This week on Maker Update, a desktop air tester, a drill press table lift, art from particle collisions, working with black & white TVs, EL Neon, and diffraction finishes for 3D prints.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Week=-

Air Quality Sensor: Concept to Production By JON-A-TRON
https://www.instructables.com/id/Air-Quality-Sensor-Concept-to-Production/

-=News=-

Maker Media is now Make Community LLC
https://hackaday.com/2019/07/10/maker-media-reboots-itself-as-make-community/

Announcing Project Egress, a Collaboration with the National Air and Space Museum! BY ADAM SAVAGE
https://www.tested.com/science/space/880604-announcing-project-egress-project-national-air-and-space-museum/

-=More Projects=-

How to Make a Motorized Drill Press Table Lift! by David Picciuto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8-02NrpdV0

Halo by Semiconductor
https://www.creativeapplications.net/maxmsp/halo-science-of-nature-through-the-eyes-and-ears-of-a-technological-sublime/

Back to the future mind reading helmet by Marcin Poblocki
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3452863

How to Build Your Own Bluetooth Billy Bass by Donald Bell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTwhn8-zvr8

-=Tools/Tips=-

Experiments in Black & White Television by Josh Ellingson
http://ellingson.cc/news/2019/6/23/experiments-in-black-amp-white-television

Best Entry Level Embroidery Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxEEbCfmzJw

DC Motor Speed Controller
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HF5P4KF/

Servo Socks on Indiegogo
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/servo-socks-make-stuff-move#/

FAUX NEON: BUILDING A FIXTURE FOR EL WIRE by Sarah Petkus
http://roboticarts.zoness.com/2019/06/08/faux-neon-building-a-fixture-for-el-wire/

3D Printing on Diffraction Grating Sheets by Ruiz Bros. (inspired by David Shorey)
https://learn.adafruit.com/3d-printing-on-diffraction-grating-sheets

Gareth’s Tips, tools and Shop Tales #9
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/garethbranwyn/issues/gareth-s-tips-tools-and-shop-tales-issue-9-185187

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Relay Basics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1D15pFMIBw

Transcript

Hey, I’m donald Bell and welcome back to another Maker Update. I hope everyone’s doing well. I’ve been keeping busy with upgrading the speakers in my van, and I’m happy to report everything went back together and sounds great, but it was a new kind of DIY thrill for me. Anyway, I have a great show for you, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

Over on Instructables, our old friend Jon-A-Tron dropped a master class taking your project from prototype to production. His example is this gorgeous air quality detecting desk lamp he created as a project for attendees of the Autodesk University conference. 

The goal was to showcase how Autodesk tools like EAGLE for circuit board design and Fusion 360 for hardware design, can work together to streamline manufacturing. His guide here goes over the different stages of his design. 

He includes the downloadable files for the enclosure and a link to the open source schematic and bill of materials needed to make the air quality sensor board designed by Taylor Sharpe from Sweet Sense. 

Essentially, it’s using an Adafruit Itsy Bitsy running Arduino code to translate data from the sensor into color values for the LED ring. It’s a project you could put together for under $100 if you can live without the beautifully milled aluminum enclosure and the custom circuit board for neatly mounting the off the shelf boards on.

It’s a great piece by John, and so cool to see the lines blurred between project-making skills and product-making skills.

Now for some news. Almost a month ago exactly, I reported to you about the closing of Maker Media, the parent company behind Make magazine, Maker Faire, Maker Shed, and makezine.com. 

This week I learned that company’s founder Dale Dougherty has created a new company called Make Community LLC that has purchased some of the assets of Maker Media. It remains to be seen how it will all work, but I’m excited to see that there’s still hope for the future of Make.

And if you haven’t heard about Project Egress, Adam Savage and the National Air and Space Museum have enlisted a team of talented makers to create a life size replica of the Apollo 11 Command Module hatch. The entire piece will be assembled live, next week, on July 18th. So don’t miss it.

Now for more projects! On Make Something, David Picciuto has this fantastic guide on how he made a motorized lift for his drill press table. Not only does this eliminate the hassle of locking and cranking the table up and down, but it also gave him a chance to make this super-swank CNC cut wood table for it, with T-tracks on it and an aluminum faceplate on the front with switches and dials that operate the lift. Super cool.

