This week on Maker Update, a Pangolin-inspired mind-control dress, a freeform circuit sound sculpture, flip-up spidey goggles, and shooting scrails.

++Show Notes [Maker Update #197]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Pangolin by Anouk Wipprecht
https://makezine.com/2020/08/31/driving-fashion-with-brain-waves-the-pangolin/
http://www.gtec.at/bci-fashion-tech-2020/

-=See Also=-

NeuroSky MindWave Mobile Teardown + Customized EEG Headpiece By anoukwipprecht
https://www.instructables.com/id/NeuroSky-MindWave-Mobile-Teardown-to-customized-EE/

Hacking MindWave Mobile
https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/hackers-in-residence—hacking-mindwave-mobile

MyoWare Muscle Sensor Kit
https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/myoware-muscle-sensor-kit

-=More Projects=-

Waldian a wall-hanging sound and light sculpture by Eirik Brandal
https://hackaday.io/project/174560-waldian
https://eirikbrandal.com/

Light Up Spider-Man Lenses With Circuit Playground via Kieran Meadows
http://www.kieranmeadows.co.uk/project_lenses.html

-=Tips & Tools=-

Solderless Wire Splice
https://kk.org/cooltools/solderless-wire-splicer/

Techniques and Strategies for Building Electronic Circuits by Leo Fernekes
https://youtu.be/vq968AFgPhg

Raspberry Pi retro player by TeCoEd
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-retro-player/

Direct from Shenzhen – USB-C power supply
https://hackspace.raspberrypi.org/articles/direct-from-shenzhen-usb-c-power-supply

An Autofeeding Screwdriver
https://www.core77.com/posts/101632/Cool-Tool-An-Autofeeding-Screwdriver

SHOOTING SCREWS THROUGH A FRAMING NAILER by Izzy Swan
https://youtu.be/HpJQpwZYXqI

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

How to Test and Identify Types of Fuses
https://youtu.be/ZYKeVS0SpOY

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, a Pangolin-inspired mind-control dress, a freeform circuit sound sculpture, flip-up spidey goggles, and shooting scrails.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, and this is Maker Update, the best show in the whole world. My favorite show, at least. I hope you’re staying cool out there, and staying inspired. But if you need a little help, you’re in the right place. Let’s get started with the project of the week.

Pangolin is a new interactive fashion project by Anouk Wipprecht. If you’re familiar with Anouk’s work, you know she has a thing for making dresses that respond to some kind of input. Typically it’s been proximity sensors and dresses that help carve out and define personal space.

For Pangolin, she’s using the human brain as her input device. An array of custom EEG sensors that look like Pangolin scales are plastered to your head and connected up to some kind of computer for processing. That aspect of this project is a little opaque. 

From there, the brain activity is monitored from 1,024 locations and interpreted and used to control LEDs and servos embedded throughout the dress. 

There’s a total of 64 servos used here, each with these custom horns that hold LEDs. The lights literally respond to brain activity, but they also visually kindof look like you’d imagine neurons would look like. It’s beautiful, and I’m so glad there’s an Anouk in the world to dream this stuff up.

Now, as amazing as this dress is, at this point there’s no specific documentation on how it was made. Luckily, there’s a trail of other projects that can lead you here if you really want to tinker with this stuff.

In the description you’ll find a link to Anouk’s Instructable on how to create this custom EEG headpiece that uses the NeuroSky Mindwave Mobile headband. It’s a great guide on hacking the headband into something that looks cooler, but it’s short on details on how to put it to work. 

For that, check out this other guide on Sparkfun by Sophi Kravitz. This shows you how to connect the data up over Bluetooth and have it interpreted by an Arduino Uno, which is where the possibilities really open up.

Finally, my own experience with brain sensor projects is that as cool as they sound, they’re actually very difficult to control. A more useful option might be muscle controlled interaction. For this, check out the MyoWare muscle sensor kit, which I’ve linked to in the description.

For a different but equally stunning intersection of art and technology, check out Eirik Brandal’s entry into the Hackaday circuit sculpture contest. 

The piece is called Waldian. It’s a sculpture that makes randomly generated melodic tones and hangs on a wall. 

