This week on Maker Update, rolling your own jetpack, machine learning for money, motion controlled hadouken, invisible roommates, infrared mirrors, and mechanical wings.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 236]++

-=Project of the Week=-

How Fast Can I Skate With A Jetpack? by Ian Charnas
https://youtu.be/9ImTH9gUAvU

-=News=-

TensorFlow Microcontroller Challenge
https://experiments.withgoogle.com/tfmicrochallenge

-=More Projects=-

Motion Controlled Street Fighter by Charlie Gerard
https://github.com/charliegerard/street-fighter-arduino-tflite
https://air-street-fighter.netlify.app/

Invisible Roomates by Nicole He and Eran Hilleli
https://nicolehe.substack.com/p/behind-the-scenes-on-invisible-roommates

Infrared Mirror by Reuben Strangelove
https://hackaday.io/project/180101-infrared-mirror

Articulating Electric Mechanical Wings By OhioFlyer
https://www.instructables.com/Articulating-Electric-Mechanical-Wings/

-=Tips & Tools=-

Soldering With A Hand Tremor: The Camera Gimbal Hack by Caleb Kraft
https://makezine.com/2021/06/01/soldering-with-a-hand-tremor-the-camera-gimbal-hack/

Solid Core Jumper Wires Review
https://youtu.be/YDuFrRUCfaU

Maker Pi RP2040, a Robot Controller Board
https://www.seeedstudio.com/MAKER-PI-RP2040-p-4961.html

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Digi-Key’s Solutions for Startups
https://www.digikey.com/en/resources/startup-resources

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, rolling your own jetpack, machine learning for money, motion controlled hadouken, invisible roommates, infrared mirrors, and mechanical wings.

Hey everybody, I’m Donald Bell, back again with another Maker Update. How are you doing? I can’t complain. Summer’s here. I’m making actual plans to do things. It’s crazy, and I hope you’re getting back into the swing of things too.

It’s time to get into it, starting with the project of the week.

A lot of us grew up thinking that the future would involve a lot of traveling by jetpack. The future didn’t work out that way, but that’s not stopping Ian Charnas.

Ian made this wearable jet engine that — instead of launching him into the air — propels him forward on roller skates.

It took Ian 3 months to build the final jetpack, and in some ways it’s a more approachable project than you’d think. Specifically, because you don’t have to build a jet engine. In the United States, at least, apparently there are no legal restrictions around the buying and selling of jet engines. So Ian was just able to buy this little cutie.

The real effort goes into engineering a way to mount the engine safely to your body. To make it happen, Ian makes liberal use of the metal shop — the welder, the water jet, the metal brake and the mill.

The end result looks straight out of the ACME catalog. No one on this video is commenting “Why didn’t you just buy this on Amazon?” This is a delightfully one-of-a-kind project — and surprisingly, not nearly as deadly as you’d assume, thanks to the heat shielding built into the frame.

The favorite thing I learned from Ian’s project is that while jet engines may be relatively easy to come by — jet fuel is not. Ian was eventually able to procure some fuel from a local private airport — but it explains why jet engine projects are pretty rare.

Go check out Ian’s video. It’s highly entertaining, and you get a chance to influence what he’ll attach a jet engine to next.

Now for some news. Google is holding a contest to get people to submit projects that use their TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers platform.

If you’ve been looking for an excuse to incorporate machine learning into a project idea, this could be just the motivation you need. 5 winners will get $2,500.

There’s an easy form for submitting your project details, and a handful of example projects with code you can adapt for your own ideas. Entries need to be submitted by July 19th.

One project I’ve already seen come out of this is Charlie Gerard’s Motion Controlled Streetfighter.

Using an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense board running TensorFlow Lite code, she’s trained it to interpret different hand gestures as fighting moves.

You can download the code from her Github, load it up on your own board, and play the live demo she made.

Or, using the Tiny Motion Trainer example code provided by Google, you can create something similar to create your own custom gesture controls for something else. It looks like a fun way to get into this stuff.

Another project that has me excited to explore some new tools is this augmented reality experience by Nicole He and Eran Hilleli.

It’s called Invisible Roomates, and it was made for Space10 and IKEA. The idea is to visualize all of the devices on your home network as little cartoon creatures. You can see them pass data back and forth, or wake up or go to sleep — it’s adorable.

For some actual info on how it was made, check out the link in the description to Nicole’s newsletter. She talks about her approach, creating a node server to detect devices and data packets, and getting that all back to the Unity software where the AR experience happens. It’s fascinating stuff.

Now, for a beautiful hardware project, check out this infrared mirror by Reuben Strangelove.

He’s displaying the output of an Adafruit Infrared camera to a grid of Neopixels. A Teensy 3.2 board is running the code, making use of the FastLED library to make the visuals extra pretty and responsive.

For some extra eye candy, when the mirror doesn’t detect movement, after fifteen seconds it goes into a screen saver mode that shows off some cool, trippy animations.

You can find the code and design files all on his github.

Finally, coming full circle on awesome stuff to wear on your back, check out these articulating electric wings by OhioFlyer and his son Luca.

The design uses linkages of U-channel aluminum extrusion, with each wing driven by its own short throw linear actuator.

Across the wings, ¼-inch aluminum rods are attached, covered in fabric, to create the individual feathers. A rechargeable 12v battery wired to a rocker switch, drives the actuator motors in forward or reverse to open or close the wings.

It’s a great design, and there’s also a look at a smaller, single motor version down at the end of the Instructable.

Now for some tips and tools. On Makezine, Caleb Kraft explains how a maker named Jonathan Gleich uses a motorized camera gimbal as an assistive device. Jonathan’s hand tremors make it difficult to use a soldering iron, but by attaching the iron to gimbal he can stabilize the iron and complete his projects. It’s a cool hack.

On the Cool Tools channel, I take a look at a solid core jumper wire kit. This stuff makes breadboard projects so much cleaner.

If you’re an electronics engineer, you probably got hip to this stuff right out of the gate. But for us tinkerers and late-bloomers, most Getting Started kits omit these in favor of flexible wires, which have their use but get messy pretty quick.

Bottom line, if you don’t know about solid core breadboard wire or have any around, check out the video and consider picking up a kit.

We’ve been seeing a bunch of boards recently using the new RP2040 chip from Raspberry Pi, the same one used in their $4 Pico microcontroller board.

But I haven’t seen something like this before. This is the Maker Pi 2040 board from Cytron, distributed by Seeed. It’s a $10 board, designed for robotics, with two DC motor drivers, 4 servos, 7 inputs for Grove sensors, a piezo buzzer, and a built-in lipo charger for battery power.

Usually something like this is a $20 shield or hat that you stack on a microcontroller, but since the RP2040 is so affordable, they just threw it in. It’s all-in-one, and just 10 bucks.

Maybe it’s too good to be true, but it’s available for pre-order, shipping at the end of June.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, if you’re an aspiring hardware entrepreneur, be sure to check out the new edition of Digi-Key’s Solutions for Startups guide.

Plot your roadmap from concept to prototyping, funding to distribution. As you move through each section you’ll come across videos from Limor and Phillip from Adafruit relating their own experiences and advice.

It’s a great resource, and all free for the taking. Check it out.

And that does it for this week’s show, be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up, or leave a comment. Jetpack or wings? Which one would you rather have. You can also get on the Maker Update email list, so you never miss a show. A big thanks to my patrons on Patreon and especially to Digi-Key electronics for making this show possible. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you soon.