This week on Maker Update, a soap-vomiting unicorn, two new boards from Arduino, a mini marblevator, a neopixel thumb war, pool noodle box bots, gendered razor holders, Lego pinball, an Android tape deck, a business card stylophone, Hobart’s entry level MIG welder, the Voronator, and the Adafruit Crickit. This week’s Cool Tool is the Hobart Handler 140 MIG Welder.

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Show Notes

Project of the Week

SOAP VOMITING UNICORN by Britt Michelsen
https://www.instructables.com/id/Soap-Vomiting-Unicorn/

News

Maker Faire Bay Area Wrap-Up
https://makezine.com/2018/05/18/live-updates-maker-faire-bay-area-2018/

Maker Faire Live Video Saturday
https://youtu.be/twNuTDDK-Hw

Maker Faire Live Video Sunday
https://youtu.be/gR80QjH6rxg

Power Racing Series 2018 Sprint 1
https://youtu.be/WDPJp41xWtc

Arduino’s FPGA Board (MKR Vidor 4000) and Uno WiFi Rev2
https://blog.arduino.cc/2018/05/17/say-hello-to-the-next-generation-of-arduino-boards/
https://hackaday.com/2018/05/18/arduino-just-introduced-an-fpga-board-announces-debugging-and-better-software/
https://hackaday.com/2018/05/20/video-of-the-arduino-fpga-board-demo-at-maker-faire/
https://blog.hackster.io/introducing-the-arduino-uno-wifi-7118f428ad39
https://blog.hackster.io/introducing-the-mkr-vidor-4000-7b3f50e7f12f

More Projects

MARBLEVATOR MINI, LOOP by Greg Zumwalt
https://www.instructables.com/id/Marblevator-Mini-Loop/

NEO PIXEL, FASTEST THUMB GAME by wellsey1972
https://www.instructables.com/id/Neo-Pixel-Fastest-Thumb-Game/

Box-E Box by Daniel Plata, Simone Pivetta & Samar Gmach
http://shakethatbutton.com/box-e-box/

HIS & HERS RAZOR HOLDERS by Mikeasaurus
https://www.instructables.com/id/His-Hers-Razor-Holders/

WORKING MINI LEGO PINBALL MACHINE by Lego Man
https://www.instructables.com/id/Working-Mini-Lego-Pinball-Machine/

Tapeless tape Deck by Artur Młynarz
http://www.mp3tapelessdeck.pl/
https://hackaday.com/2018/05/21/ditch-the-tapes-put-an-android-in-your-deck/

Mitxela StyloCard
https://mitxela.com/projects/stylocard

Cool Tools Minute

Hobart Handler 140 MIG Welder 115V
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B009X43F38/ctmakerupdate-20

Antra AH6-260-0000 Solar Power Auto Darkening Welding Helmet
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00BWAEYV8/ctmakerupdate-20

Adjustable Steel Welding Table
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B010FINPZ8/ctmakerupdate-20

Wire Scratch Brush
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00208BX4C/ctmakerupdate-20

MIG Welding Gloves
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B002WOW6ZY/ctmakerupdate-20

Tools/Tips

Tips of the Week: Voronoi Patterns, Minwax as a Mask, DIY Bondo Knobs, and Being Prepared
https://makezine.com/2018/05/11/tips-of-the-week-voronoi-patterns-minwax-as-a-mask-diy-bondo-knobs-and-being-prepared/

Voronator
https://www.voronator.com/

MAKE 3D PRINTABLE VORONOI PATTERNS WITH AUTODESK® MESHMIXER
https://www.instructables.com/id/Make-Voronoi-Pattern-with-Autodesk-Meshmixer/

Classes with Mike Warren from Instructables
https://blog.trystudio.co/story/mike

Adafruit Crickit
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-crickit-creative-robotic-interactive-construction-kit

Adafruit Parts CAD files
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CAD_Parts

CircuitPython 3.0.0 Beta 0 Released
https://blog.adafruit.com/2018/05/23/circuitpython-3-0-0-beta-0-released/

Maker Faires

Berlin Germany
Strasbourg France
Vilnius Lithuania
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada
Ljubljana Slovenia
Gibsons, BC Canada
Kharkiv Ukraine

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, a soap-vomiting unicorn, two new boards from Arduino, a mini marble elevator, a neopixel thumb war, pool noodle box bots, Lego pinball, an Android tape deck, a business card stylophone, Hobart’s entry level MIG welder, and the Adafruit Crickit.

