This month on Maker Update: a fully functioning midi instrument, Adafruit’s response to Covid 19, an easy-sew face mask, dropping eggs, Morse code, and Circuit Python en Español.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Month=-

MX MIDI Guitar
https://learn.adafruit.com/mx-midi-guitar

-=News=-

Manufacturing Face Shields
https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/03/30/manufacturing-face-shields-adafruit-manufacturingmonday-video/

Adafruit Covid 19 response
https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/03/22/covid/

One Hour Show & Tell
https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/03/16/the-biggest-worldwide-online-show-and-tell-begins-wednesday-march-18th-2020-at-7pm-et-adafruit-showandtell-please-share/

-=Adafruit Projects=-

Sew a cotton face mask
https://learn.adafruit.com/sew-a-cotton-face-mask

Egg Drop with CLUE
https://learn.adafruit.com/egg-drop-clue

Game Clock with Circuit Playground & MakeCode
https://learn.adafruit.com/game-clock-with-circuit-playground-makecode

-=Contributed Projects=-

CircuitPython BLE Morse Code Chat
https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-ble-wireless-morse-code-chat

-=Tips=-

Open Source Protective Face Shield Designs
https://learn.adafruit.com/open-source-face-shield-designs/introduction

Adafruit Feather nRF52840 Sense
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-feather-sense

¡Bienvenido a CircuitPython!
https://learn.adafruit.com/bienvenido-a-circuitpython-2

Using the Bluefruit Dashboard with Web Bluetooth in Chrome
https://learn.adafruit.com/bluefruit-dashboard-web-bluetooth-chrome

-=Product Spotlight=-

Adafruit APDS9960 Proximity, Light, RGB, and Gesture Sensor – STEMMA QT / Qwiic
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3595

Transcript

This month on Maker Update: a fully functioning midi instrument, Adafruit’s response to Covid 19, an easy-sew face mask, dropping eggs, Morse code, and Circuit Python en Español.

Hello and welcome back to the Adafruit edition of Maker Update for April 2020. I’m Tyler Winegarner, I hope you’re doing ok and staying safe. I’m willing to bet that you’re either hawkeyed for anything related to Covid-19, or you just want anything to take your mind off the global pandemic. We’re trying to do both here, so to start things off, here’s our project of the week.

Liz Clark and the Ruiz Brothers are on a tear of collaborative, music based projects for the past few months, but this might be their finest work yet. Their latest project is a midi guitar based off of the controller from Guitar Hero, complete with MX mechanical keyboard switches, a strum bar, accelerometers, neopixels, and more.

The guitar can interface with just about any Digital Audio Workstation software via USB. The keys on the neck can play notes directly, or you can use the strum bar to play chords. There’s a whammy bar and an accelerometer to modulate the notes, potentiometers to help shape the sound, and an 8 way switch to change the octave of the instrument. The brains of the instrument is the Grand Central M4 Express, and the code is all written in circuitpython. 

This might be one of the most impressive music-based maker projects I’ve ever seen. But one of my favorite aspects of this project is the custom controls. They could have harvested the strum bar and whammy bar controls from discarded guitar hero or rock band controllers, but instead they’ve engineered their own. Both from a hardware design and software interface, this project is an incredible resource.

Now for the news: You may have noticed that Adafruit has been a little quiet with regards to new products, but they’ve certainly been keeping busy. They’ve shifted much of their manufacturing over to the production of Personal Protective Equipment for first responders. It looks like they’ve got their own design for face shields using foam and transparency material, and it’s great to see. In doing so, they’ve established themselves as an essential manufacturing business, and have kept every one of their employees on the payroll. They’ve published their own face shield design for anyone who wants to make them at home. If that’s not cool enough, they’ve also posted a collection of wonderful gifs of their manufacturing process. Check them out if you haven’t seen them yet.

Which is not to say they’ve abandoned their community. Since we’ve all been sheltering at home, they’ve expanded the weekly Adafruit Show & Tell to one hour every week. It’s one more way they’re helping makers to stay connected, even while makerspaces and meetups just aren’t possible under the current health regulations.

