This week on Maker Update, a $20 screen for your Pi, a cheeseburger battle bot, a giant LED ring, and Maker Faires. This week’s Cool Tool is black hot glue.

Show Notes [Maker Update #78]

Project of the Week

Building a portable Raspberry Pi workstation from a foldable 4.3″ screen by Michael Horne
http://www.recantha.co.uk/blog/?p=18689

Foldable 4.3 Inch LCD (Amazon)
https://amzn.to/2uWmef7

News

Battle Royale With Cheese
https://www.facebook.com/BattleRoyalewCheese/

More Projects

Light Ring by Donald Bell
https://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Ring-From-Recycled-Bike-Rim/

Cool Tools Minute

Black Hot Melt Glue Sticks
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B01I9L89LS/ctmakerupdate-20

Surebonder PRO2-100 100-Watt High Temperature Industrial Glue Gun
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B006IY359K/ctmakerupdate-20

Tips

Interview with Randy Sarafan
https://youtu.be/78dP5Hk-eVw

Bots by Randy:
https://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-Bots/
https://www.instructables.com/id/Simple-Machines/
https://www.instructables.com/id/Telepresence-Robot-2/

Should I Patreon? Leave a comment.

Maker Faires

Kent State Mini Maker Faire Kent, Ohio
Omaha Mini Maker Faire Omaha, Nebraska
Salt Lake City Mini Maker Faire Salt Lake City, Utah
Almaty Mini Maker Faire Almaty
Maker Faire Sachsen Chemnitz
Twin Tiers Mini Maker Faire Horseheads, New York
Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire Edinburgh, Scotland

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, a $20 screen for your Pi, a cheeseburger battle bot, a giant LED ring, hot glue for goths, and Maker Faires.

I’m Donald Bell and welcome to another Maker Update. I hope you guys are doing well and getting your summer project list together. I’ve got a fun show for you, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

For a quick and cheap way to add a screen to a Raspberry Pi computer, check out this guide by Michael Horne on combining a pop-up rear-view camera screen with a Raspberry Pi Zero W.

The screen costs around $22 and I’ll include an Amazon link for it in the description. It runs off of a composite video input and 12v DC power perfect car a car’s cigarette lighter socket, but not really ideal for the Pi.

But after some investigating, Michael found that the screen itself actually runs off 3.3v after you bypass some of the electronics.

Long story short, Michael’s thorough guide shows how you can power both a Pi and the screen using a single 5v power adapter, driving the screen from the Pi’s 3.3v GPIO pins.

It’s a cool, and straightforward hack. It’s a great way to get a cheap little terminal setup, or portable game system, or make little exhibit screens that play video. I’m curious to play around with it.

It’s time for some news. Some of my favorite local makers, many of them pillars of the Power Racing Series community, have built their own robot for the new season of BattleBots, which is currently filming in Los Angeles.

They’re sworn to secrecy about how the robot is doing, but I can share some details with you about the robot itself.

First, it’s a cheeseburger. They’ve named it the Battle Royale With Cheese. The design is a spinning blade style combat bot built around a circular steel cage.

There’s a suite of different blades, including a bacon strip and a pickle. The olive and toothpick on top helps it land upright if it’s flipped. And if one dangerous burger bot wasn’t cute enough, there’s a tiny companion bot named Shorter Pounder.

You can keep up with the team on Facebook using the link in the description. Just remember when burgerbot fever is sweeping the country, that you heard it here first.

Time for one more project. This one is something I made for a change.

Remember last week when I was all inspired to reuse the parts from the bike I tore apart. Well, I challenged myself to turn this bike rim into a cool color changing LED ring. And it works!

I have everything written up as an Instructable, including the list of materials and the code. Basically it’s a strand of cheap WS2811 LEDs, connected to an Adafruit Pro Trinket, battery backpack, a tiny LiPo, and a button to switch it on and off.

I love how it turned out and I still have a second rim left, so I’ll probably make another one to match it.

It’s time for another Cool Tool review. This time I’m going to show you guys black hot glue sticks. A pack of these cost me $8 on Amazon. I’m going to show you why they’re useful. And if you want to pick some up, using the Amazon link in the description helps support my videos and the Cool Tools blog.

Hot glue is a quick and sturdy way to join things together. For electronic projects, hot glue is also an easy way to mount LEDs or project boards in an enclosure.

But with traditional hot glue, the end result sorta looks like you’ve stuck things together with snot.

Black glue sticks have two things going for it. One, it avoids looking like hot glue. Especially in a black enclosure, it blends in a little better.

Two, as a more practical advantage, it blocks out light leaks. So it you’re mounting an LED and don’t want to see a halo around the hole it’s in, a few globs of this will hold your LED in place and seal in the light.

Now, there are downsides to this glue. This stuff in particular is a half-inch type stick, so it won’t work in smaller craft glue guns. Though, I suspect there’s smaller versions out there.

But the biggest downside is that it will stain the inside of your glue gun. Once you put a stick of this stuff in your gun, if you switch back you’re going to be making swirly, gray glue blobs for a long time before the black clears out.

At this point I’ve just committed one of my glue guns to use black hot glue. I keep it at my electronics workbench and find it pretty handy.

You can use the link in the description to pick some up for yourself, and you can see thousands of reader recommended tools like these at Cool-Tools.org.

A couple other things to share with you this week. First, today I’m talking live on YouTube with Randy Sarafan about some of the awesome simple robots he’s put out on Instructables.

Depending on how early you’re seeing this, you can catch the talk live and ask some questions or see the archived version using the link in the description.

On that note, I’d really like to do more of these maker interviews, but they don’t get the big views and they’re not sponsored. So, I’ve been thinking about launching a Patreon to help support a more regular maker interview show. Let me know what you think about that, or about these interviews. I’d love to make them into something you’d all be excited to chip in for, but I could use some feedback.

Maker Faires! We’ve got 7 coming up this weekend including Kent, Ohio; Omaha, Nebraska; Salt Lake City, Utah; Almaty, Kazakhstan; Chemnitz, Germany; Horseheads, New York; and Edinburgh, Scotland. If one’s near you, go check it out.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, like, and comment. Get on the email newsletter, pick up some hot glue, and if you’re feeling like this made your day just a little better, you can buy me a coffee using the link down here. Alright? Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next week.