This week on Maker Update: secrets of the Zenbot, Maker Music Fest, Makerbot marries Ultimaker, a 3D printed bling ring, an LED matrix cube, and a centrifugal golf cart.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.283]

-=Project of the Week=-

Zenbot by David Covarrubias
https://makezine.com/projects/zenbot-musical-doorbell-drumbot/

-=News=-

Maker Music Festival is Up
https://www.makermusicfestival.com/

MakerBot, Ultimaker Announce Their Merger
https://www.makerbot.com/stories/news/makerbot-and-ultimaker-agree-to-merge-to-accelerate-global-adoption-of-additive-manufacturing/

-=More Projects=-

Color Changing Bling Ring By GeekMomProjects
https://www.instructables.com/Color-Changing-Bling-Ring/

RGB LED Matrix Cube with 25,000 LEDs by Ruiz Brothers, Phillip Burgess
https://learn.adafruit.com/rgb-led-matrix-cube-for-pi

I Made a Weightless Centrifugal Car by Handy Geng
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyYxfNyWU5I

-=Tips & Tools=-

Open Resin Printer Settings Database by Adam Bute
https://makertrainer.com/

DiResta Miter Saw Tip
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gxDnrLe0J1I

How I Design Gear Trains in Autodesk Fusion 360 by Greg Zumwalt
https://youtu.be/BsEk0xB8VLk

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

What is a Reference Design?
https://youtu.be/EBiea0r2APs

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: secrets of the Zenbot, Maker Music Fest, Makerbot marries Ultimaker, a 3D printed bling ring, an LED matrix cube, and a centrifugal golf cart.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Maker Update. How are you doing? What are you working on? Me, I’m working on refreshing this whole little workshop. It needs a reinfusion of maker mojo, and a good purge. I hope your space is working for you, and you’re just hungry for project ideas. So let’s get going with the project of the week.

Zenbot by David Covarrubias is one of the coolest robotic instruments I’ve seen.

The design fits seven servo-actuated mallets around a handpan with 14 notes. To play all of the notes, each of the mallets make use of a second servo allowing it to twist its direction and strike a secondary note.

The Zenbot was featured in the most recent issue of Make magazine, but the online explainer for the project only went up last week, which is what I’m including in the description. Not only does the online guide include far more detail, but it also links to the 3D print files and a series of YouTube videos David made that go into every detail of the project.

As I see it, there are only two notable downsides to the project. One is expense. He’s using these high quality Dynamixel servos, which offer a great combination of power and quiet operation. They’re around $22 each, and you’ll need 14 of them – so that’s $300 right off the bat.

The other limiting factor here is programming the song pattern. David is using an ingenious method of writing the song pattern in the Arduino code, but it seems like a fairly painstaking process to transcribe a song into this unique format.

That said, both of these problems seem fixable if you’re willing to put in the work and get creative with part substitution. With the right constraints, I suspect you could probably swap the servos for DC motors and save some money that way.

But if money is no object, David’s instructions provide everything you need to build an exactly replica of what you see here. Not only is it amazing to watch, but it sounds beautiful.

Speaking of new and amazing maker instruments, this past weekend was the launch of the new Maker Music Festival online experience. The free site offers all kinds of new content for 2022, along with all the great music and instruments from last year.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, I encourage you to give it a browse. The whole setup makes it lots of fun to explore. And if you’re lucky, you may even come across my new instrument for the year, the Glockenwheel.

In other news, last week 3D printer brand MakerBot announced a merger with competing brand Ultimaker. The deal is expected to close later this year.

And though both companies are known for making 3D printers that are a bit out of the budget for the average maker, the merger also involves Ultimaker’s popular Cura software for 3D model slicing, and MakerBot’s Thingiverse 3D model repository, which has been languishing for years.

It’ll be interesting to see where this all goes.

Now for more projects. On Instructables, Geek Mom Projects has a fun guide on making your own 3D printed LED rings.

The design uses a single CR2032 watch battery and a clever design that sandwiches it between the two LED legs that light up the ring.

The two part design snaps together and allows you to have interchangeable tops that you can design however you want. She includes a star and a heart design, but you could easily make a light up logo design or any number of shapes or letters.

On Adafruit, the Ruiz brothers and Phil Burgess teamed up for this guide on making this interactive LED cube with 25,000 pixels.

This is a rare, Advanced guide, partly due to how expensive it is to pull off. You’re looking at $300 in panels, plus another hundred or so for the Raspberry Pi and other parts. The assembly isn’t difficult, but a mistake would be very expensive.

But wow, what a cool thing to have. And I love how the battery and everything has been tucked inside for a totally self-contained design. Definitely a showpiece.

For something at a massive scale, check out this hand welded centrifugal car by Handy Geng.

This has got to be one of the craziest, barely drivable art cars I’ve ever seen. As the electric motor drives the wheels forward, it also spins the cabin of the car upside-down.

Half the time he’s driving, it seems like he can’t see where he’s going because he’s backwards or upside-down. From what I can tell, though, he has a screen and camera system mounted in front of him to help him see at any angle.

The most clever part, I think, is that he’s placed the steering column out the side of the cabin in the center of rotation, so that it can stay still while he rotates around it.

Be warned, though, as you might imagine, it’s a bit of a stomach churning ride and there’s unpleasant side effects near the end. But there’s also a reveal that he included a way to disengage the spinning gear, allowing him to drive it like a regular golf cart.

Now for some tips and tools. For those of you with resin 3D printers, Adam Bute created a database of proven printer settings for various printers, as well as different resins. You can find it on MakerTrainer.com. Hopefully it can save you from some of the heartbreak of a failed print.

On YouTube, Jimmy DiResta offers a handy miter saw tip, showing how to make a staggered stop block. This way when you’re making multiple cuts of the same length, the sawdust has a place to go and doesn’t build up and throw off your measurement. I thought that was clever.

Also on YouTube, Greg Zumwalt shares how he creates 3D printed gear trains using Fusion 360. By setting two circles as tangents to each other, they remain in contact with one another even as the circle diameters change. It’s a cool trick.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out their latest Quick Take video explaining reference designs.

When I was first starting out I was blown away and frankly intimidated by how engineers could seemingly whip up complex circuit designs from thin air. Only later did I realize how heavily people rely on reference designs to accomplish their goals.

So check out the video, and spend some time poking through Digi-Key’s reference design library just to see what’s possible.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. As part of my workshop purge I’m going to be giving away a few odds and ends to my email list subscribers, so keep an eye on that or sign up if you’re not already. A big thanks to Digi-Key electronics for making this show possible. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you soon.