This week on Maker Update: turn your drink to Infinity, a book powered by feathers, secret codes, volume knobs, marshmallows, home automation, and cracking the code on machine learning.

++Show Notes [Maker Update #159]++

-=Project of the Month=-

Neopixel Infinity Coaster
https://learn.adafruit.com/infinity-mirror-coaster

-=News=-

Take Flight with Feather contest Winner
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/22/winners-of-the-take-flight-with-feather-contest/

OHS Badge powered by Circuit Python
https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/01/18/the-open-hardware-summit-2020-badge-is-circuitpython-powered-and-its-the-100th-board-ohsummit-circuitpython-ohsummit20/

-=Adafruit Projects=-

TOTP Authentication Friend
https://learn.adafruit.com/pyportal-2fa-totp-authentication-friend/internet-connect-2
https://youtu.be/f_L9ZuqXqa8

John Park Bluetooth Projects
https://learn.adafruit.com/bluetooth-le-hid-volume-knob-with-circuitpython
https://learn.adafruit.com/now-playing-bluetooth-apple-media-service-display
https://learn.adafruit.com/ble-hid-keyboard-buttons-with-circuitpython

Machine Learning with Marshmallows
https://learn.adafruit.com/machine-learning-with-marshmallows-and-tiny-sorter/train-the-model

-=Contributed Projects=-

PyPortal MQTT Home Assistant
https://learn.adafruit.com/pyportal-mqtt-sensor-node-control-pad-home-assistant

-=Tools/Tips=-

CLUE Sneak preview
https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/01/18/latest-clue-design-sneak-preview-nordictweets-arduino-microbit_edu-circuitpython-clue/

LadyAda Gyroscope calibration
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-sensorlab-gyroscope-calibration

Oculus Quest Sideloading
https://learn.adafruit.com/sideloading-on-oculus-quest

LadyAda Teachable Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j43MLLRkTiE&feature=youtu.be

-=Product Spotlight=-

ItsyBitsy NRF52840 Bluetooth LE
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4481

Transcript

This week on Maker Update: turn your drink to Infinity, a book powered by feathers, secret codes, volume knobs, marshmallows, home automation, and cracking the code on machine learning.

Hello and welcome to another Adafruit Edition of Maker Update – I’m Tyler Winegarner, and like always, I’ve been keeping busy starting a half dozen projects, and sometimes finishing one or two of them. I hope that’s not where you’re at, but if you’re ready to get going on another one, here’s our project of the month.

There’s few things more startling than the first time you walk between two mirrors that are parallel to one another and then see your own image stretching off into infinity. That’s the basic Idea behind this project from the Ruiz brothers, a portable and compact infinity mirror coaster. A ring of neopixels gets sandwiched between a pair of two-way mirrors – You can see in from the outside, but their reflective quality means that the pixels look like their stretching impossibly down into the table. It’s a cool effect.

Typical of the Ruiz brothers, the design shows a remarkable sense of economy of space. The 3d printed parts hide all of the electronics while giving ready access to the power switch and usb port for programming and charging. Some of that compact design comes from the ItsyBitsy Bluetooth LE board that’s running things. It has a tiny footprint, but plenty of power to drive the lightshow on circuitpython, and the NRF52840 chip means that you can control the lights remotely from your mobile phone.

Infinity Mirror projects aren’t especially new, but it’s great to see one so small and so tightly packaged. A small lipo battery means that you don’t need it to be tied to a wall wart, which makes it a little more impressive at your next scifi bar crawl. If you’re ready to take this project further, the Ruiz Brothers also have a tutorial for making this desktop NeoPixel Infinity cube. It uses the super skinny 4mm Neopixel strips, so you’ll need a steady hand when soldering, but it’s a mesmerizing result if you’re ready for the challenge.

Time for the news, Adafruit just announced the official release of CLUE, a sensor-packed project and development board. Similar in design to the MicroBit, Clue packs in a 240×240 TFT display, a 9 degree of freedom accelerometer / gyroscope / magnetometer, A proximity, RGB and gesture sensor, a microphone, temperature sensors and more – along with the 5 alligator clip friendly connectors at the bottom. It’ll support CircuitPythin and MakeCode, and there’s a Stemma / Quiic connecter for additional hardware – if they’ve forgotten something you need.

Hackaday and Adafruit have announced their winner for the Take Flight with Feather contest, the Open Book project from Oddly Specific Obbjects. You might remember this one from a few months back, it’s an E-Ink reader powered by a Feather ATSAMD51 microcontroller. There’s a whole lot that’s remarkable about this project, like the onboard flash chip for configurable languages and typefaces, but my favorite is the huge board with its information-rich silkscreen. Keep a lookout for this one, it’ll be a cool project to get your hands on.

