This week on Maker Update, dedicated hardware for your Keanu Reeves GIF collection, sound reactive sabers, return of the Trash Panda, and machine learning in your pocket.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Week=-

Light Up Prop with Prop-Maker by Ruiz Brothers
https://learn.adafruit.com/prop-maker-light-wand

Previous Lightsaber project by Ruiz Bros.
https://learn.adafruit.com/lightsaber-featherwing

-=News=-

The Free Annual Python Conference in Ohio. PyOhio 2019 is July 27-28, 2019 at The Ohio Union in Columbus. The Saturday keynote speaker: Kattni Rembor!
https://www.pyohio.org/2019/

8/8/2019 is CircuitPython day!

-=Adafruit Projects=-

PyGamer Keanu Reeves GIF Player by John Park
https://twitter.com/johnedgarpark/status/1145493707644264448

Based on Arcada Animated GIF Display by Lady Ada
https://learn.adafruit.com/pyportal-animated-gif-display

Bringing Back THE VOICE of Speak & Spell by Phillip Burgess
https://learn.adafruit.com/bringing-back-the-voice-of-speak-spell

Trash Panda 2: Garbage Day by John Park
https://learn.adafruit.com/trash-panda-2-dumpster-dive

Tilt Controlled Marble Maze by Dano Wall
https://learn.adafruit.com/tilt-controlled-marble-maze

Tiny Machine Learning on the Edge with TensorFlow Lite Running on SAMD51
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/06/24/tiny-machine-learning-on-the-edge-with-tensorflow-lite-running-on-samd51-arduino-tensorflow-tinyml-tensorflow/

-=Contributed Projects=-

Superhero Power Gauntlet by Richard Albritton
https://learn.adafruit.com/superhero-power-gauntlet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfgkRSK7YKQ

-=Tools/Tips=-

PyBadge GamePad by Ruiz Brothers
https://learn.adafruit.com/pybadge-gamepad

Adding Cursor Support to CircuitPython
https://learn.adafruit.com/cursor-for-circuitpython/

USB HID Crank Controller by Ruiz Brothers
https://learn.adafruit.com/usb-hid-crank-controller/overview

Feather takes flight at Seeed Studio with the Grove Shield for Particle Mesh
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/06/27/feather-takes-flight-at-seeed-studio-with-the-grove-shield-for-particle-mesh-seeedstudio-particle-adafruit-feather/

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpG9r7CMTYs
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4292

Adafruit PiRTC – Precise DS3231 Real Time Clock for Raspberry Pi:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4282

Adafruit PiRTC – PCF8523 Real Time Clock for Raspberry Pi
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3386

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, dedicated hardware for your Keanu Reeves GIF collection, sound reactive sabers, return of the Trash Panda, and machine learning in your pocket.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell and welcome back to another Adafruit Edition of Maker Update. I hope you’re having a great summer. The Adafruit team has been working on a bunch of really fun projects to keep you busy, so let’s start in with my pick for the Project of the Month.

Check out this collapsible, light up sword by the Ruiz Bros. For the sake of our lawyer budget, let’s call it a “laser sword” alright?

We’ve seen this collapsing design recently from 3D Printing World, but the Ruiz Bros. mashed it up with their previous design, which adds motion-reactive lights and sound effects. This way, not only does it crackle when you flip it out, but it also flashes and makes a great clashing sound when it knocks into things.

The foundation of the project is an Adafruit Feather M4 Express board with a Prop-Maker Featherwing add-on board, a speaker, a super-bright 3 watt RGB LED, and an 18650 rechargeable battery.

There are 12 parts to 3D print. None of them need support. And the coolest thing is that the sword design by 3D Printing World prints all as a single collapsible piece.

Some quick news to throw out there. The Annual PyOhio Python conference takes place on the weekend of July 27th. It’s a free event and the keynote speaker is Kattni Rembor.

