This week on Maker Update, the Lightswell, the $59 Jetson Nano, folding a bike, a hacker puzzle terminal, and a split head rawhide hammer.

++Show Notes [Maker Update 202]++

‏-=Project of the Week=-

Light[s]well by Brian Harms
https://www.nstrmnt.com/#/lightswell/

‏-=News=-

NVIDIA Announces $59 Jetson Nano Board
https://hackaday.com/2020/10/05/nvidia-announces-59-jetson-nano-2gb-a-single-board-computer-with-makers-in-mind/

‏-=More Projects=-

Folding Bike by Laura Kampf
https://youtu.be/bxdSBVeseM8

3D Printed Hacker Console by Purkkaviritys
https://hackaday.com/2020/10/01/3d-printed-video-terminal-dials-c-for-cyberpunk/
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4610186

‏-=Tips & Tools=-

THOR Rh150 Split Head Hammer Hide 900G Size 2
https://kk.org/cooltools/thor-split-head-hammer/

Empire State Maker Faire
https://makerfaire.com/empire-maker-faire-2020/

Choosing the right RTC for your project
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/30/choosing-the-right-rtc-for-your-project/

Tape Measure Basics by Make Build Modify
https://youtu.be/s8UzG9-qvNU

Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales – Issue #64
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/garethbranwyn/issues/gareth-s-tips-tools-and-shop-tales-issue-64-280539

Adafruit October Edition of Maker Update
https://youtu.be/yQRj66Gqp4s

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

What is a Voltage Regulator
https://youtu.be/D52xUrIDrZY

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, the lightswell, the $59 Jetson Nano, folding a bike, a hacker puzzle terminal, and a split head rawhide hammer.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome to another Maker Update. I hope everyone’s doing alright. I have to hand it to you guys, it’s been a weird and difficult year that just keeps getting weirder, and yet, you just keep making cool projects for me to share. Your creativity is my job security, so thank you, and let’s get started with the project of the week.

Check out this light installation by Brian Harms. He calls it Lightswell, and it’s an excellent example of how diffusion and texture can transform the look of Neopixel lighting strip. 

What we have here is an Alexa controlled lighting fixture made from 80/20 aluminum extrusion. Each aluminum beam has a strip of addressable LEDs with a generous, common spacing of 30 LEDs per meter. 

Spaced between them you have these laser cut sheets of cardstock that form a wave pattern. It sorta reminds me of the ribs inside an old airplane wing, with the skin off. The shape was created using the Grasshopper environment in Rhino 3D modelling software.

For the electronics, Brian is using an Arduino MKR1000 board along with the Arduino Create IoT Cloud to help him with the Alexa integration. 

What’s cool about the way he’s done it is that he can use voice commands to do more than just turn it on or off. He can change colors, he can start a rainbow mode, and he can even change the animation rate of the rainbow mode by asking for a percentage. 

The whole thing is super pretty, but honestly, the IoT part might be overkill. A Trinket and a toggle button could get you most of the way there. 

For me, the coolest part of this is how he was able to create this big shape that’s essentially a stack of paper. 99% of what you’re looking at is diffused light. I guess you could say the same thing about any lampshade, but still, it’s a concept I’m excited to play with. 

Now for some news. This week, NVIDIA announced a new version of their Jetson Nano single-board computer priced at $59. 

The original Nano was introduced in March of 2019 as a $99 board for maker and robotics projects. It competes against the Raspberry Pi and offers a lot of GPU muscle, making it an attractive choice for machine learning applications.

This new $59 option seems essentially the same as the original, but with half the RAM. It’s due out at the end of this month and you can learn more using the link in the show notes.

Now for more projects. Laura Kampf has made some incredible and often ridiculous bike projects. This time, she’s putting her own spin on a folding commuter bike. 

The goal was to make a bike she could bring on the train which has a limit to how many full size bikes are allowed, but no limit on folding bikes. The bike rims do have to be 20 inches or smaller though, so Laura went with a smaller BMX style bike as her base. 

She then shows how she precisely measured and cut the bike in half. She creates a retractable, spring-loaded mechanism to lock and unlock the frame together. 

My favorite hack though, is how she repurposed two sections of roller chain to act as the folding hinge. She welded the ends of the chain section to some steel flat bar, then cut the bar in half at the same angle of the cuts on the bike. 

She makes it all look so simple, but there are a dozen places where small choices make a huge difference. 

Another project I really liked this week was this 3D printed hacker console by Purkkaviritys. 

It’s more like a hacker puzzle made to look like Blade Runner terminal. It was created for the Disobey 2020 hacker conference in Finland.  

The design includes a small screen, a camera, a keypad, and a card reader, all connected up to a Raspberry Pi inside. It sorta reminds me of my cocktail machine, but without the cocktails. 

The idea is that people at the conference would hack the card reader, put their lanyards together to decipher a secret code, enter the code on the terminal, and see if they can successfully break through.

I love this idea, and the design is ripe for repurposing for other projects. You can find the STL files for it over on Thingiverse.

Now for some tips and tools. On the Cool Tools channel, Sean Michael Ragan shows off this split head hammer that you can open up and customize with different materials. 

The idea is that this is a soft-faced hammer for hitting more delicate materials that you don’t want to damage. It ships with rawhide faces, but you could swap them out with nylon or aluminum, or in extreme situations — cake. 

A reminder that New York’s Empire State Maker Faire is coming up next weekend. There will be a student day streamed online on October 16th. The main day of programming will be on Saturday the 17th, from 9am to 8pm, with a keynote from Adafruit’s Limor Fried at 1pm Eastern. 

On Hackaday, there’s a great piece by Lewin Day on how to choose the right real-time clock for your project. 

On their own, Microcontrollers aren’t great with keeping track of the exact time. If you need a project that keeps to a schedule, you’ll need an RTC. But you have a few options depending on how accurate, how cheap, or how efficient you need the module to be.

On the Make Build Modify channel, there’s a great 14-minute long deep dive on tape measures, full of tips and tricks that are bound to surprise you. Using it as a compass, making cut lines on pipe, scribing a line, or even using the tape to pick things off the floor.

In the latest edition of Gareth Branwyn’s Tips Tools and Shop Tales, he includes some great ideas for finding the center line on a pipe, hacking needle-nose pliers with rubber bands, and reviving old paint brushes. 

And in case you missed, the new month means a new edition of the monthly Adafruit edition of Maker Update hosted by Tyler Winegarner. This month we have a MIDI melody maker, some great halloween projects, and a look at the new Adafruit MatrixPortal M4, a CircuitPython Powered Internet RGB Matrix Display driver board. You can find the new episode on the Adafruit Youtube channel.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out their recent video on voltage regulators. These are an essential component for any electronic design, but there are many ways to put them to use. 

This video covers a lot of territory in a short time — linear regulators, switching regulators, buck-boost converters, and flyback transformers. You’ll get a good grasp of the possibilities.

And that does it for this week’s show, be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up, or leave a comment. You can also get on the Maker Update email list. A big thanks to my Patrons on Patreon and to Digi-Key electronics for making this whole thing possible. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next week.