The circuit contains two oscillators, an envelope generator and a voltage controlled amplifier, all controlled by impulses from a network of logic gates. The entire schematic for it can be found as an SVG file on the Hackaday project page. 

This is going to be a tough one to beat, because not only does it sound cool, but it looks incredible, and incredibly complex to pull off. 

I also like how he’s added LEDs to each of the elements of the design so that you can get a visual sense of what’s responsible for the sounds you’re hearing. It’s excellent, and I’ll also include a link to his website in the description where you can find a whole gallery of other work like this to get you inspired.

And for a project that deserves way more attention than its getting, check out these light-up, flip-up Spiderman goggles by Kieran Meadows.

This is a two-part system that includes the goggles and a medallion worn on the chest. Inside the medallion is an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express board that holds the code. The 3D printed enclosure for it also extends the buttons out to the front of the enclosure so that you can use them to flip the LED lenses up and down.

There’s also a bunch of clever engineering that went into the goggles. Adafruit’s steampunk costume googles provide a foundation, but they’re heavily altered here with a whole 3D printed rig that holds a servo for flipping the lenses, and then extends up and over the back of the head to get the battery pack out of the way.

The video is great, but check out Kieran’s full writeup on his website, which includes some of the detailed Fusion 360 layouts of the design.

Now for some tips and tools. On the Cool Tools channel, Tyler Winegarner and I talk about these solderless, clamp-on wire splicers. If you remember a few episodes ago I talked about wire tapping technique. These are a quick and dirty tool for achieving that same idea, splicing one wire into an existing one without cutting or undoing the existing wire. 

The video already has a bunch of comments pointing out what an insecure connection this creates, and I won’t argue with it, but I’m still glad to know that a connector like this exists for splicing into wires under less-than-ideal circumstances.

Through Hackaday I came across this video by electrical engineer Leo Fernekes. He goes over his strategies and techniques for creating practical prototypes with surface mount components. 

Breadboards are great for low-voltage prototyping with through-hole components, but what happens if you need more power, or components that are only available as teeny little surface mount packages? 

This is where a lot of people will send out for a PCB to get etched or milled and cross their fingers that everything works. Leo prefers to get to validating the circuit right away with these blank copper-clad boards that he segments so that the small surface mount components will fit across the little cuts, but he’s left with these big copper pads that he can probe and wire to without going blind or crazy.

There’s a ton of great tips in this video, including wire wrapping, surf boards, creating power busses with copper tape, and more. 

I was also inspired by this tip from TeCoEd on using vintage 35mm slide magnifiers as a kind of retro display enclosure. His project uses a small OLED screen, which gets magnified by the slide viewer. I’m thinking of how it might look with other small screens. I couldn’t resist picking a few of these slide viewers up on eBay to play with.

On the HackSpace blog I read this interesting piece on these USB-C power supply boards you can get from Banggood. 

Standard USB is great for moving 5 volts at up to 2 amps. USB-C, however, depending on what it’s connected to, can move up to 5 amps at 20v. A board like this can let you tap into that power and dial it in with a little display and two buttons. Could be a useful option for the right project.

Here’s a tool I didn’t know existed — an auto-feeding screwdriver. This one is made by Weber, and designed for assembly line production. 

A tube blows each screw into a channel where it gets picked up by the retracting driver and held in place magnetically until it’s placed. Totally impractical for most of us, but how cool that this thing exists.

There is, however, something like this for us common people. On his YouTube channel Izzy Swan shows off Scails. Part screw, part nail, you load them into your nail gun and shoot them into wood just like a nail. But if you know you’re going to need to remove or service this connection later, the scrail allows you to remove it and replace it just like a screw. Kinda cool.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out this video on how to test and identify different types of fuses. 

From auto fuses to cartridge fuses, through-hole fuses, bolt-mount fuses, you can spot the differences and use a multimeter to test for both continuity, or measure the voltage drop on fuse while it’s in a live circuit. This short video will tell you just hat you need to know.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up, or leave a comment. Let me know what kind of project you’d build that could benefit from mind control. You can get on the Maker Update email list so you never miss a show. A big thanks to my Patrons on Patreon and an extra big thanks to Digi-Key electronics for making this show possible. Thanks for watching, stay cool, and I’ll see you next week.