Hey I’m Donald Bell, and welcome to another Maker Update! Man, a lot has happened in the past two weeks — gokarts were built, Maker Faire Bay Area came and went, I bought a new 3D printer, and I started a new part-time job at Autodesk, which is why I’m publishing this on a Friday.

It’s all good news though, and I’ll cover more of it in a minute. But first, let’s take a look at the Project of the Week!

Check out this soap vomiting unicorn by Britt Michelsen. This is a 3D printed enclosure for an off-the-shelf automatic soap dispenser. You load soap through the horn, switch it on by pressing the right nostril, and a sensor on its neck triggers the soap dispenser when your hand is nearby.

Britt has a great Instructable up for the project, walking you through the design, 3D printing, and fitting components. She also has some great tips on finishing your 3D prints to get a smooth, professional look.

It’s a hilarious, yet useful project. There aren’t a lot of parts to print and the electronics seem fairly easy to hack together. This one’s going on my personal project list.

It’s time for some news. Lot’s of news. First off, for those of you who couldn’t make it out to Maker Faire Bay Area this past weekend — I’ve got the next best thing. Down in the show notes you’ll find links to Make’s own wrap-up post and their two live videos from Maker Faire, which are each around 8 hours long and filled with great talks and demos.

In fact, even if you were at Maker Faire Bay Area, I know for a fact that you couldn’t have seen everything. The links are a great way to see what you missed.

Also in there, I’ve got a link to the opening sprint race for Power Racing series. This year, I had two cars in the race, Kitty Grabs Back, and my newest car, Business Lunch, driven by my friend Jordan Bunker. The motors on Business Lunch burned out on the final lap, but Jordan still managed to get third place. Overall our team raked in a bunch of medals, ruined both our cars, but had a lot of fun.

The big Maker tech news out of Maker Faire was Arduino’s announcement of the MKR Vidor 4000 board. This is a small, FPGA-based project board due out in June, price TBD. The FPGA capability allows the code to dictate the architecture of the chip, so it can be highly customized for your project. That means that every pin can be configured to be either an input, output, i2c, PWM–whatever your project needs.

Massimo Banzi also announced a new generation of the Arduino Uno with Wi-Fi built in. The new version also includes an integrated gyroscope sensor so you can use the board itself as a kind of control input. Pricing is also TBD, but the board should roll out mid-June.

More projects, rapid fire. Greg Zumwalt has a new Instructable up for his 3D printed Marblevatpr Mini Loop. Aside from a 300 rpm gear motor, a ball bearing, a switch and a panel mount power jack, everything you see here is 3D printed. You can find files for all the parts in the Instructable.

Gary Wells made this dueling button-mashing game using two arcade buttons, small neopixel rings, and an Adafruit trinket. It’s like a digital thumb war. Two players compete to see who can mash their button faster. It looks like fun.

Another alt-control style project I found this week is Box-E-Box by Daniel Plata, Simone Pivetta & Samar Gmach. It’s a robot boxing game where two players get into these cardboard box costumes, with animated LED matrix faces and arcade buttons on the side connected to a Teensy microcontroller.

The boxers whack each other with pool noodles trying to hit the other player’s arcade button. The first player to three hits wins.

Mikeasaurus on Instructables has a fun guide on designing and printing His and Her razor holders. The guide is based on Tinkercad, and is a nice inroad for learning how to add more nuanced details like chamfers and lips to your Tinkercad designs.

Lego Man Productions has a guide on making a working mini pinball game completely from legos and a couple rubber bands.

Artur Młynarz created this tapeless tape deck by retrofitting an Android phone into a vintage deck and creating a custom Android application to give the appearance of a moving tape.

You’ll need to route power and audio cables for the phone internally, and pop out the plastic cover from the cassette tray to use the touch screen — but if you can find a cool working deck like this with VU meters and an integrated amp, this is a cool hack.

Finally, Tim Alex Jacobs made this playable MIDI stylophone business card. The card communicates MIDI note data over a built in USB connection. Tim walks you through the prototype, the PCB design, and his trick for doubling up the thickness to create the USB plug.

It’s time for another Cool Tools review. This time we’re going to take a look at my Hobart Handler 140 MIG Welder. I bought this on Amazon for $500, and in my experience it’s the best quality option around this price. I’m going to show you why, and if you want to pick one up, using the link on the description helps support my videos and the Cool Tools blog.

I just got into welding about a year and a half ago, and I’ll admit, I was intimidated. Luckily I had a friend to show me the basics and let me borrow his Lincoln Electric welder to work on my gokart frame for Maker Faire.