Speaking of purple PCB’s, this year’s badge for the Open Hardware Summit runs on CircuitPython. It’s sort of a wristwatch form factor with a 1.5” LCD display, but there’s loads of other sensors for temperature, pressure and humidity, an IMU, a gesture sensor, a stemma/quiic connector, and it supports Bluetooth LE. And for the final touch, it’s also the 100th board to support CircuitPython.

Time for more projects, Brent Rubell created this adorable desktop TOTP Authentication friend for your Two Factor authentications. Instead of getting a text message with a single use code, TOTP usually runs on a mobile app that’s constantly generating new codes for your logins. It’s a little more secure because if your sim gets cloned, your attacker still won’t get access to your two factor codes. This project runs on the pyportal and displays the codes constantly, and a simple touch interface lets you switch between different logins. It’s worth mentioning that because to code runs on circuit python, the auth strings are easily available to anyone who has physical access to the project and knows where to look – so this is better suited to home than office use. But it’s a great project, and looks particularly handsome in these classic CRT enclosures for the PyPortal designed by the Ruiz Brothers.

Last month John Park wowwed us with his Apple Notification Service Center notifier for the Circuit Playground Bluefruit and the TFT Gizmo. This month, he’s gone a little crazy with it. He’s built three different bluetooth based remote controls for various devices, and they’re all pretty great. The first one is a “Now Playing” display running on the CircuitPlayground TFT Gizmo that makes use of the Apple Media Service library to display the song that’s currently playing. Another one is a volume knob that interfaces with anything that understands the USB Human Interface Display library so you can control the volume remotely. The last one uses the same library and a few push buttons to create a rudimentary keyboard. It’s not hard to imagine that he’s going to eventually voltron these all together into a remote media control console, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

It’s getting easier and easier to dip a toe into the Machine Learning pool, but one of the most charming is this cereal sorter powered by Teachable Machine. Teachable Machine is a service provided by google that’s a web based machine learning interface. Here it’s being used to look at bits of cereal and separate the marshmallows from the other bits. A tiny servo with an adorable face and MANDATORY GOOGLY EYES wiggles to vibrate the cereal bits down a conveyor where it will be evaluated by a webcam, and if it’s a marshmallow it gets dumped into one cup, or another if it’s not.

From the Adafruit community this month we’ve got a PyPortal Sensor and Control interface for Home Assistant. Home Assistant is perfect if you want to get into home automation, but would rather roll your own than trusting all of your home info to the cloud. The demo here is just controlling a few smart lights and responding to the light sensor on the PyPortal, but with all the sensors it has onboard, you could use it for temperature control and plenty more – and the touchscreen interface could make for a convenient wall mounted control surface.

Time for some tips and tools, LadyAda wrote up this tutorial for calibrating your gyroscopic sensor board. It goes into a little bit of how these tiny components work, and why they come from the factory with some nonzero data, even when they’re at rest. She tells you how to dial them in so the data you get from them is more useable.

Collin Cunningham has a pair of hacks for the oculus quest. The first is a tutorial on how you can sideload software to your headset. Sideloading is a process where you’re able to run software that hasn’t yet been approved through the official storefront. It comes with some risks, sideloading can be a vector for harmful software, but it can also be a way to play with some really cool dev stuff. You’ll need to register as an oculus developer, but that seems to be the most intrusive step. The other hack is a lot less involved, it’s just a quick tip for adding a battery to the strap of your headset for added battery life and hopefully more comfort.

We talked about Teachable Machine earlier, LadyAda also has a tutorial that introduces you to it up on the Adafruit learning center. She teaches it to identify her face, her face with her hoodie up, and when she’s not present at all – and then it displays the results on a circuit playground. If you’re ready to dig in and learn what machine learning is all about, or you just want to see what the back end of all those captcha images is all about, check this one out.

Powering a handful of projects in this episode, this month’s Adafruit product spotlight is the ItsyBitsy NRF52840 Express board. True to it’s name is has a really miniscule footprint of only 1.3” by .7” to fit into just about any project, but it packs an incredible punch. It supports bluetooth low energy, a special output pin for 5v applications, human interface device applications and more. You can code for it in circuitpython and the Arduino IDE. You really don’t want to miss this one.

And that is going to do it for this month’s show. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, give us a thumbs up or leave us a comment – we always love to hear what you’re working on. Big thanks to everyone at Adafruit for making this show possible, all our supporters on Patreon, and to you for watching. We’ll see you next month.