This week on Maker Update, dueling wands, robots without the wiggle, Chirp, Scratch, a Marquee sign for your room, homeschool imagineering, hacking heat shrink, and finishing with graphite.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Week=-

Harry Potter Dueling Wands with Arduino! by Wermy
https://sudomod.com/harry-potter-wands/

-=News=-

Disney Research Makes Dynamic Robots Less Wiggly, More Lifelike
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/disney-research-dynamic-robotic-characters

Chirp brings data-over-sound capabilities your Arduino projects
https://blog.arduino.cc/2019/08/12/chirp-brings-data-over-sound-capabilities-your-arduino-projects/
https://chirp.io/

Scratch 3 Desktop for Raspbian on Raspberry Pi
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/scratch-3-desktop-for-raspbian-on-raspberry-pi/

-=More Projects=-

How to Make a Lighted Marquee Sign by I Like to Make Stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eydL5MFV2w

-=Tools/Tips=-

Imagineering In a Box: free instructional video series from Disney and Khan Academy
https://boingboing.net/2019/08/11/glendale-comes-to-you.html
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/hass-storytelling/imagineering-in-a-box

Caleb Kraft Recommends Pneumatic Engraver and Vise for Beginners
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhGxRlbXKkk

Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales – Issue #13
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/garethbranwyn/issues/gareth-s-tips-tools-and-shop-tales-issue-13-191683

Understanding 1-2-3 Blocks by Bob Clagett
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe4lYZptGHY

Pictures of DEFCON 27
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/08/15/pictures-of-defcon-27-hacker-summer-camp-badges/

Badgelife Tracker by Martin Lebel
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AAQhLHpA4vzBJbySKs13kGlBty9BVqNwCylW5Y7qZlc/edit#gid=0

Harbor Freight Clamp Coupling by Elproducts
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3800334

Print Shrink Tube Labels With A Cheap Brother Printer by Voltlog
https://hackaday.com/2019/08/14/print-your-own-heat-shrink-labels-for-factory-chic-wire-naming/

Graphite Dust as Paint Finish by GRΛFIT and Coregeek Creations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxVz8t-u9cM
https://twitter.com/coregeeknet/status/1163509773142130688

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Circuit Breaker Basics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HujFUqayORc

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, dueling wands, robots without the wiggle, Chirp, Scratch, a Marquee sign for your room, homeschool imagineering, hacking heat shrink, and finishing with graphite

Hey, I’m Donald Bell and I’m back with another Maker Update. Hopefully, you’re already overloaded with great project ideas, but just in case, I’ve got some more for you here, plus a ton of tips this time around. But let’s get started with the project of the week.

Wermy from Sudomod has this outstanding guide on how to make a pair of dueling Harry Potter wands. 

These were custom made for a Harry Potter themed quiz show. The client wanted something that could act as a buzzer system so contestants could buzz in with their answer. Instead, they got these motion-activated wands that wirelessly trigger an LED animation and sound effects.

There’s also a seperate remote that the show host uses to mark answers as correct or incorrect, pause the game or ready the wands for a new question. 

The project uses a lot of Adafruit boards, including the ItsyBitsy M0 Express, Feather M0 Express, Feather 32U4, and an Adafruit Audio FX sound board — all programmed with Arduino.

On top of that there’s also a few accelerometers and radio modules, the addressable LED strip, and rechargeable batteries.

As you can see there’s also a fair amount of 3D printing for the wands and enclosures. The wand design is especially cool, with a removable core that houses the battery and components. 

It’s a really inspiring build. Not cheap, but maybe if you have a workplace halloween party and a budget to work with to make it something special this could be just the thing. Or maybe swallow the cost and rent it out for Harry Potter themed birthday parties. Either way, you’re going to blow some minds. 

You can find the code, schematics, and bill of materials on Sudomod.com. No STL files, but shoot him a message and maybe he can help you out.

Now for some news. Disney Research has a new video and academic paper out showing off how they’re able to model, analyze and limit unintentional vibrations in lightweight animatronic robotics. 

