This week on Maker Update, a pint-sized Pi flight sim, the Pleasurebot 9000, a Fallout guitar, a crawling ballbot, an RFID Spotify player, bending plastic, and hands-free handles.

++Show Notes [Maker Update #178]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Pi Commander by Adrien (Gathno Brain)
https://www.gathnobrain.net/en/2020/05/17/pi_commander_en/
https://youtu.be/lee3-AWeF9Q

Flat Ribbon HDMI Cable on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B07F59KDZ3/makerprojec0c-20

-=More Projects=-

PleasureBot 9000 by Ian Charnas
https://youtu.be/wULncdSh8hk

Fallout Inspired Guitar by Tim Sway
https://youtu.be/H40kfH_Ix4E

Spherical Quadruped Arduino Robot By Gregory Leveque
https://www.instructables.com/id/Spherical-Quadruped-Arduino-Robot/

Sonos Spotify Vinyl Emulator By markhank01
https://www.instructables.com/id/Sonos-Spotify-Vinyl-Emulator-SSVE/

-=Tips & Tools=-

4 Cool Ways to Bend Plastic! by Make Something
https://youtu.be/mBxutE97Jf4

Hands-free 3D Printed Adapters By John Opsahl
https://www.instructables.com/id/Hands-free-Door-Unlatching/
https://www.instructables.com/id/Hands-free-Toilet-Flush-Foot-Pedal/
https://www.instructables.com/id/Hands-free-Forearm-Deadbolt-Turn/
https://www.instructables.com/id/Hands-free-Forearm-Door-Pull/

Hardware Storage System By makendo
https://www.instructables.com/id/Hardware-Storage-System/

Wowstick 1F+ Electric Screwdriver
https://kk.org/cooltools/best-electric-precision-driver/

A web-based LCD Character Editor for Arduino code
https://chareditor.com/
https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/05/21/a-web-based-lcd-character-editor-for-arduino-code-alestiago3/

Sophy Wong Workshop Tour
https://youtu.be/7aYi3lGs96s

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

How MOSFETS Work – Another Teaching Moment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F485AB1B1_Y

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, a pint-sized flight sim, the Pleasurebot 9000, a Fallout guitar, a crawling ballbot, an RFID Spotify player, bending plastic, and hands-free handles.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell and welcome back to another Maker Update. I hope you’re doing alright and staying cool. Summer feels like it’s already here, but because I’m crazy, I’m already thinking about Halloween and what I can start working on now to make this year’s decorations extra awesome. I’ve some ideas. But I also have a lot of cool projects to share with you, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

Adrien from Gathno Brain went to incredible lengths to turn this 80s Top Gun-era cockpit toy into an air combat simulator. 

Using a Raspberry Pi, a 4-inch screen, an arcade style joystick, and a handful of buttons and LEDs, he was able to retrofit the enclosure with the essential ingredients for a desktop MAME cabinet. 

For the software, he’s using a retro-gaming Pi OS called Recalbox. I feel like Retropie gets most of the attention on this show, but Recalbox looks like a great new option that from what I’ve read, is a little more beginner-friendly. For Adrien’s build, he’s configured it to play nothing but aerial combat games. 

But what really puts this project over the top is that Adrien repurposed and integrated most of the original switches, lights and electronics from the toy. He desoldered and cleaned up the two PCBs that handled the original interactions and worked them into the rest of the system so that everything’s running off the same 5v input. 

Also, I noticed that to help fit the Pi and screen into this small toy enclosure, Adrien used a flat ribbon HDMI cable. You can get these in straight or right-angle combinations. If you need to cover a short distance with the lowest possible profile, these seem like a good way to do it.

You can learn more about Adrien’s Pi Commander project at gathnobrain.net.

Now for more projects! The Pleasurebot 9000 sounds like a Barbarellian sci-fi perversion, but it’s actually a delightful automatic head scratcher by Ian Charnas. 

