This week on Maker Update: a holiday town controlled with your phone, robots that twist, robots that hop, a tool for flexures, and supercapacitor earrings.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.311]++

=Project of the Week=

Automated Xmas Village by omantn https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/z2ov41/i_built_an_app_powered_christmas_village_for_my/

Project code: https://github.com/omantn/christmasvillage

=News=

Arduino Launches IOT Bundle
https://store-usa.arduino.cc/products/iot-bundle

=More Projects=

World’s Simplest Omnidirectional Mobile Robot by Ayato Kanada, Y. Sato, T. Mashimo
https://youtu.be/U2LdPMVteAg

Simple Bots: Hopscotch By randofo
https://www.instructables.com/Simple-Bots-Hopscotch/

=Tips & Tools=

CRUMB by Mike Bushell
https://www.crumbsim.com/

Shape-Haptics Project
https://interactive-materials.github.io/#shape-haptics

Shape-Haptics Online sandbox:
https://interactive-materials.github.io/shape-haptics/

Hybrid Supercapacitor Earrings by California STEAM
https://www.tindie.com/products/californiasteam/rechargeable-hybrid-super-capacitor-earrings/

Adafruit NeoPixel Driver BFF
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-driver-bff

=Digi-Key Spotlight=

Cross Reference Tool
https://youtu.be/JVoPm9144us

=Transcript=

This week on Maker Update: a holiday town controlled with your phone, robots that twist, robots that hop, a tool for flexures, and supercapacitor earrings.

Hey everybody, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another episode of Maker Update – the show where we update you on cool things makers are making. That’s what we do here. I’ve got a fun show for you with a ton of robots and a dash of holiday spirit. So let’s get started with the project of the week.

Check out this Raspberry Pi-automated miniature holiday village shared by Omantn on Reddit. 

Apparently, his wife had been collecting these Christmas village ornaments for years, which make up each of the buildings in the diorama. 

To display them, he wired an addressable LED into each building and routed everything back to a Raspberry Pi 4 model B.

Not only does the Pi handle turning each LED on and off, and defining the color of the LED, but it’s all managed with a web app hosted on the Pi that you can pull up on any phone or computer on your local network.

He also added a model train, which is controlled by the same app and can be made to stop at the little train station with the push of a button.

It’s adorable, and I can only imagine how much fun it would be to play with at a holiday party. 

You can find the recently published code for the project on GitHub. The link is included down in the description here, along with the original Reddit post.

Even if you’re not in a position to do something like this with your holiday collectible ornaments, consider how this code could be adapted for other projects. Maybe a tabletop game terrain, or school diorama project. I definitely think there’s more you could spin out of this.

Now for some news. Arduino has launched an interesting IoT kit that includes guides for 5 different projects aimed at beginners. 

The kit sells for $80. An Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect board is at the heart of the whole thing, bundled with a motor, a servo, an LCD, and all the components you’d need for the projects.

If you’ve been looking for a solid entrypoint for getting familiar with creating your own internet connected hardware, I don’t think you can go wrong here.

Now for more projects. This is an experimental robot design by Yunosuke Sato; Ayato Kanada; and Tomoaki Mashimo, and my apologies on my pronunciation. 

At first glance this looks like a wheeled or treaded robot design. But those shiny metal wheels are actually hollow coils of spring steel, with the two ends welded together to form a complete torus shape. 

A piezoelectric stator drive is then used to either drive it forward or backward, OR twist it clockwise or counter-clockwise. 

In essence, it’s an omni wheel design, but a completely different approach. It’s also possible to use this in single wheel applications, which you couldn’t do with a traditional omni wheel.

No project notes on this since it’s more of an academic proof of concept, but maybe there’s enough here to experiment with if you’re motivated.

For a robot design that anybody can make, on Instructables Randy Sarafan has a couple new guides up on his series of Simple Bots. 

These are taken from his latest book, Bots Made Simple, which is filled with awesome little robot projects made just with items found at the hardware store, plus a servo or two. 

He calls this one Hopscotch, and I love how simple, yet effective it is. It’s just a small broom head, a battery pack, some zip ties, and a U-bolt attached to two continuous rotation servos. 

But those ingredients can’t convey the magical little plip-plop motion it takes as it scoots across the floor. It’s perfect.

Now for some tips and tools. You have some great choices when it comes to diagramming basic circuit designs. Between Fritzing and Tinkercad Circuits, it’s fairly easy to whip together a clear blueprint of your design.

But what if you want a 3D breadboard design with a little more cinematic flair and built-in circuit simulation. Well, you may want to check out CRUMB. 

This is a paid app available on iOS, Android, or Steam. I haven’t tried it. I can’t say if it’s any good. But if simulating circuits or representing them in a beautiful way is a problem you’re trying to solve for, this could be the solution.

A group of researchers from the University of Singapore have created a research article and online tool for designing mechanically haptic interfaces using laser cut sheet material. 

There are some interesting prototypes shown in the research footage, including modifications for existing tools, swappable haptics for VR controllers, and even attachments for common electronic components, adding custom detents to rotary or linear encoders.

The research draws from the flexure experiments by Amy Qian (Chen, Chi-en) of Amy Makes Stuff, who is acknowledged in the article, and has some great videos to check out on this subject if you want to dive into it.

But the cool part here is the online sandbox they’ve created for modeling and simulating these types of mechanisms. You can find it at interactive-materials.github.io. I’ll leave a link in the description where you can play around with modifying the design and exporting the results. Check it out.

While shopping around for interesting gift ideas I came across these Supercapacitor LED Earrings by California STEAM on Tindie. They’re sold out at the moment, and I’m probably not helping things by mentioning them, but there is a list you can get on.

The LEDs have these switchable animations. But what’s extra unique here is that they’re powered by a rechargeable capacitor instead of coin cell batteries.

These makers have a number of other LED earring designs that are also worth checking out.

For rolling your own wearable LED project, Adafruit has a new NeoPixel Driver BFF board, perfect for pairing with their super tiny QT PY board. 

The BFF just stacks on, and provides a JST socket for easily plugging in a strand of Neopixels. The data pin defaults to A3, which is logic-level shifted up to 5 volts. But there are a bunch of pads included to make it easy to route the data to another pin if needed.

The combo not only gives you a small footprint, perfect for wearables or cosplay, but it’s also extremely affordable, with the QT Py around $8 and the BFF around $4.For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, I’ve included a link where you can learn more about their cross-referencing tool.

Need a substitution for a component that’s out of stock or discontinued? Instead of manually searching for one and jumping through filters, just drop the manufacturer’s part number into Digi-Key’s cross-reference tool. 

With any luck, you’ll get a sorted list of Digi-Key’s recommended alternatives with all the details you need at a glance to make a comparison.

You can find the tool at digikey.com/crossreference.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up, or leave a comment. Let me know what you found interesting this week. A big thanks to Digi-Key for making this show possible. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you soon.