This week on Maker Update, sleeping in the canopy, Cricut free at last, String art, Midi Fighters, kinematics and building your first mechanical keyboard.

++Show Notes [Maker Update #225]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Leaf Canopy Bed by Simone Giertz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inVvXS6gA8c

-=News=-

Cricut Abandons its Subscription Plans entirely
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/cricut-fully-abandons-plans-to-make-device-owners-pay-subscription-fee/?fbclid=IwAR10yAmKGy4TphHAnFYYwkTBmyOnBOctZtuaOK_D_7di209hE–NtdYV63U

-=More Projects=-

Thread Art portraits by Jenny Ma
https://youtu.be/UsbBSttaJos

Tabletop Vise by Adam Savage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of9qY62tWKo

Pico Midi Fighter by Blitz Ciy DIY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm90guAoNeI

Pi Digit Spigot by bornach
https://www.instructables.com/A-Spigot-That-Streams-Digits-of-Pi/

-=Tips & Tools=-

Robotic Kinematics Study
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fbmguBgVPA

Your Very First Circuit Sculpture by Jeff Epler
https://learn.adafruit.com/first-simple-circuit-sculpture

Adafruit ItsyBitsy Airlift add-on guide by Brian Siepert
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-airlift-bitsy-add-on-esp32-wifi-co-processor

Guide: making your first mechanical keyboard by Zach Freedman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYcNi9hKxDk

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Milling your own Circuit Boards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZP8MId3km0

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, sleeping in the canopy, Cricut free at last, String art, Midi Fighters, kinematics and building your first mechanical keyboard.

Hello and welcome back to maker update! I’m Tyler Winegarner and I hope you’re doing well. We’ve been getting our first touches of spring here in New York State, and I gotta say, it’s great to be spending some time outdoors again. I hope the weather has been kind wherever you are. We’ve got a fantastic show full of great projects, so lets get into it with the project of the week.

We get to see a lot of makers making a lot of different things – furniture, tools, toys. But its rare that we get to see them make a project as personal as the bed that they’ll sleep in. In Simone Giertz’s latest video, she’s designing and building a bed that suits her own very specific and unique needs.

The last few places she has lived have all had elevated, loft-style beds. She loves having the space below the bed for storage – what’s more, she loves the feeling of climbing up into her bed and feeling enveloped by it – almost like her own treehouse. Which is why she’s creating a railing of CNC cut plywood leaves to help create that effect around the bed she’s built in her new home.

The Leaves are accented by tiny pieces of laser cut felt. Lasers cut felt rather beautifully – but she mentions that it certainly doesn’t smell very good. Because felt is wool, it basically smells like burnt hair. The headboard is a larger version of the same motif, with a channel cut in to the back for some LED accent lighting around the border. Gluing in each of the felt pads was an extremely tedious process, taking almost three days for all of them.

But the result? It looks absolutely gorgeous – and judging by Simone’s reaction you can tell that all the hard work pays off. I love the contrasting look of the felt against the plywood, and I can see myself using this technique for something in the future.

If you’ve been holding your breath through the recent Cricut news, it sounds like you can finally heave a sigh of relief. To recap, Cricut planned to roll out a limitation to their design software – unless you paid a $10 a month subscription fee, you would be limited in how many custom designs you could upload to it a month. After a massive outcry, they walked the plan back, stating that the change would not affect existing cricut users, but it would still affect future customers.

It seems now that they have abandoned the plan entirely after continued outcry. In a blog post by CEO Ashish Arora, he stated that all users can continue to enjoy free, unlimited uploads of custom designs to the software, and they have no plans to ever change that policy. Lets hope that holds.

More projects! Chances are, you’ve seen this style of art before, where an image is formed by strands of thread that connect nails around the edge of a circle. Software engineer Jenny Ma created an algorithm to create these types of images, and then used it to create this very portrait of her parents. She describes how her algorithm works in detail, explaining the ideal number of nails to make the portrait, and which types of images work best. Once again, the actual execution  looks pretty tedious, but the final result makes it all worthwhile.

