This week on Maker Update, a wheel-y cool weather bot, a call for maker music projects, freaky fractals, making monsters, and drawing with the PlottyBot.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 270]++

-=Project of the Week=-

WeatherBot – a Motorized Weather Machine by DIY Machines
https://www.instructables.com/WeatherBot-a-Motorised-Weather-Machine-3D-Printabl/

-=News=-

Maker Music Festival Call for Makers
https://www.makermusicfestival.com/

-=More Projects=-

Freaky Fractals: HD Video Feedback Machine By Dave Blair
https://makezine.com/projects/freaky-fractals-hd-video-feedback-machine/

Make Your Own Monsters Using Old toys by Bill Making Stuff
https://youtu.be/MfgICk7WIs8

PlottyBot by Ben Akrin
https://ben.akrin.com/?page_id=9650

-=Tips & Tools=-

MandalaGaba by Ben Akrin
https://www.mandalagaba.com/

MandalaGaba Pro by Ben Akrin
https://pro.mandalagaba.com/

3D Contour Map By makendo
https://www.instructables.com/3D-Contour-Map/

Kiri:Moto
https://grid.space/kiri/

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

How to Read a Schematic
https://youtu.be/-dzHDgJVJh4

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update, a wheely cool weather bot, a call for maker music projects, freaky fractals, making monsters, and drawing with the PlottyBot.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell and welcome back to another Maker Update. I hope everyone’s doing well. Here in California we got a little preview of spring weather, and the change felt great. So many other things still feel stuck–including my creative output. But it’s part of why I love doing this show. I get to see all the awesome things you guys are doing, and it makes me feel like inspiration is right around the corner. So let’s get started with the project of the week.

Last week, Tyler identified the undiminished maker interest in creating your clock. I’ll add another one – making your own weather station.

That’s why it’s really something special when a new weather station idea comes along. The WeatherBot Forecaster by DIY Machines is literally a new spin that I’m excited to see.

The idea here is that you get your weather information here two ways. On the base, an e-ink display gives you the practical info for today and tomorrow’s forecast.

But the real show stopper here is the weather scene created for you using a stack of four plates. These can be either 3D printed or laser cut, and files are included for both. Each plate indicates a different aspect of the weather, including rain, wind, temperature, and cloudiness.

The plates are spun using servos and gears. And the really clever bit here that I like is how each plate includes notches that, when combined with an array of roller style limit switches, provide the microcontroller with an awareness of what scene is currently being displayed on each plate.

Now, for the electronics, the project uses a generic ESP32 type board, which can be configured in the provided code to connect to your WiFi network so it can pull down weather info.

Using the included diagram, you can work out where the switches, servos, and e-ink board connect to the ESP32. If you feel like getting fancy or keeping things neat, you can order a specially designed PCB that attaches to the ESP32 and breaks out and labels all the connections.

It’s a unique project. It’s both practical and something you can show off. The documentation is top-notch. But more than all this, for me, it sparks ideas for how I could remix this concept for something else.

Could I scale it up for something wall-sized? Absolutely.
Could you apply other themes to this format? Totally. It doesn’t have to be about the weather.
I just think there’s a lot of ways to take this and I love it when an idea like this comes along that you can put in your back pocket for just the right project.

Now for some news. The call for makers is out for this year’s Maker Music Festival. This is an event headed up by Sherry Huss of Maker Faire and Joe Szuecs (Sooch). But it’s also a year round website filled with the creative work of maker musicians.

I’ve got a piece in there from last year, and I’m hoping to contribute a new one. I like the challenge of making something that makes music. If that sounds like your kind of challenge, head over to makermusicfestival.com and get registered.

The launch event takes place on May 14th and 15th. This year, they’re also including a student competition to help motivate younger makers to get involved. So if you’re a teacher or parent with kids who would be into making noisy inventions, this is a great opportunity.

Now for more projects. On the Make magazine site there’s a great piece by Dave Blair on how he made this video feedback rig he calls the God machine.

Have you ever pointed a video camera at its own monitor and created a feedback loop where the image echos out like an infinity mirror?

Well, Dave exploits this effect to its maximum potential. He’s using a DSLR camera, two HD screens positioned at a right angle to each other, and a sheet of teleprompter glass – also known as beam splitter glass – angled between them to combine the images.

Using the rig, he can move the camera forward or backward, or rotate it, creating subtle changes that result in these repeating fractal patterns. He’s also routed out some of the analog controls for the video monitors so that he can play with hue and brightness controls on the fly.

I’ve never seen anything like it, and the results look amazing.

On the Bill Making Stuff channel, Bill’s got a great tutorial on making monster figurines by mashing together cheap plastic dinosaur and dragon toys.

Sometimes, you can make something fun and scary just by swapping around the head and the tail or rearranging the feet. But things really get interesting when you start mixing parts from different creatures.

A Dremel with a cutoff wheel and a bottle of CA glue are all you really need to get started. But the key to making it all look seamless is mixing up some epoxy putty.

As a model making novice, this stuff is new to me, but reminds of the JB Weld putty I’ve used for repairs. Bill’s using a combination of an epoxy called Milliput and one called Green Stuff.

You just squish it into place, give it a bit of texture, and then once it cures you can prime it and paint it. It looks like a lot of fun.

Through Hackaday I learned about the PlottyBot project by Ben Akrin.

This is a DIY desktop plotter built around a Raspberry Pi Zero W and constructed from 3D printed parts and a handful of easily sourced components.

There’s a thoroughly documented assembly process. The custom plotter Pi software comes as an SD card image, taking the hassle out of software installation. There’s no command line stuff. You connect to it all using a web interface, upload your Gcode, and you’re off to the races.

Now for some tips and tools. This one also comes from Ben Akrin. He’s created a free web tool called mandala gaba where you can quickly scribble out these kinda spirograph mandala patterns and save them as PNG files.

Now, you can use software to trace and convert these to plotter-ready SVG patterns. Or, try a more advanced version of the tool at pro.mandalagaba.com, which offers a direct SVG export feature.

Scott McIndoe has updated his popular Instructables guide for creating laser cut 3D contour maps.

His original guide used a piece of free software called Slicer, that then was abandoned and turned into a plugin for Fusion 360. It’s complicated, but Scott’s sorted it all out with a replacement web tool called kiri:moto.

Different tool, but essentially the same process. You grab the section of map you want using the Terrain2STL tool, and then bring that STL into kiri:moto to simplify and slice it up into laser-cutable chunks.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, I’ve included a link to their video on reading schematics for beginners. In just 5 minutes, you get a great overview of the basics of reading and understanding simple schematics, the types of symbols you’ll typically see, and how to understand annotations.

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, because you just love the show so dang much. That said, the Maker Update newsletter and blog will be paused for a few weeks while I’m away on a trip. So don’t be alarmed. Tyler will take care of next week’s show. A big thanks to Digi-Key, and thanks for watching. I’ll see you soon.