This week on Maker Update, internet controlled RC cars, a 3D printer world record, animating 36 servos, plotter art from Wi-Fi maps, a funky ghost, and freeform circuit tips from the master.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Week=-

Driving A Tiny RC Car Over The Internet Using ESP8266 By Surrogate.Tv
https://makezine.com/2019/09/12/driving-a-tiny-rc-car-over-the-internet-using-esp8266/

Drive the cars online
https://www.surrogate.tv/game/racerealcars143

-=News=-

Prusa Sets Guiness Record For Most Simultaneously Operating 3D Printers
https://makezine.com/2019/09/10/prusa-sets-guiness-record-for-most-simultaneously-operating-3d-printers/

-=More Projects=-

Servo Motor Artwork by Doug Domke
https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/doug-domke/servo-motor-artwork-79e2d3

Putting The Pieces Back Together Again by Ralf Baecker
https://www.creativeapplications.net/robotics/putting-the-pieces-back-together-again-the-order-of-chaos/

WiFi Impressionist – City as an electromagnetic landscape by Richard Vijgen
https://www.creativeapplications.net/environment/wifi-impressionist-city-as-an-electromagnetic-landscape/
http://www.wifiimpressionist.com/

Funkgeist by bobtato
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:570654
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAS_xohexmk

-=Tools/Tips=-

Building Freeform w/ Mohit Bhoite
https://vimeo.com/354276626

Getting Started in Woodworking | 5 Things You Need by Make Something
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5srGLxUiMQ

Mashing Up Toy Hacking and Microcontrollers By colleengraves
https://www.instructables.com/id/Mashing-Up-Toy-Hacking-and-Microcontrollers/

Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales – Issue #17
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/garethbranwyn/issues/gareth-s-tips-tools-and-shop-tales-issue-17-197573

East Bay Mini Maker Faire Sun, 10/27
https://eastbay.makerfaire.com/

-=Product Spotlight=-

Stepper Motors – Tech Basics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-FXWrxiL0c

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, internet controlled RC cars, a 3D printer world record, animating 36 servos, plotter art from Wi-Fi maps, a funky ghost, and freeform circuit tips from the master.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, back again with another episode of Maker Update. A big thanks to Sophy Wong for stepping in last week. I loved it, and I hope she’ll come back again sometime. But there’s plenty to catch you up on, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

The guys at Surrogate TV made this RC race track system where anyone on the internet can control and race a real 1:43 scale RC car against other online players. 

To make it happen, they started with off-the-shelf RC cars and controllers. After some trial and error, they eventually resorted to replacing the electronics inside the car with an Arduino-programmable ESP8266-based board called the Wemos D1 Mini Pro.

Not only was this board small enough to just barely fit inside the car body, but it works with a little compatible motor shield that stacked neatly on top to control acceleration and steering. 

As I understand it, each car is setup as its own server, taking in driver control input from a main PC, and also reading and reporting back the status of the car.

It looks like a lot of fun and I’ll leave a link in the show notes where you can drive the cars yourself.

It’s time for some news. Prusa Printers set a new world record for the most 3D printers operating simultaneously. The previous record from 2014 was 159 printers by Airwolf 3D. The new record set by Prusa is 1,096 printers. 

Aside from being a cool publicity stunt, I actually found it pretty inspirational to see this scale of printer farm manufacturing. Each one made a little hex tile that were all used to create a mosaic when it was over.

Now for more projects. On the Arduino Project Hub, Doug Domke shares how he created this kinetic art piece using 36 servos connected up to an Arduino Uno and three 16-channel Adafruit Servo Motor controllers. 

He mentions being inspired by a piece he saw at a modern art museum, and I suspect he’s talking about this work by Ralf Baecker I covered here back in episode #103, that uses 1,250 stepper motors.

Doug’s project is a much more approachable, bite-sized version with some hypnotic animations and an interesting interactive option using 3 ultrasonic sensors.

Another project that mixes art and tech is this Wi-Fi painter by Richard Vijgen. One part of this is a 2.4 GHz antenna mounted on a Raspberry Pi-controlled pan and tilt mechanism. The readings from this are sent to a computer where a 3D map of Wi-Fi signal strength is created. 

From that 3D map, a pen plotter then constructs a landscape perspective view of the data. The longer it draws, the denser the image becomes.The result is beautiful mess, but I’m into it.

Funkgeist by Bobtato on Thingiverse is a geared 3D printed ghost that wiggles its chubby little ghost arms around as is spins. The original idea is that you mount it on a turntable and find a way to tie its head down so that it stays still while the base and arms twirl around.

The Ruiz Bros. on Adafruit show off a version they printed in glow in the dark filament and mounted on a simple motorized box with a tie-down for the head. I think it could be an easy little Halloween project to try out.

Now for a few tips and tools. There’s a great 40-minute video out of Mohit Bhoite’s talk at the Eyeo festival. He covers his history making freeform circuit sculptures. About halfway in, you get to see how he creates makeshift fixtures for his projects using little breadboards and perfboards. 

On the Make Something channel, David Picciouto goes over his top 5 tools for getting started in woodworking. It really turns into 7-8 tools, but what I appreciate hearing from him is that for almost everything you’d want to do, there are multiple ways to go at it and almost always an inexpensive tool that will get the job done.

On Instructables, Colleen Graves has another great guide to creating toy hacking workshops. This time, she adds in mashing-up your hacked toy with different microcontroller boards. If you’ve ever thought about hosting a kid-friendly maker workshop in your area, Colleen has an outline here for a fun 4-day workshop that you could probably expand into a weeklong summer camp program.

Issue #17 of Gareth Branwyn’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales includes a tip for adding sandpaper to the bottom of an aluminum yardstick for a simple no-slip ruler or straightedge. Plus, a useful jig for clamping things together at right angles. 

And a quick reminder that I will be bringing some projects out to the East Bay Mini Maker Faire in Oakland, CA on Sunday October 27th. If you’re in the area, I encourage you to come out and say hello. I’ll have some stickers to give away too.

And for this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, they’ve got a new video up that goes over the basics of how stepper motors work. They show some basic operation, getting a stepper motor to work with an Arduino, and controlling it with a potentiometer. Worth a look if you want just a little motivation to give these motors a try.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a comment, or leave a thumbs up. Get on the Maker Update email list to get show notes and links emailed out to you automatically every week. A big thanks to my Patrons on Patreon and to Digi-Key electronics for making this show possible. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next week.