It’s essentially a scalp massager connected up to a reciprocating motor that gently lowers and lifts the massager on your head. Just like a back scratcher, there’s something about it that feels better when someone else does it for you — even if that someone else is a robot.

So, the Pleasurebot is here to serve you. To build one for yourself, you can probably just look up reciprocating linear motor designs on Thingverse and take it from there. But, Ian is also selling these directly with the proceeds going to provide PPE for healthcare workers. You can find out more at iancharnas.com

Tim Sway made this incredible, Fallout-inspired electric guitar. In his latest video he skips past the underlying guitar build and cuts right too all the unique accents and elements he created to give it the right post-apocalyptic personality. 

From the salvaged circuit board panels, the bottlecap volume knobs, the blinking LEDs, the rusted metal grille pickguard, there’s a lot of ideas here you can take and apply to your own projects.

On Instructables, I found this crazy robot design by Gregory Leveque. It’s based on an Arduino Nano and uses a servo driver board connected up to 10 servos, along with some LEDs and an ultrasonic sensor for obstacle detection. 

But what makes this robot so special is the ingenious way it has these doors that open up so that the legs can fold out, and then retract back together when it’s done. This enclosure is 3D printed, and includes custom brackets that perfectly fit all of the components.  It’s a very cool design, and gets bonus points for being kinda cute.

Also on Instructables, Mark Hank 01 shows how he was able to make this RFID reader for his stereo so that he could trigger albums to play just by placing the album art near his speaker.

He calls it a vinyl emulator because it’s meant to play full albums and it requires some attention and contact with the album art, similar to how you’d interact with records. 

He’s using a Raspberry Pi to act as a middleman between the RFID reader, Spotify and his multi-room Sonos music system. If it’s something you’d like to try, the guide really covers every little detail, from the basics of setting up a Raspberry Pi, to writing Spotify data to your RFID tags.

Now for some tips and tools. On the Make Something channel, David Picciutto demonstrates four ways to bend plastic. The coolest one, I think, is this straightened out electric stove coil placed inside some steel tubing, allowing you to heat up a joint in the material right where you want it. 

John Opsahl published a series of four 3D printed designs on Instructables for hands-free adapters for common household fixtures. A foot-operated toilet flusher, a forearm operated deadbolt twister, a forearm door pull, and a foot-operated round doorknob twister — which is probably the toughest challenge to solve.

Scott McIndoe shows how he saved and converted laundry detergent bottles into a hardware organizer for his garage. 

This is a trick I’ve seen also seen Tom Sachs do, but he cuts his bottles a little higher to keep the handles on. What Scott did that I think is smart is to actually tape or glue an example of the item under the description. 

On the Cool Tools channel, I talk with Jordan Bunker about the Wowstick electric precision screwdriver. 

I actually picked this one up right after I talked with him and it’s now one of my most used tools, especially with all the small screws I’m using on the cocktail robot. It’s also able to use all of the 4mm bits from the iFixit kits I have. 

If you work with small screws and standoffs for electronics, for around $50, this will save you time and also save you some strain on your hands from twisting on those skinny precision drivers. Check it out.

Through the Adafruit blog I learned about Chareditor.com. If you have one of these common, 16×2 LCDs, this online editor allows you to create custom characters and animations. You draw in what you want, and it spits out the Arduino code. You can scroll characters across the screen or animate them within each block. Having it be this easy makes me want to play with LCD animations just for fun.

Finally, if you missed last Saturday’s Virtually Maker Faire, you can catch up with a lot of the content on the Make YouTube channel. I might be biased, but one of my favorite segments was Sophy Wong’s workshop tour. There are a lot of great organization ideas here that you can steal, including a soldering workstation Ikea cart.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out their latest video on How MOSFET transistors work. I could still use a MOSFETs for Dummies video, but this is a great, short, technical and straightforward explanation. I just have a blindspot on transistors that I hope to overcome. I feel like the more things like this I watch, the better chance I have. If you’re in a similar situation, go check it out.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. Let me know your favorite aerial combat video game. If the original Star Wars arcade game counts, that’s probably mine. 

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.