Also, August 8th is being celebrated as Circuit Python day, probably because all those eights look pretty snakelike. There’s an event being planned, but mark your calendars now.

Time for more projects from the Adafruit team. John Park took the internet by storm this week with his PyGamer-based Keanu Reeves GIF player. The project is based on Lady Ada’s Arcada Animated GIF display. With it, you load up GIFs on a micro SD card, and you can advance through them with the thumbstick. More than anything, I’m just happy John introduced me to the world of Keanu GIFs.

Do you remember the Speak & Spell? Well Phil Burgess has recreated the voice so that it can be triggered from an Adafruit NeoTrellis M4. The guide is a fun read with some interesting history around how the original Speak & Spell voice was created.

Another John Park project that deserves to go viral is this guide on how he made a game called Trash Panda 2 for the PyGamer or PyBadge hardware.

In the game, cats and raccoons are going through your garbage and you have to scare them away with your flashlight to score points.

John walks you through how he designed the game using Microsoft MakeCode. You Learn how to make tile arrays, create gravity, and even use the light sensor because the game requires that you play in the dark for authenticity.

I also really enjoyed this tilt controlled marble maze by Dano Wall. It uses a Circuit Playground Express, two servos, and some pro cardboard crafting skills. The servos react to the position of the accelerometer on the board and adjust the angle of the playfield.

And Lady Ada has a video up showing how she was able to get TensorFlow Lite running on the PyGamer’s SAMD51 microcontroller. With it, she was able to demonstrate some basic machine learning and voice recognition. The code is available on GitHub if you want to give it a try.

From the Adafruit community we have this great guide from by Richard Albritton on how to build your own superhero power gauntlet inspired by a certain ferrous metal man.

What’s really cool about this build is that he’s programmed in some gesture control so that it triggers a power up sound and light animation when you raise it up, and a power down mode when you lower it.

The project uses an Adafruit Feather, a breakout accelerometer, an Adafruit Sound FX board, speaker and amplifier. The guide includes links to the 3D printed glove. If you want this for Halloween, get on it now.

Time for some tips and tools. The Ruiz Bros. created a 3D printed gamepad design that fits over the Adafruit PyBadge. This gives you a thumbstick like the PyGamer, and raises the buttons up. The case also just gives it a nice, finished look.

Brent Rubell has a guide and code for adding a cursor to your CircuitPython project. This way you can select items on a screen using a joystick. It’s a great solution for when a touch screen doesn’t make sense or costs too much.

The Ruiz brothers also created this guide for making a 3D printed hand crank that you can use as an HID USB device for your computer. You can customize it to scroll webpages, turn the volume up and down — whatever you want. It’s a neat design and inexpensive to make.

Seeed Studio is now offering what might be their first Feather format compatible board. It’s a Grove sensor breakout shield designed for Particle’s line of Mesh boards which use the Feather format.

For this week’s product spotlight, you probably know by now that there’s a new Raspberry Pi 4 out in the world. The best way to get one from Adafruit is to sign up for notifications when stock becomes available.

But one feature the Raspberry Pi still doesn’t have is a real-time clock chip that can allow it to track time accurately even when the power is off.

For Raspberry Pi projects that do datalogging, or work as clocks, or alarms, or servers, you’ll want to pick up an Adafruit PiRTC.

This small add-on mounts directly on any Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins. There’s no soldering. You just add your own coin cell battery and you’ve got a dedicated real-time clock that will keep time for 5 years or more.

The PiRTC comes in two flavors. The best and most recent is the Precise DS3231. It’s $15 and uses an extremely accurate chip. For less critical applications, there’s an older PCF8523 version that sells for $6. You can find links for both, and for the Raspberry Pi 4, down in the description.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a comment or leave a thumbs up. You can get on the Maker Update email list to get show notes emailed out to you each week, along with a few bonus projects. A big thanks to my patrons on Patreon and to Adafruit for sponsoring this monthly special edition of the show. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you soon.