This week on Maker Update, wearable microphone jammers, reinventing retro tech, moving mirrors, 3D printed turntables, digital Super 8, and a circuit sculpture radio.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 233]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Naomi Wu’s Cyberpunk Ultrasonic Microphone Jammer Build
https://youtu.be/H1rozZ7ebxQ

Based on: Wearable Microphone Jamming
by Yuxin Chen Huiying Li Shan-Yuan Teng Steven Nagels Zhijing Li Pedro Lopes Ben Y. Zhao Haitao Zheng
https://sandlab.cs.uchicago.edu/jammer/

-=News=-

Hackaday’s Reinvented Retro Contest
https://hackaday.io/contest/179304-reinvented-retro-contest

Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect
https://blog.arduino.cc/2021/05/17/the-arduino-nano-rp2040-connect-is-here/

-=More Projects=-

Reflection by Adam Cigler and Petr Vacek
https://prusalab.cz/en/portfolio-item/reflexe-signal-festival/

The Songbird 3D printable turntable by Charlie Ransford
https://gallery.shu.ac.uk/work/the-songbird/

Digital Super-8 camera by Xabi Z
https://hackaday.io/project/178439-digital-super-8-camera

Chintoo FM by Mohit Bhoite
https://twitter.com/MohitBhoite/status/1391816025776148484

-=Tips & Tools=-

Jen Schachter Reviews a Soldering Fume Extractor
https://www.tested.com/making/tools/tested-favorite-tools-soldering-fume-extractor/

How to get Super Glossy Finish on Prototype Parts by Eric Strebel
https://youtu.be/4_Oq-5xlblE

Make 3D Prints Look Like Distressed Painted Metal by Emily Velasco
https://youtu.be/tpFE_XsS5rE

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

The Great Search: Don’t overpay for out-of-stock parts, find Digi-Key alts
https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/05/11/the-great-search-dont-overpay-for-out-of-stock-parts-find-digi-key-alts-thegreatsearch-digikey-adafruit-digikey-adafruit/

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, wearable microphone jammers, reinventing retro tech, moving mirrors, 3D printed turntables, digital Super 8, and a circuit sculpture radio.

Hey everybody, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Maker Update. I hope you’re all doing well, and maybe even getting a taste of that post-vaccine life. There are a lot of cool things to catch you up on, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

Do you ever think about how many devices there are around you with microphones that could potentially be listening in on what you’re saying? It’s enough to make anyone a little paranoid.

One countermeasure you can take is to jam any nearby microphones by overwhelming them with ultrasonic noise.

It’s technique outlined in a recent research project at the University of Chicago. For their proof of concept they created a wearable array of ultrasonic transducers, formed into a bracelet.

It works, and in the article I’ll link to you can find the source code, bill of materials, and 3D printed files to recreate the project on your own. It’s an Arduino-based project, and actually, most of the instruction on recreating it is included in the Arduino code annotations.

Feeling inspired, Naomi Wu created a new spin on the project with this stylized choker. Not only does it look cooler, but its proximity to your mouth could make it more effective at masking your voice.

To test this out, Naomi recorded the interference using different microphones — a clip on lav mic, her smartphone, and a camera shotgun mic. It seemed effective on everything except the shotgun mic, which is probably better optimized against ultrasonic interference.

Still, it’s a great project that may ease your fears over Big Brother just a little.

Now for some news. Hackaday has launched a fun new contest called Reinvented Retro. The idea is to create something with a mix of old and new technology. Maybe reinvent some old tech with new features, or give some new tech a vintage look.

The contest is sponsored by Digi-Key. It ends on June 28th. The top three projects will be awarded a $200 shopping spree to the Digi-Key warehouse.

Also, on Monday, Arduino announced that their new board — the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect — is now available for purchase.

This is Arduino’s spin on the Raspberry Pi 2040 chip found on the Pi Pico board. It also includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a microphone, six-axis smart IMU, 264KB of SRAM, and the 16MB of flash memory for extra storage.

