This week on Maker Update, multi-channel audio on the cheap, the future of Fritzing, GPIO Zero, a laser cut kaleidescope, and digging, climbing, cooking, or shredding your way to a high score.

Show Notes

Project of the Week

Play multiple sound files on multiple output devices with Python and sounddevice by Devon Bray
http://www.esologic.com/multi-audio/

Github repo
https://github.com/esologic/pear

via Hackaday
https://hackaday.com/2019/02/14/python-script-sends-each-speaker-its-own-sound-file/

News

Future of Fritzing Is Murky by Brian Benchoff
https://hackaday.com/2019/02/14/the-future-of-fritzing-is-murky-at-best/

GPIO Zero v1.5 is out
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/gpio-zero-v1-5/

More Projects

Diffraction Grating Kaleidoscope By jbumstead
https://www.instructables.com/id/Diffraction-Grating-Kaleidoscope/

Coal Rush
http://shakethatbutton.com/coal-rush/

Ruins Climber
http://shakethatbutton.com/ruins-climber/

Cook Your Way
http://shakethatbutton.com/cook-your-way/

Making of Cook Your Way
https://enric.llagostera.com.br/cookyourway/making-of/

Guitar Wizards
http://shakethatbutton.com/guitar-wizards/

Tools/Tips

Windows on Raspberry Pi Imager
https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/02/15/the-windows-on-raspberry-pi-imager-installs-windows-10-arm64-on-raspberry-pi-3b-b-piday-raspberrypi-windows10/

Pinecone ceiling lamp by scoobie975
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3322642

Pinecone lamp by Streetfire_Industries
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2827592

Cool Tool: Greeting Card Sound Player
https://youtu.be/-B-EW1W4l0g

Maker Faires

February 23, 2019 Gainesville Mini Maker Faire
February 26 +27 + 28, 2019 Maker Faire Dubai

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, multi-channel audio on the cheap, the future of Fritzing, GPIO Zero, a laser cut kaleidescope, and digging, climbing, cooking, or shredding your way to a high score.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, welcome back to another Maker Update. I hope you’re all feeling good. Thanks for joining me again. We have a lot of fun projects on today’s show, so let’s get started with the Project of the Week.

Through the Hackaday blog I learned about this project from Devon Bray. He shows how to make a multi-channel audio looper using a Raspberry Pi computer and his custom Python script.

His work was commissioned by an artist who needed a sculpture with 8 different speakers to each have their own loop of sound. Devon’s solution, which I love, was to plug a USB hub into a Raspberry Pi, and then plug in cheap USB audio adapters into each of the USB ports and run those out to inexpensive amplifiers. He even designed and 3D printed a board to mount everything on.

By default, the Python script will play and loop the audio files in a specific folder once it boots up. You have to number your files to correspond to the audio channels you want them played on, and the files will start their loop again only once the longest file has finished.

He also shows an alternative example that looks for audio files from any attached thumb drive, so you can swap out files without having to interface with the Pi.

I think it’s a really great tool for artists, but also for museum exhibits, and I think it would be especially handy for Halloween and haunted house sound effects. You can find all the code on his Github page.

It’s time for some news. If you’ve ever used the free Fritzing software to document your electronic designs, you may soon have to find a new tool. Hackaday reports that site no longer allows for new accounts to be registered and hasn’t been updated for a year.

You can read more details on Hackaday, but the hopeful part of the story is that there is an effort underway to create a fork of the project that could keep it alive.

A new version of GPIO Zero is out, version 1.5. This is a free utility that helps you understand and modify the I/O pins on your Raspberry Pi. It’s a very popular and useful tool for Pi hardware projects.

With the new update, you can create emulated pin settings, remotely control pins over a network, there’s new command line art for the Pi 3A+ and B+, and updated drivers for reading off distance sensors. A link in the show notes will tell you how to install the update.

Now for more projects. Jon Bumstead has a great design for a laser cut kaleidescope. It’s constructed from circles of MDF, layered in a way that sandwiches two double axis, diffraction sheets.

When you give the design a twist, the to gratings of the sheet shift across each other to create new patterns. It’s a neat trick, and I love the design.

The GDC Alt.CTRL showcase is a month away, and we’re already seeing a bunch of alternative controller indie game projects pop up. I’m going to quickly cover 4 games that you can learn more about in the show notes.

Coal Rush is a game where you race trains by shoveling coal, switching tracks and blowing a train whistle. The coal is made of ping pong balls that have been painted black. It looks like a fun workout.

Ruins Climber is a game where you’re a chicken trying to scale a wall with a rope. The controller here is a loop of rope that you pull to go up and down, and a giant button to hop from one rope to the next.

Cook Your Way is a virtual cooking game where you add ingredients with little punch cards and adjust the heat on your virtual stove, and chop ingredients with a fake knife. The control interface is really just a clever use of buttons and sensors connected to an Arduino Mega. You can find a link to the build details for this one in the show notes.

Finally, check out Guitar Wizards. This one is a riff on Guitar Hero, but instead of playing together, two players play against each other, and instead of a screen, a blazing panel of over 2,000 LEDs shoots notes back and forth to each player. A Teensy microcontroller and the Fast LED Arduino library are at the core of it all.

Alright, now for a few tips and tools I found this week. WORproject.ml is a site for getting your hands on the Windows on Pi imager. It’s a Windows only tool that burns Windows images that you can use on a Raspberry Pi 3.

I saw a few pinecone style lamps online this week, including a ceiling lamp design by Federico Barbieri, and this table lamp by Streetfire Industries.

And if you’re into sound projects like that multi-channel project from the top of the show, you should also check out this Cool Tools review I did on a $10 greeting card sound module. It’s one of the few cheap options out there that read files from a micro SD card. They’re great to have on hand for adding sound to any project. They come with a speaker and are easy to hack.

Maker Faires! We’ve got Gainesville Florida on the 23rd, and then Maker Faire Dubai from the 26th-28th. To find out when your local Faire is happening, head to MakerFair.com.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. Get on the Maker Update email list to have show notes sent out to you automatically each week, plus a few bonus projects I couldn’t fit in the show. A big thanks to the Maker Update Patrons on Patreon. Thanks to everyone for watching, and I’ll see you next week.