This week on Maker Update, stop motion with Raspberry Pi, NVIDIA’s $99 AI board, Game Burgers, Lissajous Jukebox, StreetWriter, Ping Pong clock, and a laser cut turntable cabinet.

Show Notes

Project of the Week

Raspberry Pi Stop-Motion Animation Rig By wonderfulidea
https://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-Stop-Motion-Animation-Rig/

More demo videos
https://vimeo.com/246523818
https://vimeo.com/247332053
https://vimeo.com/247332235

News

Nvidia Launches $99 Jetson Board for Makers, Self-Training Robot Software
https://makezine.com/2019/03/18/nvidia-launches-99-jetson-board-for-makers-self-training-robot-software/

Jetbot on Github
https://github.com/NVIDIA-AI-IOT/jetbot

Hackaday Take
https://hackaday.com/2019/03/18/hands-on-new-nvidia-jetson-nano-is-more-power-in-a-smaller-form-factor/

Hackster Take
https://blog.hackster.io/introducing-the-nvidia-jetson-nano-aaa9738ef3ff

More Projects

Game Burger Advance by Love Hultén
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7rJk9aORiE

Making of Game Burger Advance by Love Hultén
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yptYD7hNjFw

LissaJukebox (aka dedicated Lissajous machine) by Emily Velasco
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=466xZ3cexMg
https://hackaday.io/project/163565-lissajukebox-aka-dedicated-lissajous-machine

StreetWriter By Charles Glorioso
https://www.instructables.com/id/StreetWriter/

Ping Pong Ball LED Clock by thomas jensma
https://www.instructables.com/id/Ping-Pong-Ball-LED-Clock/

Turntable Cabinet By JON-A-TRON
https://www.instructables.com/id/Turntable-Cabinet/

Tools/Tips

Replace Clogged Spray Paint Tips
https://youtu.be/JRJVE_KK3fU

Signal Generator DIY Kit
https://amzn.to/2TpV1Jn

Plotter People #2 recording
https://twitter.com/plotterpeople/status/1106984748465836032?s=03
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idl8TvI-0iw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTCbodOY8xc

TurtleToy
https://turtletoy.net/

Maker.js
https://maker.js.org/

Maker Faires This Weekend

Phaeno Mini Maker Faire Germany
Lafayette Mini Maker Faire USA
Thalia Mini Maker Faire Germany

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, stop motion with Raspberry Pi, NVIDIA’s $99 AI board, Game Burgers, LissaJukebox, StreetWriter, Ping Pong clock, and a laser cut turntable cabinet.

Hey, I’m Donald bell and welcome to another Maker Update. It’s good to be back and I have a lot of projects to catch you up on. But first, a reminder that next week’s show will be my special monthly edition on the Adafruit channel. So don’t miss that. But now, let’s take a look at the project of the week.

From Wonderful Idea Co., we have a beautifully done Instructable on how to make a simple stop motion animation rig that’s perfect for kids.

The heart of the project is a Raspberry Pi computer with a Pi camera module positioned over the board using a simple wooden arm held together with wingnuts so you can adjust the height.

Five arcade buttons along the side are used for taking a snapshot, an undo button, playing the video, saving the video, or erasing the video.

What’s cool though, is that to hook up the buttons to the Pi, they combined a GPIO breakout board meant for a breadboard, with a protoboard they could solder up for a more permanent installation.

It looks like a lot of fun to play with, but it’s especially great for classrooms or children’s museums, as a engaging way to spark creativity.

It’s time for some news. NVIDIA launched a new $99 project board geared for AI and robotics. It’s called the Jetson Nano Developer Kit, and it comes with a big honkin’ graphics processor that can encode and decode 4k video at 60 frames per second — perfect for computer vision projects.

What makes it particularly great for robotics is the software library NVIDIA is rolling out for it next month, called Isaac. With it, you can simulate environments for your robot and train your own AI for specific tasks.

To get you started, NVIDIA also put out a Github project guide for building a low cost rover bot with a 3D printed chassis and $150 in components. You can find a link in the show notes.

More projects, rapid fire. Love Hulten made this outrageously adorable handheld game system he calls the Game Burger Advance.

His custom game hardware creations are all beautiful works of art, but he rarely shows off how they were made. This time, though, he created a “making of” video that shows virtually every step in the process. From creating the buns from laser cut wood, to wiring up the Pi Zero and the game pad — it’s enough to make you think you might be able to make your own.

After months of work, Emily Velasco has finished building her LissaJukebox. It’s a Lissajous machine that generates patterns on a small portable TV that she’s painted to look like a vintage green monochrome CRT.

What’s really cool is how she’s generating the patterns. She’s wired up two cheap function generators to the X and Y coils of the TV. This isn’t a simulation — she’s directly manipulating the CRT.

For the finishing touch, she created this super retro enclosure for it with an aluminum front panel, wooden sides, and synchronized interior lights. I could watch this all day.

Charles Gloriouso made this sidewalk writing robot that repurposes car fuel injectors to spell out messages in water.

The geared wheels are taken from a Power Wheels car, a windshield washer task feeds the fuel injectors, and an Arduino Uno translates a text file into the sequence of pulses needed to spell out the words. The whole thing is operated by scrap toy RC car remote.

Loving the way LEDs look when diffused through ping pong balls, Thomas Jensma made this cool matrix of ping pong LEDs and turned it into a clock.

Using an Arduino Nano, 128 ping pong balls and a strip of 128 addressable LEDs, Thomas patiently sawed and glued each ball and mounted the design on MDF. The result looks beautiful, though I want to believe there’s an easier way to jig this all together or maybe have a 3D printed or laser cut template that everything can fit in.

Speaking of laser cut, Jon-A-Tron is back with this awesome design for a turntable cabinet with built-in speakers. He cut his version out of ¾” plywood using a high-powered laser cutter, but there’s no reason you couldn’t go at it with a CNC router, or even a template and a jig saw. You can find the full guide, with plans on Instructables.

I have a few tools and tips to share with you. First, on the Cool Tools channel, I have a roundup video showing three different types of graffiti style replacement tips for Rustoleum type spray paint cans. I was sick of getting clogged caps, so I found some cool options.

The signal generators used in Emily Velasco’s LissaJukebox are these cheap kits you can get on Amazon for $14. You can find them cheaper on eBay, but they take forever to ship. The Amazon one ships with Prime. At that price, I bought one just to have handy as a rainy day project.

Recordings from the second Plotter People meetup are on YouTube now. There’s a talk from Geoffrey Bradway and one from Chandler Abraham. Both are a great dive into CNC plotter graphics.

My favorite takeaway from the talks was the discovery of Turtletoy.net. It’s an online library of plotter graphics that you can tweak the code on, make your own, and download as SVG files. There’s some really great stuff on there, and even some files that will randomly regenerate every time you load them.

I also learned about Maker.js. This is an online tool by Microsoft Garage that lets you create and code modular line drawings using a Javascript library. There are some great demos to get you started and a luxurious amount of file export options.

Maker Faires! We’ve got three this weekend including Wolfsburg, Germany; Lafayette, Louisiana; and Gottingen, Germany. If none of those are near you, check the map at makerfaire.com to see when your local faire is happening.

And don’t forget that we also have Maker Faire Bay Area — the big one — happening on the weekend of May 18th. I’ll be there all weekend and it would be great to see you.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. Remember that next week’s Maker Update will be on the Adafruit channel where I’ll also have some big news to share, so don’t miss that. You can also catch every episode and all the show notes by subscribing the the Maker Update email newsletter. And a huge thanks to my awesome Patrons on Patreon who keep me inspired and keep this show rolling. Alright? Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next week.