This week on Maker Update, making tea with a robot, walking through radio waves, an Excitebike shed, fiber optic wings, and 3D printed googly eyes.

++Show Notes [Maker Update #144]++

-=Project of the Week=-

The Dipper – a tea dipping robot by TexWorkshop
https://hackaday.com/2019/10/03/no-need-to-watch-your-tea-this-robot-does-it-for-you/

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3549640

-=More Projects=-

Hertzian Landscapes – The interactive space of a radio spectrum by Richard Vijgen https://www.creativeapplications.net/js/hertzian-landscapes-the-interactive-space-of-a-radio-spectrum/

Excitebike Bike Shed by Once Upon A Workbench
https://youtu.be/OyrlvK7DMSM

Fiber Optic Wings By Natalina
https://www.instructables.com/id/Fiber-Optic-Wings/

Halloween Happy Ghost Pin Walker by gzumwalt
https://www.instructables.com/id/Halloween-Happy-Ghost-Pin-Walker/

-=Tools/Tips=-

3D Printed Googly Eyes by Make Anything
https://youtu.be/qJBBpmfiaNg

1-inch eyes download
https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-googly-eyes-1-inch-93764

How to Control Addressable LEDs With Fadecandy and Processing By amygoodchild
https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Control-Addressable-LEDs-With-Fadecandy-and/

The Billy Bones Kit by MadLab
https://blog.tindie.com/2019/10/billy-bones-kit-get-halloween-mood/

Making sliding angle grinder by Workshop from Scratch
https://hackaday.com/2019/10/03/solve-your-precision-woes-with-a-sliding-angle-grinder/

Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales – Issue #19
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/garethbranwyn/issues/gareth-s-tips-tools-and-shop-tales-issue-19-200043

Makevember kit information
https://www.bricolage.run/blog/2019/9/10/makevember-2019-pocket-kit

-=Product Spotlight=-

How to make an IoT Sweets Dispenser
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDP5J9Jd07A

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, making tea with a robot, walking through radio waves, an Excitebike shed, fiber optic wings, and 3D printed googly eyes.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Maker Update. I hope each and every one of you is doing alright, and only slightly panicking to get all you Halloween projects and decorations in order. I’ve got another fun show for you, so let’s get right into it with the project of the week.

Check out this automatic tea making robot by Kristjan Berce. It’s a 3D printed design that steeps a bag of tea in your cup for whatever amount of time you set on the dial. Every 30 seconds it lifts the bag out and dunks it back in until the time is up.

Inside the enclosure is an Arduino Nano connected up to a potentiometer to set the brew time, a button to start it, an RGB LED to indicate it’s on, a buzzer to indicate when it’s done, a small stepper motor to lift the bag of tea, and a rechargeable Lithium Ion battery to power the whole thing.

You can find the 3D design files on Thingiverse and the materials list and Arduino code on Hackaday. If you have a tea drinker in your life who’d get a kick out of this, it could be a great gift to start making for them now.

For something totally different, I was blown away by this immersive, interactive radio spectrum experience made by artist Richard Vijgen.

Richard also made the Wi-Fi plotter project I mentioned back in episode 141. This time he’s working with the broader radio spectrum, from 0 to 1Ghz.

Signals are picked up from a HackRF receiver and interpreted through a computer using Fast Fourier Transform. That 2D data is then made into a 3D point cloud so that the bits of noise can move and seem to swarm around you as you walk through the space.

Three computers and RealSense cameras are used to track people in the room. As they move, each person sweeps through the frequency band and can see where they are in the spectrum and what types of devices are operating in that frequency.

On YouTube, Once Upon a Workbench shows how he made a quick little backyard bike shed and used colored blocks to recreate the main character from the NES classic Excitebike. The blocks just seem to be endgrain cutoffs from a length of 2×2, painted up with the colors you need. I think it’s an easy technique to recreate for your favorite character.

On Instructables, Natalina shows how she was able to make these cool costume fiber optic wings. A harness holds a high-watt RGB LED on her back that lights up fiber optic strands that she carefully arranges out across her shoulders through a series of channels in the harness. It looks really cool.

Also on Instructables, Greg Zumwalt has a guide on how to make this little, 3D printed, motorized walking ghost toy. It’s a fun idea, and once you understand the mechanism you can adapt it for all kinds of other toy designs.

Now for a few tips and tools. On the Make Anything channel, Devin Montes has some designs for making your own 3D printed googly eyes. The video and design are from earlier this year, but with Halloween approaching, there’s never a better excuse to crank out some googly eyes.

One of my favorite projects of the year is this interactive LED geodesic dome by Amy Goodchild. On Instructables, she now has a seperate guide on controlling addressable LEDs using a Fadecandy controller and Processing software, the fundamental elements of her dome project.

Through the Tindie blog I learned about this Billy Bones electronic kit MadLab. These circuit board skeletons wiggle and laugh when you expose them to light. I thought it was a cute idea.

Through Hackaday I learned how Workshop from Scratch created his own jig to allow him to slide his angle grinder in a straight line. Not an easy project, but if you need a relatively precise way to cut through a length of thick metal it beats sending it out to a water jet.

In the latest issue of Gareth Branwyn’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales newsletter, he’s got a great one from Andy Birkey on using a board with screws in each corner that you can use to level your resin casting projects. Place your mold on the board when you cast it, then adjust the screws until you’re level.

And as we make our way through October, let’s remember that Makevember is right around the corner. It’s your chance to challenge yourself to make any little simple thing, every day in November and post it with the #makevember hashtag.

I’ll be taking up the challenge again this year. And if you want a little motivation, #makevember originator Dominic Morrow has a makevember kit you can sign up to learn about on his blog.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out their latest video on how to make an IoT candy dispenser. It’s using a Particle Photon board to drive a servo back and forth that opens or closes the candy feeder.

The trigger comes through an Adafruit IO online button that can be pressed from anywhere in the world. Probably not the most practical device for handing out Halloween candy, but it’s a neat concept to understand that you can apply to other projects.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave me a comment down here. What was your favorite project? You can also get on the Maker Update email list. I want to give 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.