If you like the idea of the Pico but wish it had some extra bells and whistles, this could be the board for you. Arduino has it priced around $25.

Now for more projects. This one’s from a few years ago, but I saw it pop up on the Make blog and realized I hadn’t covered it. It’s an interactive array of hexagonal mirrors created by Adam Cigler and Petr Vacek.

It’s called Reflection, and it was made in the PrusaLab workshop in the Czech Republic.

It uses a mixture of 3D printing, CNC-cut plywood, and a large steel frame to hold everything together. Behind each mirror is a pair of servos which work to tilt the mirror in any direction. All of these servos ultimately connect up to six Raspberry Pi computers which work in sync to animate the mirrors. It looks incredible.

Charlie Ransford’s The Songbird is an educational, 3D printable turntable kit. It’s a cool looking design and of course requires a fair bit of extra hardware to make it a practical turntable. But if you like the idea of printing and assembling your own turntable, they’ve got a Kickstarter going so that you can buy a kit.

On Hackaday, Xabi Z shows how he was able to retrofit an old Super-8 camera with a Raspberry Pi Zero and a camera module.

The trick to this seems to be mounting the Raspberry Pi camera. To be able to take advantage of the existing lens and preserve the Super 8 look, Xabi popped the lens off the Pi camera module and mounted the raw sensor where the film would normally be exposed.

Because the Pi sensor is much smaller than Super 8 film that would normally be there, the image is cropped in — but it works.

Finally, you have to check out this fully functional FM radio circuit sculpture by Mohit Bhoite.

He calls it Chintoo FM, it’s got a cute little robot look to it, and a capacitive pad on the side for changing the station.

A speaker makes up the base, with a stylish milled veneer grille on the front.

The hardware is all very approachable — an Adafruit ItsyBitsy board, a seven segment display, a small audio amp and a Philips TEA5767 FM radio chipset. What’s incredible is the design and execution. It’s just beautiful to look at.

Now for some tips and tools. On Tested, Jen Schachter goes through the soldering setup she used, presumably for her book nook kits. She goes over a few of her favorite helping hands solutions, and shows off a great solder fume extractor from a brand called Kotto.

I actually have a little desktop fume fan that I enjoy from this same brand. This one, though, is deluxe, and can be positioned right over your work. It has an adjustable fan and an optional HEPA filter that seems to do a good job capturing the smoke, instead of just blowing it around your room.

In his latest video, Eric Strebel shows how to get a super glossy, professional finish on your prototype parts. He goes from 3D print to primer, and then back and forth with increasing grits or wet sanding, tack cloth, base color coat, a clear top coat, more sanding, and then buffing it all out with some 3M purple polish.

It’s a long way to go for a finish like this, but it’s great to know that it can be done and how to get there. If you’re making a prototype that needs to look good in a Kickstarter video closeup — this is a skill worth developing.

That said, it’s also good to know how to make things look beat up. Emily Velasco has a great, short video on how to make 3D prints take on the look of distressed metal. It’s an easier effect that you can achieve with just a few cans of spray paint, some sanding, and some vaseline.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, on Adafruit, Lady Ada shows how to find alternatives to out of stock parts on Digi-Key.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been seeing a lot of people talking about parts supplies being bought up, and brokers trying to resell them at huge markups.

Using an example part, Limor walks through how to use the Similar Part finder included on Digi-Key’s product pages. Oftentimes, there are plenty of fish in the sea. They may not have the same part number, or exactly the same specs, but an alternative exists that can save your project. Check it out.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up, or leave a comment. Thinking about that jammer tech from the project of the week, what’s another device we should make to protect our privacy? You can get on the Maker Update email list for another way to keep up with the show. A big thanks to my Patrons on Patreon and to Digi-Key electronics for making the whole thing possible. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you soon.