, with a healthy dose or artistic satire.

There’s a Move kit that plots directions based on Chinese Geomancy and Fengshui. A vision kit that identifies superstitious iconography and warns against bad luck. And then there’s a Hear kit listens for words and then provides numerology fortunes based on it.

It’s all a little tongue in cheek, but at the same time, it looks like some serious hardware and software going on here. They’re also just beautiful boards.

I contacted them to ask about pricing and the vision kit is 350 euros, and the other two are 300 euros. Not cheap, but only a handful are being made.

Through Hackaday I learned about this 2-part guide looking at how to build your own high-capacity battery packs from 18650 Lithium Ion cells. Wiring, spot welding connections, battery management systems — if you ever need to make a large, custom rechargeable battery pack, there’s a ton of great info in here.

A project like this requires some great wire strippers. On the Cool Tools channel, I’ve got a look at 10 different pairs of wire strippers — most of them self-adjusting, perfect for removing the identical length of sheathing across a range of wire. I’ll show you who does it best.

And on Gareth Branwyn’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales newsletter, he takes a look at how to prevent tool rust and making hinges in PVC pipe.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, a video for Maker.io goes over how to use a Particle Photon IoT board with Adafruit’s free Adafruit.io service. You’ll learn how to create a data feed, how to send data to it, and how to read data back from it. If you’re thinking of dipping your toe into the Internet of Things, this is a powerful combo.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a comment or leave a thumbs up. Get on the Maker Update email newsletter. A huge thanks to my patrons on Patreon and to Digi-Key Electronics for sponsoring this show. I’m off next week for a summer break, but I’ll be back. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you soon.