In a recent one day build video Adam Savage is building an instrument maker’s vise from a kit. I guess it really goes to show that I’m not a machinist, because when I think of a kit, I don’t think of a bunch of raw stock that still needs to be machined into a tool. I don’t think there’s many types of maker videos that are more satisfying to watch than machining of this type – watching these beautiful parts emerge from raw metal stock is always a joy to behold – and this also looks like a thoroughly enjoyable tool to use.

In a recent collab with the Ruiz brothers, Liz Clark from Blitz City DIY created what’s called a MIDI Fighter – a midi controller with a grid of 16 arcade buttons to playback notes. For the project she chose to build it around the Raspberry Pi Pico – the hot new microcontroller from the Raspberry Pi foundation. It has tons of GPIO and supports Circuit Python.

In order for the buttons to light up, as well as function as inputs, she added 16 more GPIO with this i2c GPIO extender and LED controller. There’s also a five-way joystick and a screen for a user interface – the result is an instrument that allows her to assign any midi note to each individual button on the console.

It was Pi day a little over a week ago, so it was no surprise to see a round of Pi-based projects. One of my favorites is the Pi spigot by bornach. It’s sort of an interactive art piece – you turn on the tap, and the digits of pi come dribbling out of an LED tap, to splash out on this row of LED matrices. The real trick here is calculating the digits of Pi so it never runs out. They’re using what’s called the spigot algorithm developed by Gibbons, Rabinowits and Wagon. Of course, the name of the algorithm also informed the design of the sculpture. It’s cool to watch.

Time for some tips and tools, it’s never a bad time to take a moment to appreciate the mechanical complexity that goes into simple movements, whether its in robotic armatures or our own bodies. Oleksander Stepaneko’s youtube channel is chock full of robotic motion studies like these – in this one you can see two different robotic armatures showing movement and rotation along a single axis. I don’t know about you, but I found this stuff mesmerizing – I can watch it for hours.

Over on the Adafruit blog I found this guide to making your first circuit sculpture by Jeff Epler. If you’ve long admired the circuit sculptures by Mohit Bhoite or Jiri Praus, but didn’t know where to begin, this guide will let you take your first baby steps. You’ll begin with a Gemma M0 and build a heart shaped pendant using brass rod. The guide walks you through the process of shaping the rod around a water bottle to get even curves. The entire pendant is touch reactive, extending the capacitive touch pads on the gemma out into the overall pendent. It’s a great guide to get you started.

While on Adafruit I also saw that there’s a new member of the ItsyBitsy family, the ItsyBitsy Airlift add-on. The airlift add-on extends the itsyBitsy with wifi capabilities. This board quickly became one of my favorite boards for LED and other wearable projects – the single 5 volt gpio pin made it a dream for controlling neopixels. Adding Wifi connectivity to this board should lend it to some great new projects.

And finally, over on his channel Zach Freedman has a thorough guide on building mechanical keyboards. If you’ve never built an electronics project before, this is a great place to begin – as long as you’re okay with investing a ton of time and a decent amount of money – but the result is something you can love and use every single day – at least every time you use your computer. Over the course of this video Zach answers every question you could possibly have – key switches, key caps, key profiles, keyboard layouts – it’s all there.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight, we’re checking out this older video on how to mill your own PCBs on a cnc router. This video specifically shows the Bantam Tools CNC Mill, but most of this should transfer over to whatever mill or router you have. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been intimidated by this kind of project – I just need to go ahead and make a board just to give it a go. Unfortunately they only show milling a one sided board – things get a lot more complicated when you’re milling a two sided board. Still, it’s a great place to get started.

And that is going to do it for this week’s show! I hope the changing of the season gets you motivated to get started on some brand new projects, maybe something outdoors. Let us know about it down in the comments. If you liked this show give it a thumbs up, and subscribe to the maker update newsletter so you never miss an episode. Big thanks to Digikey Electronics for making this show possible, and having all the cool gear. Take care, and we’ll see you soon.