This week on Maker Update, a pizza compass, taking Groot for a walk, wooden rockets, lemon keyboards, pet eyes, and the downfall of duct tape.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 231]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Pizza Finder by Joe Grand
http://www.grandideastudio.com/pizza-compass/

-=News=-

Disney Imagineering’s Project Kiwi
https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/23/disney-imagineerings-project-kiwi-is-free-walking-robot-that-will-make-you-believe-in-groot/

Maker Music Festival (May 15th and 16th)
https://www.makermusicfestival.com/

-=More Projects=-

Building a High Powered Rocket in 5 Days by Xyla Foxlin
https://youtu.be/CKqrQUHYgrM

Lemon Mechanical Keypad By Ruiz Brothers
https://learn.adafruit.com/qtpy-lemon-mechanical-keypad-macropad

Your Pet Eye: The Worst Fake Video Game by Emily Velasco
https://youtu.be/H7eNHkZovpQ
https://github.com/emilyvelasco/eyeball_simulator/blob/main/eye_w_sleep.ino

-=Tips & Tools=-

MIT’s Missing Lectures
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyzOVJj3bHQuloKGG59rS43e29ro7I57J

Collin’s Labs Notes
https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/collinslabnotes

Adam Savage: “Why I Actually Hate Duct Tape”
https://youtu.be/jEfQAo-BuB0

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

THE GREAT SEARCH – Latching Power Relay for FeatherWing
https://youtu.be/1WRe7UlUkDc

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, a pizza compass, taking Groot for a walk, wooden rockets, lemon keyboards, pet eyes, and the downfall of duct tape.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Maker Update.I hope you’re all doing well. May is a bittersweet month for me in the Bay Area, because locally we’ve always had our Maker Faire in May. I still miss it, though it has been nice getting something together for Maker Music Festival, which I’ll update you on shortly. But first, the project of the week.

Wired has been doing a series of maker project videos recently, including a Tetris microwave from Allen Pan, and this awesome pizza compass from Joe Grand of Grand Idea Studios. 

The idea is to make a device that, no matter where you are in the world, can direct you to the nearest pizza. 

Now, sure this is something any of us could do with a basic smartphone, but that’s actually what makes this project so interesting. How can you accomplish this trivial smartphone task, without a smartphone?

Joe walks you through the whole process, and in ways I haven’t even seen done before. And really, it’s this peek at his creative process that really makes this worth your time. 

You get to see how he breadboards the circuit, using a Particle Boron board for cellular data, along with a neopixel ring, a GPS module, and a magnetometer.  

He then moves on to the code, and you see him tackle each function one by one. How do I get the ring to light up? How do I get a compass reading from the magnetometer? How do I get that represented on a ring with only a few LEDs? How do I use the Particle board to pull down a Google search result for pizza? How do I get location data from that search result? On and on, in a way that I find wonderfully candid and entertaining.

Then he moves on to designing a printed circuit board layout. This is hard stuff to communicate to a layman audience of Wired subscribers, but Joe explains badgelife PCB art in a nutshell, and before you know it, you’re looking at a result that’s hard to argue with.

What I found interesting is that not only did Joe get his boards made through a 3rd party, but he also had them assembled offsite. I know a lot of you are thrilled to populate and bake your own boards, but I was happy to learn that there are companies that will handle that for you, for a price of course.

In the end, pizza was located successfully, and Joe was kind enough to share the code, the schematic, bill of materials, the gerber files, all on his website. You can find a link in the description.

Now for some news. Disney Research has revealed the results of Project Kiwi, an effort to create a freestanding animatronic version of Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy. 

A multi-year effort that started in 2018, little Groot here seemingly spent most of his life as a headless robotics project focused on creating a lifelike, natural movement. 

The end result is incredible. I wish the video included some of the process of creating the animatronic head, but I suspect Disney’s had that aspect of the design pretty well figured out at this point. 

Can you imagine seeing this little guy walking around? He’s going to need bodyguards to prevent it from being hugged to death.

