This week on Maker Update, graffiti CNC, a commitment to carbonation, a laser cut haunted house, a face-detecting leaf blower, and going Gaga for Halloween.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 254]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Graffomat by Niklas Roy
https://niklasroy.com/graffomat/
Git: https://github.com/royrobotiks/Graffomat

-=More Projects=-

How I Made Unlimited Sparkling Water by Becky Stern feat. Ian Charnas
https://youtu.be/SsoFy_1hXqI

Haunted House Miniature Diorama Build! by Jen Schachter
https://www.tested.com/making/haunted-house-miniature-diorama-build/

Face Detection for My Leaf Blower by Jeff Geerling
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/face-detection-my-leaf-blower

See also: Face Mask Detection by Caroline Dunn
https://github.com/carolinedunn/Face_Mask_Detection

Lady Gaga Cosplay by TechnoChic
https://www.instructables.com/Lady-Gaga-Cosplay-Making-the-LED-Matrix-Mask-From-/

-=Tips & Tools=-

Deep Hole Markers Reviewed
https://kk.org/cooltools/best-markers-for-deep-holes/

Adam’s One Day Builds: Ghostbusters Proton Pack!
https://www.tested.com/one-day-builds/adams-one-day-builds-ghostbusters-proton-pack/

The Cheapest Stepper Motor And How You Use It (28BYJ-48 & ULN2003 Arduino Tutorial!) by Simple Electronics
https://youtu.be/HDxrrG1RFaw

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Electronic Brake for Inline Skates – Potentially Genius
https://youtu.be/5m6GpbSgyKE

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update, graffiti CNC, a commitment to carbonation, a laser cut haunted house, a face-detecting leaf blower, and going Gaga for Halloween.

Hey everybody, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Maker Update. It’s my favorite time of year — the leaves are on the ground, and the halloween decorations are starting to go up. It’s just magic. I love it. I hope the new season is treating you well, wherever you are. I’ve got a fun show for you. Let’s get started with the project of the week.

Over in Berlin, Niklas Roy spent his summer making this gigantic, rolling CNC wall plotter that draws with spray paint.

He calls it the Graffomat, and it’s the most wonderfully rickety, improvised, lo-fi plotters you’ll ever see.

The motors for moving the spray paint along the X and Y axis are repurposed 18v drills. The power for each drill is connected to its own H-bridge driver board.

But because they’re dumb motors with no positional awareness, Niklas added these encoder strips made from electrical tape. A pair of phototransistors on each axis, roll over the black and white tape to get a sense of their position.

All of it is wired back to an Arduino Nano, which handles all the code. On a breakout module there is a separate 1.8 inch screen with an SD card reader that’s used to load and preview files.

If it all seems a little low-budget, well, that’s kinda the point. By making it practically disposable, you could bring this out to a location and even if you’re run off, you could leave this behind and not lose sleep over it.

Aside from being able to paint premade files, Niklas also includes a way to control the spray paint with a serial-connected joystick, or, using a connected computer, you could have it controlled over the internet.

It looks like a lot of fun, and it’s one of those projects where I’m going to bookmark it just for the trick of combining encoder strip with drill motors.

More projects! Becky Stern and Ian Charnas teamed up to create an unlimited Soda Stream carbonation tank.

What starts out as a simple question of how do you adapt a Soda Stream to take a 50lb tank of carbon dioxide, turns into a whole lot more.

How do you create a scale for the tank to measure your CO2 levels? How do you safely install the tank without blowing yourself up or dying from a gas leak. And most importantly, what’s a carbonated can of tomato soup taste like?

It’s a fun video, and you just feel like you could hang out with these two all day.

Following the success of last year’s book nook design, Jen Schachter has a new laser cut kit available for creating this miniature haunted house.

On Tested, Jen shows how the whole thing is put together. But more importantly for us, she goes back and shows how the early concept came together, moving from foam core models, to sketching design in Illustrator, and arriving at this wobbly, spooky, organic design.

Check out her video for some great tips on concealing finger joints by integrating them into features of your design.

Another project that seems appropriate for the season is this AI-connected leaf blower by Jeff Geerling.

No, it won’t clean up your driveway, but it will selectively blast air at your enemies. Jeff shows you how to train an AI to recognize someone’s face, then trigger a hardware action over GPIO. In this case, he’s using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module to switch a relay, powering a leafblower.

It’s a funny prank, and he credits the code to Caroline Dunn, who created this Raspberry Pi face mask detection project in November of last year. That’s a great project in it’s own rights and I’ll link to it down in the description.

In both cases, what I like is that you get to see how computer vision connects out to an external hardware action, whether that’s lighting an LED, ringing a buzzer, or engaging a relay — these are the kind of interactions I haven’t seen a lot of yet in AI projects.

Finally, if you’re looking for a Halloween costume with an integrated face mask, on Instructables, Natasha from TechnoChic (shiek) shows you how to make a version of Lady Gaga’s matrix mask from the VMAs.

She’s using a series of Adafruit Dotstar 8×8 modules, wired up to an ItsyBitsy M4 and a small MEMs microphone.

Now, you could go fancy with a 3D printed enclosure, but Natasha keeps things simple with cosplay foam, vinyl and tape. It only has to last through Halloween, right?

Now for some tips and tools. On the Cool Tools channel, I’ve got a video that takes a look at three different brands of deep hole markers, or pattern markers.

These are great for tracing shapes onto another material, especially if you have to reach through a hole, or layers of machinery to make it happen. They’re also just a fun, goofy looking pen to have around.

In an epic, 43 minute build video, Adam Savage and the Tested team show how they created this outstanding Ghostbusters Proton pack.

If the length of this video scared you off, it’s worth setting aside some time or adjusting the YouTube playback speed to make it work. It’s this great team effort with Jen Schacter, Sean Charlesworth, and propmaker Ben Eadie (eaty).

Just to be a fly on the wall listening to the different decisions they make and how they solve problems — it’s a real treat.

On the Simple Electronics channel, there’s a great overview of the humblest of all stepper motors, the 28BYJ-48 motor.

It doesn’t have much power, and its cheap design doesn’t lend itself to accuracy, but if you need a small, inexpensive motor with positional awareness, you’re going to want to get familiar with these and the code used to control them.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, do yourself a favor and check out a new series on the Digi-Key channel called Potentially Genius.

In each episode, the invention team from Tomorrow Lab take an idea and create a functioning prototype in just 16 hours.

In this first video, the team develops an electronic brake for an inline skate. And because each team member has their own specialty, it’s a real thrill to see the product development handed off from person to person as it gets developed. Check it out.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up, and leave a comment if you can, letting me know which project caught your eye this week. You can sign up for the Maker Update email list, so you never miss a show. A big thanks to Digi-Key electronics. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you soon.