There are some incredible examples of these wireframe robots that at first jiggle all over the place from their own momentum, and then have their motor control optimized for smooth, natural movement. 

The trick is that through accurate modeling, they’re able to predict the unwanted wobbling and preemptively compensate for it just by adjusting the acceleration and deceleration curve of the motor control in very small precise amounts. It’s incredible.

Arduino announced that their Nano 33 BLE Sense board will be their first board capable of both sending and receiving Chirp encoded audio signals. 

This is part of a new partnership and SDK with Chirp, a technology that allows for machine to machine communication using an audio signal — no internet connection required. It kind of sounds like R2D2. 

We also learned that the new version of the Raspbian OS for Raspberry Pi, called Buster, now supports an offline, desktop version of the Scratch 3 coding software. If you’re involved in STEM education or any kind of beginner coding class, you’re probably familiar with Scratch.

One thing that I think is new, or at least new to me, are these little Scratch blocks made for the Pi that let you easily connect and control signals on the GPIO pins. From the looks of it, you really get some useful, Arduino-like interactions that you can explore.

One more project I want to share with you. Over on the I Like to Make Stuff channel, Bob Clagett shows step by step how he made this wall-hanging, light-up movie marquee for his daughters room. 

The video is sponsored by Marvel Studios, but I can’t even hate on it because the project is so darn good. It’s woodworking, acrylic, vinyl cutting, electrical, detailing — there’s a lot to it and the payoff is great. No spoilers. 

A bunch of tips this week. If that Disney Research piece got your heart racing, check out a new Khan Academy series done in partnership with Disney called Imagineering in a Box. 

It’s an incredible and completely free series of videos and exercises that reveal all of the thinking and storytelling and design methods that go into a Disney-style ride. It’s not kid-stuff, and to me I think it applies to anything from escape room design, video game design, haunted house design, or any kind of visual storytelling.

On the Cool Tools channel I’ve got a new video up talking with Make magazine’s Caleb Kraft. Caleb and I talk about his most recent hobby — engraving. We talk about the kind of pneumatic engraver he uses and this super cool ball vise that he uses to fixture and rotate his work.

Gareth Branwyn’s latest Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales newsletter covers working with gum-backed kraft tape, spray-mounting wood to cardboard to help hold CNC router projects, and putting vaseline on the tip of your CA glue bottles to keep them from crusting up. 

Bob Clagett shows off some of the various ways you can use 1-2-3 blocks. These are inexpensive metal blocks used by machinists, with perfectly squared corners, that measure 1-inch, by 2-inches, by 3 inches. 

Adafruit has a look at some of the custom badges of Defcon 27. But if you’re interested to learn more about Defcon badges, through Hackaday I learned about an ongoing Badgelife tracker spreadsheet by Martin Lebel that has been collecting information on all the badges. 

Chuck Hellebuyck has a design posted on Thingiverse for a 3D printed coupler that connects two Harbor Freight clamps together to form a larger clamp. His video also shows off how he designed it quickly in Tinkercad.

In a series of videos from Voltlog, you can learn how to easily bypass the mechanical DRM on an entry-level $20 Brother label maker, so that it can print to heat shrink tubing. It’s usually a feature reserved for much more expensive models, but apparently you can get it working by just taping over a hole on the cartridge.

And I found two different posts this week by GRΛFIT and Coregeek Creations showing how to finish black glossy paint with fine graphite powder to create a polished metal look that won’t rub off. It looks super nice, and a great idea to try out on any kind of cosplay project.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out a new video they have up covering the basics of circuit breakers. You’re probably used to seeing these on your house, but there are plenty of applications where you may want to use them to protect your project.

The video goes over various types of circuit breakers and it’s really cool how they show a cross section of each design to illustrate what’s going on. It’s a 4-minute video that will make you just a little smarter.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a comment or leave a thumb’s up. Those thumbs really do matter. You can get on the Maker Update email newsletter to get show notes emailed out to you every week. A big thanks to my patrons on Patreon and to Digi-Key Electronics for sponsoring this show. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next week.