I also caught this writeup of an incredible interactive artwork called Halo by a design firm called Semicondutor. 

The piece uses light projection, and the amplified sound of 384 wires vibrated by individual solenoids to produce this sensory experience that people can walk through. 

What’s especially cool is that the lights and sounds are interpreted data from the ATLAS particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It’s an incredibly intricate piece, but such a cool blend of art and science and engineering. 

You can learn more about how it was made using the link in the description.

If you’re looking for a geeky costume for Halloween, check out this Doc Brown mind-reading helmet from Back to the Future, made by Marcin Poblocki. Aside from all the 3D printed parts here — and there’s a lot of them — each node has an LED wired in, all controlled by a single Arduino Nano. You can find the 3D files and the Arduino code on Thingiverse. 

Finally, for those of you following my saga of Billy Bass hacks, I’ve got a new guide up with the help of Jordan Bunker, that shows how to modify any Big Mouth Billy Bass talking toy fish to respond to any Bluetooth audio source. It’s a guide that can be adapted to all kinds of toy hacks, so check it out.

Now for some tips and tools. Have you ever seen an old black & white TV and thought about what it would take to hook it up to a modern HDMI video source, like a Roku. Well that’s exactly what artist Josh Ellingson did. He tweeted the results and it went viral. 

Well now he’s got a post up on his blog, showing you exactly what combination of cables and converters he’s using to get the job done. 

This same technique can be used to output a Raspberry Pi to an old TV, either over HDMI or the headphone jack composite output.

If you’re my age or older, most of these components will look familiar. But to millenials, this is apparently black magic.

I also had a chance to talk with Josh for a Cool Tools video and discuss the embroidery machine he uses to experiment with designing his own patches. If that’s something you’ve ever wanted to explore, this will either inspire you put you off the idea, because it’s kind of an ordeal.

While watching David Picciuto’s motorized drill press table, I bookmarked this all-in-one motor speed controller he’s using to make it work. For $13, it works with a wide range of voltages, includes a pre-wired reverse switch and potentiometer for adjusting the speed. Seems like a handy drop-in solution for working with DC motors.

For working with servos, Dan Kitchen has an invention he calls Servo Socks that he’s funding on Indiegogo with only a few days left. They’re an enclosure of HDPE plastic that you place your servo in, that can be drilled and shaped and glued. Looks like a handy thing to have for prototyping. 

Sarah Petkus has a great guide on her technique for building fake neon signs with EL wire. You see how she makes a reference sketch, traces it in Illustrator, then takes it to Fusion 360 to create a backing plate for the design. 

The real trick is how it gets studded with these little 3D printed fasteners that she created that hold the wire to the backing like a standoff. It’s a fascinating process, and I suspect it could be adapted for the new breed of side-lit LED neon rope. 

Another great new technique that’s been making the rounds is this idea of 3D printing to diffraction grating sheets, to give your 3D prints a shimmery rainbow finish. From what I can tell, the technique was first demonstrated by maker and costume designer David Shorey. But over on Adafruit, the Ruiz Brothers have a step-by-step guide that walks you through the process and provides some useful tips.

Finally, on Gareth Branwyn’s Tips, Tools and Shop Tales newsletter, he’s got another tip from Bob Knetzger on molding with styrene, a DiResta tip on how to know when a ball valve is closed, why every maker needs a stepped drill bit, and even best practice for layering your hamburger. Check it out.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out this video from the Another Teaching Moment series on how to understand the differences between different types of relay switches. 

Relays allow you to take low voltages that are common to hobby electronic projects, and use them to switch on and off higher voltages like household AC, or even just higher DC voltages like motor voltages, that you want separate from your circuit. 

This video walks you through both common and the more exotic types of relays out there. It also goes over some of the basic anatomy of those different designs. It’s worth a look.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumb’s up or leave a comment and let me know you’re out there. You can also get on the Maker Update email list to get show notes and links sent directly to your inbox each week. A huge 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.