Also, I want to remind you that the Maker Music Festival is coming up on the weekend of May 15th and 16th. It’s a free, online event, that’s really like a self-guided directory of cool projects and performances that exist at the intersection of music and the DIY maker world. 

You’ll see electroacoustic stuff, but also performances on weird handmade instruments. There are presentations and workshops. 

I’ve got a performance piece in there, with my new drum bot, and also a presentation hopefully on my work adapting motors and solenoids for percussion. Don’t miss it.

Now for more projects. Xyla Foxlin has a highly entertaining video on how she built a wood veneered high-powered rocket in 5 days. 

Xyla has been working on her rocketry certification and needed to whip together a design on a tight deadline. 

I have to admit that I had no idea what went into making rockets like this, but it’s a fascinating amount of fiberglass and epoxy and laser cutting, fins and fillets, and parachutes. 

I now understand the appeal and I’m grateful to Xyla for showing the whole journey. Her enthusiasm is infectious, and it’s a great story. Go watch it.

On Adafruit, the Ruiz Brothers show how they were able to create this lemon shaped mechanical keypad.

This is a 3D printed macro keypad, shaped like a lemon, or a lime, or orange, or your citrus of choice. 

Under each slice is a Cherry MX style mechanical switch, wired up to the latest Adafruit QT Py board which can act as an HID device over USB. There’s also a small neopixel jewel to give it a nice glow.

The code is all done in Circuit Python, and there’s not much to it that you wouldn’t find in any of the other custom keyboard projects on Adafruit. 

What really caught my eye was the 3D printed enclosure. Aside from being cute and all snapping together without any hardware, there’s a cool technique here to give it that fuzzy texture.

This uses a new feature inside of Cura that’s appropriately called “fuzzy skin”. It’s all done in the slicer, so it’s not a texture you have to model. 

For the right project, it’s actually a cool way to conceal layer lines. You have some control over whether the effect is applied to the interior or exterior perimeter of your design. If you’re going for something organic looking, this seems like a great new option.

I also got a kick out of Emily Velasco’s little retro arcade project called Your Pet Eye. 

It’s a little digital eyeball that you control with a joystick. There’s a button to make it blink and a light sensor that can dilate the pupil.

The whole thing has a kind of ‘80s, Apple II educational software vibe to it. The crazy part is, it’s using an Arduino to handle all the animation and video output. It’s barely able to keep up, but it works. Emily has the code over on Github.

Now for some tools and tips. By way of Tiffany Tseng I learned about a free lecture series from MIT all about working in the kind of Linux command line environment you’ll find on Raspberry Pi. 

They call it the missing lecture series. I’m only a few episodes in, but it’s already illuminated some fundamental stuff that I wish I’d understood earlier.

We’ve already mentioned a few of these, but I’ve been enjoying the new Collin’s Lab Notes series from Collin Cunningham. These bite-sized little videos cover a fun range of topics, from the history of resistor markings, to the world of hidden potentiometers, I encourage you to browse the collection using the link in the description.

And in one of the latest videos from Adam Savage on Tested, Adam reveals how much he loves duct tape. Which is to say, not at all. He hates the stuff. And it’s fun to hear all the reasons why, and what adhesives he’d prefer in different situations.

The TLDR here is to go get yourself a good role of gaffer tape.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out the latest Great Search video by Lady Ada on Adafruit. 

She’s looking to add a high current latching relay option for a featherwing add-on board. She explains the benefits of latching relays, especially for power consumption, and shows you how to find them on Digi-Key and narrow your search for the right kind of relay for your needs. 

In her case, for a relay that can operate on the 3.3 volts coming from the Feather or a connected lipo battery, she needs something with a coil voltage of 3 volts or less. This actually makes it a surprisingly difficult search, but if you hang in there, she finds a winner.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. Thinking back on that pizza finder, what kind of dedicated compass would you make? You can get on the Maker Update email list, so you never miss a show. 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 soon.