Now for more projects: You’re likely overwhelmed with designs for face shields, masks and other PPE you could be making for your family or your local first responders. But if you don’t know where to start, Erin St Blaine created this fantastic tutorial for making a cloth mask out of materials you likely have around your house. Her patterns can be printed on a standard letter paper, and it’s all hand stitched. Even if you’ve never sewn a stitch in your life, this is perfect place to begin.

In this time when certain foods can be a little hard to find at your local grocer, it’s tough to rationalize sacrificing them for engineering challenges like the Egg Drop Challenge. You know, the one where you need to build a device to protect an egg being dropped from a specific height? Anyway, John Park used the sensors and the display onboard the Adafruit Clue as a digital stand-in for a re-useable and less messy crash test dummy – perfect for prototyping designs before its final egg test.

Whether you’re sheltering with family and your board game collection is getting more regular use, or you just have a regular game night and want to add a little more structure to it, this neopixel game timer by Erin St Blaine is a wonderful addition. Thanks to the circuit playground express and Make Code, you can set it up in minutes. You could be done with just the board, but it’ll look so much better if you extend it with a neopixel strip, or find a bigger button to mash when its time to take your turn.

Carter Nelson from the Adafruit Community built this Adafruit Clue Morse code chat client, and if you’ve been looking for a good way to learn morse code, this is the perfect rainy day project. You’ll need at least two Clue boards, and they connect to each other over Bluetooth Low Energy. One button is for dots, the other for dashes, and if you press both together it will send your message. You also get feedback on your inputs, in both morse code and alphabet letters. Incoming messages are interpreted in english, so this will only help with your expressive skills, not your receptive. Still, this looks super fun.

Time for some tips and tools, one of the biggest impacts that makers can have on the Covid-19 pandemic is to create protective face shields and donate them to your local hospital and other first responders. Dano Wall created this guide outlining some of the design considerations for face shields. It covers a few different strategies for cutting out the PET sheets to form the protective barrier, and a video guide to setting up parametric designs in Fusion 360. The designs for protective face shields are changing fast, but it’s a great guide for anyone who wants to get involved.

Last month our featured product was the Adafruit Feather NRF52840 Sense. Now, Kattni Rembor now has a full guide up for this powerhouse development board. There’s a complete rundown on the board pinouts including the i2c addresses for all the onboard sensors, A setup guide for the arduino IDE, a few basic Ble tutorials, and more. She also outlines the Adafruit BLE NRF52 api, and walks you through using Circuitpython on the Feather Sense.

Speaking of circuit python, there’s a now a Spanish translation of the Circuit Python starter guide, courtesy of Álvaro Figueroa Cabezas. The code examples and the messages from the REPL are still in english, so you’ll need to be a little language-flexible, but this should help to extend circuit python to more people.

If you’ve managed to get your hands on any recent Bluetooth Low Energy boards like Clue or the Feather NRF52840 Sense, now there’s a desktop dashboard you can use to get info from the board that runs in your chrome browser. Once you connect to your hardware, it will spawn a number of panels depending on what sensors it has onboard. There are panels for the accelerometer, temperature, barometric pressure, button indicators, light sensor, an RGB color picker and more. Should be useful for debugging your next project.

For this month’s Adafruit product spotlight, you may have noticed that there’s quite a few boards lately that come equipped with a combination proximity, RGB, light and gesture sensor. If you’ve wanted to include this sensor in your projects but on a breakout board, you’re in luck. There’s an onboard voltage regulator allowing it to accept 3.3 or 5v, Pins for i2c, 3v out, and a pair of stemma/qwiic connectors. It’s on the standard .7 x 1” sized PCB, and there’s four mounting holes. Best part, it’s only seven dollars and 50 cents.

And that is gonna do it for this week’s show! I’m hoping the next time you see me here, this whole covid-19 business will have settled down a bit. As always, big thanks to Adafruit for letting us do this show for you. Stay safe, look after your family, help your community, support your local first responders, wash your hands, and keep making. Thanks so much for watching, we’ll see you soon.