But after awhile I realized I needed to invest in my own welder. The obvious choice was to go with a Lincoln since I was already using one and they’re easy to get at any Home Depot. But after doing some research, this $500 Hobart had a lot of reviews raving about its quality, so I gave it a shot, and I’m glad I did.

Here’s why I recommend this as a great beginner’s MIG welder. First, it runs off standard 110v household power. Professional welding setups typically run off 220, and the ones that run off 110 are often a little weak.

This one has plenty of power for getting nice welds on steel tubing and angle iron. The trade off is that it can’t do continuous welds for more than a few minutes before it needs to rest. If welding is your job and you’re doing it all day, that’s an obvious deal-breaker. But for what I do, I’m never spending more than a minute on any particular weld, so I never think about it.

The second great benefit for beginners is that it comes setup for flux-core wire right out of the box, and includes a reel of flux wire. What this means as a beginner, is that you can get welding straight away because the flux wire doesn’t need shielding gas, which most beginners don’t have on hand.

After a few days, I was able to score a tank of shielding gas and some regular MIG welding wire, which delivers better results for me. When you make this switch, you have to change the polarity on the welder by unscrewing and swapping two wires. But it takes just a minute, and I think overall most beginners will be happy this is set up for flux core out of the box so they can get right to practicing.

The third thing that’s great about this package is that the components are high enough quality that you may never need to replace them. From the gas regulator, to the gun, the 10-ft grounding cable, and the extra tip — there’s a higher touch on every little component compared to what I’ve seen on other entry-level welders.

My impression is that to compete with the low cost Lincoln and Home Depot and Harbor Freight options, Hobart is betting on quality to differentiate what they’re offering. It works for me. It got me through an intense build with my latest gokart. And no one from Hobart is paying me to say this, just to be clear.

If you’ve been intimidated by welding, I encourage you to take a class at your local makerspace or have a friend show you the basics. As a maker, it opens up a lot of possibility.

If you want to pick up this same setup, I’ve got a link for it in the description, along with what I use for a helmet, welding table, wire brush and gloves. And remember you can see thousands of reader recommended tools like these at cool-tools.org.

I have some more tools and tips to share. Through Gareth Branwyn’s Tips of the Week column I learned about Voronator.com. The site allows you to upload 3D files, which are then processed with a Voronoi pattern and sent back down to you. The result are these organic looking, filament saving designs. For the right application, it’s a neat tool to have bookmarked.

For another take on working with Voronoi patterns Dan Porter shared an Instructable on how to apply and dial in the effect using Autodesk’s free Meshmixer software.

This week I learned that Mike Warren (aka Mikeasaurus) from Instructables is offering in person workshops and one-on-one instruction in the Bay Area, through TryStudio.co. As a lot of you know, Mike’s one of my favorite makers, and if you’re looking for a guru to help you with 3D design, woodworking, electronics, or flamethrowing skateboards, this is a cool way to rent his brain for a bit.

Adafruit has introduced a new board called the Crickit that’s a sort of robot platform breakout for the Circuit Playground Express. For $30, you get a bunch of screw terminals that break out connections for servos, motors, speakers, LEDs, and solenoids — plus a little I/O breadboard and four capacitive touch pads. I’m eager to see the robot projects that follow from this. Knowing Adafruit, they won’t suck.

Speaking of Adafruit, watching Noe and Pedro on 3D Hangouts this past week I learned that there’s a GitHub page full of Fusion 360 files for a bunch of Adafruit boards and components.
So if you ever wanted to design an enclosure that perfectly fits a board or button they sell, you can probably pop a 3D model of it right into your design.

Adafruit has also announced version 3.0 Beta of Circuit Python. This is the software that allows a growing number of their boards to be programmed using Python code instead of Arduino. There’s a lot of little changes and improvements, but it is Beta, so there are likely some kinks to be worked out.

Maker Faires! This weekend we have Berlin, Germany; Strasbourg, France; Vilnius (Vil-nyus), Lithuania; Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Ljubljana (Lou-blee-anna), Slovenia; Gibsons, BC; and Kharkiv Ukraine. I think it’s one of the few weekends where there’s not a faire happening in the US, but if you’re out near one, go check it out.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up, or leave a comment. Pick up that Hobart if you’re looking for a solid, hobbyist welder. No show next week, but I will send an email, so get on that email list. And the plan now is to get these shows out every other Friday. I know I’ve been your wednesday guy, but my new gig at Autodesk has me in the office Tuesday and Wednesday, and that’s putting food on the table. So, thanks for being flexible, and thanks for watching, and I’ll see you soon.