This week on Maker Update, a giant carbon dioxide meter to measure the air quality, making 3D printer filament in space, an urchin robot, popsicle stick plotter, animatronics, a projection mask, and a primer on paint brushes.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Week=-

Giant Analog CO2 Meter By rabbitcreek
https://www.instructables.com/id/Giant-Analog-CO2-Meter/

-=News=-

ISS Astronauts to Receive “Space Recycler” Machine That Turns Waste into 3D Printer Feedstock
https://www.core77.com/posts/90896/Sustainability-in-Space-ISS-Astronauts-to-Receive-Space-Recycler-Machine-That-Turns-Waste-into-3D-Printer-Feedstock

Harvard’s UrchinBot
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/harvard-amphibious-urchinbot

-=More Projects=-

BrachioGraph – the cheapest, simplest possible pen-plotter by Daniele Procid
https://brachiograph.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

How to Build a Simple 3D Printed Arduino Animatronic Eye Mechanism by Will Cogley
http://www.nilheim.co.uk/latest-projects/simplified-3d-printed-animatronic-dual-eye-mechanism

Face Changing Projection Mask – Be Anything By seanhodgins
https://www.instructables.com/id/Face-Changing-Projection-Mask-Be-Anything/

-=Tools/Tips=-

Flexure Gripper and Demo Board by Amy Makes Stuff
https://youtu.be/YEz-r8KDY-0

Controlling a servo with an Arduino by Jeremy S Cook
https://blog.arduino.cc/2019/11/06/some-tips-and-tricks-for-controlling-a-servo-with-an-arduino/

A Primer on Paintbrushes!
https://youtu.be/qwxOkqrca2M

Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales – Issue #24
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/garethbranwyn/issues/gareth-s-tips-tools-and-shop-tales-issue-24-207795

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

How to Select a Resistor for an LED
https://youtu.be/UWx2BEx7xyI

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update, a giant carbon dioxide meter, making 3D printer filament in space, an urchinbot, popsicle stick plotter, animatronics, a projection mask, and a primer on paint brushes.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Maker Update. It feels like it’s been forever. I hope you’re all doing well. Happy Makevember! Let’s get started with the project of the week.

Check out this carbon dioxide air quality meter by Rabbit Creek. The project uses a CO2 sensor tucked inside a 3D printed horn to read the air quality and then displays it on both an e-ink display and a giant analog gauge.

The gauge is created using a 4-foot long driveway marker pole, attached to a servo and aluminum hub that all mounts behind the enclosure.

For the electronics, the Adafruit Feather 32u4 Adalogger board is the heart of the project, running an Arduino script included in the Instructable. That board is connected to the servo, the CO2 sensor, and a 2-inch e-ink display that reads well in direct sunlight.

The enclosure and the horn are all 3D printed and the files are included in the guide. I think it’s a great project for schools or science museums to bring attention to air quality and the rising levels of CO2. I also love the giant analog VU needle and I can imagine that being adapted for other projects.

It’s time for some news. On November 2nd, the International Space Station was delivered a new device that will allow them to break down and reuse plastic into feedstock for the 3D printer they’ve had on board since 2014.

The idea is that the recycler will allow astronauts to reuse the thermoplastic waste from food packaging and create new tools with it. It’s a cool idea for a space station, but also a product I’d love to see more of down here on earth.

In other news, last week, a robotics team from Harvard demonstrated a new robot designed to mimic the mobility of a sea urchin. It’s a crazy, freaky design that uses pneumatic soft actuators to pull itself forward and hard spines to turn around.

Just like a sea urchin, it’s not quick. But researchers are hoping the design could be useful for underwater applications like cleaning and inspection.

Time for more projects. BrachioGraph by Daniele Procida is one of the most stripped down pen plotters I’ve seen yet. Using a Raspberry Pi Zero, three servos, two popsicle sticks and a clothes pin, you can create these wonderfully crude plotter illustrations for under $20. The guide walks you through the hardware assembly and the software you need to install. It could be a great little student project.

In the last episode, I told you about Will Cogley’s amazing resin encapsulated eyeballs for animatronics. Well, he has a new guide up showing you to use those eyes in what he calls a simplified animatronic eye mechanism.

From my perspective, this is one of the best, most completely realized 3D printed eye mechanisms I’ve ever seen. It’s using six servos, and aside from a few nuts and bolts, everything else you need is 3D printed.

He’s using an Arduino and an Adafruit servo board to drive it all. And what’s especially cool is that he’s designed and shared a 3D printed remote control you can use to puppet everything like a pro. Go check it out.

And it was too late for me to include in the Halloween episode, but I can’t not talk about Sean Hodgins Face Changing Projection mask.

Using a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a mini projector and a USB battery pack, Sean made a little Pi projection mapping system that sits at the end of a wooden stick attached to the mask.

With the geometry of the 3D printed mask, Sean is able to map and mask videos and images to it with just the right warping and contours to look natural. It’s a great idea, and I think it would be cool to adapt it even to just sculptures or things that are fixed in place, which would open up your options on projectors.

Now for a few tips and tools. On YouTube there’s a great video out by Amy Makes Stuff, going over a demo board she made of different lasercut flexures. Most of these are useful mechanical elements you can incorporate into your designs. They all make use of flexible hinges of some kind to latch or move or slide.

In the same video, Amy also shows a flexible gripper design she made that performs a soft grip on objects. It’s a design that I imagine would work well in robotics.

On the Arduino blog, I found a great video by Jeremy S. Cook on tips for using servos with Arduino. Jeremy shows how to control a servo directly with an Arduino Uno, talks about why you might want to run a capacitor across the power wires of the servo, and how to use a detach command to stop your servo from jittering between movements.

On the Tested channel Norm and Bill go over all the different types of paint brushes they use in their model making and prop building projects. There’s also a great tip in here on making a cheap acid brush more useful by adding a few drops of CA glue to the base of the bristles to keep them from falling out.

And in the latest issue of Gareth Branwyn’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales, he’s got some great ones on using pennies as spacers, marking a tight spot, and reviving old markers with a few drops of isopropyl alcohol.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out their latest video on how to select the right resistor for your LED projects. It also shows how to make the most of the Digi-Key product index to find the right resistor for your needs.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. Get on the Maker Update email list to get show notes emailed out to you automatically. A big thanks to my patrons on Patreon and to Digi-Key electronics for sponsoring this show. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next week.