This week on Maker Update: new tricks for an old game controller, 3D printed muscles, a pocket-sized LED cube, and an unbeatable bot.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.300]++

-=Project of the Week=-

PS4 Controller Breakout Board PCB by Becky Stern
https://www.instructables.com/PS4-Controller-Breakout-Board-PCB/

-=News=-

Low-Cost, 3D-Printed Pneumatic Muscles are “Easy to Make”
https://opentalk.iit.it/en/3d-artificial-pneumatic-muscles-for-future-makers/

-=More Projects=-

Tiny LED WiFi Companion Cube by Charlyn Gonda
https://charlyn.codes/tiny-led-wifi-cube/

I made an UNBEATABLE Robot! by Maker’s Muse
https://youtu.be/YWOqAwXmvJU

-=Tips & Tools=-

Full Control XYZ
https://fullcontrol.xyz/

Tips for CLEANEST Wire Management by Zibartas
https://youtu.be/dnUqBoIq0J0

Dupont connector lock by marelk485
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5409132

Cosplay Hacks By Phillip Burgess
https://learn.adafruit.com/cosplay-hacks

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

How to Convert Length, Width, Volume and Height
https://youtu.be/exk8cLifS-U

DK Conversion Calculator
https://www.digikey.com/en/resources/conversion-calculators/conversion-calculator-length

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: new tricks for an old game controller, 3D printed muscles, a pocket-sized LED cube, and an unbeatable bot.

Hey everyone, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Maker Update. In fact, it’s the 300th episode of Maker Update, which makes me feel old, and proud – let’s go with proud.

And as luck would have it, I’ve got a great show for you today. Let’s get started with the project of the week.

Becky Stern wants to give your old, broken PS4 controller a new lease on life. Because how tragic is it that this ergonomic configuration of buttons and joysticks are locked into a life of pixel pushing, when they could be controlling your next Arduino project.

But it’s no easy hack to liberate this thing. Every control is wired to the main board through this small, flexible membrane that pressure fits against conductive pads.

So to break out each function, Becky goes to work creating a whole new custom PCB intended to fit the same dimensions as the original board.

Not only does Becky nail the design – including the pressure fit pads for the membrane cable, and even a spot for the built-in speaker – but she’s open sourced the whole thing so you can make your own.

Or, to make it extra easy she has very affordably priced boards available through her online store, which you can get with some of the joysticks and buttons to save yourself some desoldering.

Once hacked, you can hardwire out all the controls to trigger or manipulate anything you want. Or, if you can think small, you can bake the project right into the controller – like Becky is doing for a music project she’s working on.

So if you’ve ever wanted to use an ergonomic game controller like this to control a project, now you’ve got a surefire way to make it work. I personally don’t have a project like that at the moment, but for the price of a board and a used PS4 controller, I might just put this together so I can have one on-hand.

Now for some news. Researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology and the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies have devised a new type of 3D printed pneumatic actuator.

They’re calling it a GRACE actuator. They’re printed in a soft, flexible resin to withstand the wear and tear of inflating and collapsing.

Not only does this make it relatively cheap to manufacture, but you also get some design advantages because you can bake the actuators right into a simplified design.

This hand, for example, is a single print with all the necessary actuators built into the design. Very cool idea.

Now for more projects. Charlyn Gonda has a new guide up on Adafruit, showing how she created this tiny, WiFi-connected LED companion cube.

The project uses six 1-inch, high density DotStar LED matrix displays, along with an Adafruit QT Py ESP32-S3 WiFi board, an accelerometer breakout, and a BFF charging board connected to a super tiny rechargeable battery.

The frame is 3D printed, which makes it a little fragile but also easy to repair.

The coolest part though, in my opinion, is that you can connect to the cube over WiFi to change out the animations, type a message for it to display, or even draw a shape using your finger.

It’s a very cool project, and very well documented. It’s a little pricey because of all those LED panels, but still much more affordable than those bigger LED cube projects.

For another tiny yet impressive project, Angus from Maker’s Muse shares a complete redesign of the ant-weight combat robot he built a few months ago.

This time around, it’s a lighter, lifter type robot with smaller motors, silicone tracks, and this absolutely tiny speed controller board from BotBit.

My favorite takeaway from this project is the explanation of how he was able to turn these novelty wristbands into tracks that wouldn’t slip off the wheels.

It seems counterintuitive, but by bulging out the middle of the wheel, the tracks naturally want to self-center as they rotate. It’s a mechanism called a “crowned pulley” and it’s kinda blowing my mind.

Just like the first robot design, Angus includes all the files and bill of materials here for you to recreate this robot. It really looks like a great entry point into RC project and combat robots.

Now for some tips and tools. Last week saw the launch of FullControlXYZ, a site with a growing list of pre-made, parametric 3D designs that showcase a very unique print method.

Instead of stacking up a 3D print using a series of purely horizontal layers, these designs take the print path in any direction.

There’s no special 3D printer required. The magic is all in the Gcode, which you can export directly from the FullControlXYZ website.

Some of the designs are just beautiful, aesthetically and mathematically. And some of the designs are more of a proof of concept, like this spool design that demonstrates how this technique can be used to create these seemingly impossible overhangs.

If it’s been awhile since your 3D printer felt magical, I’d give one of these designs a try.

On his YouTube channel, Zibartas demonstrates some techniques for creating a clean look for wire and cable management – especially when it comes to cosplay projects.

Velcro and zip-ties are quick and easy methods to get this done, but he also covers braided sleeves, combining sleeves with heat shrink, creating little bands of heat shrink, making fabric sleeves, and designing pre-formed cable runs.

On a related note, on Thingiverse, marelk485 has a collection of 3D printable snap-fit DuPont connector sleeves. With these, you can make single DuPont connections more durable, or group multiple cables into a more organized ribbon.

On Adafruit, Phillip Burgess has an epic collection of hacks for cosplayers. It covers way more than you think.

Yes there are tips for designing costumes or buying materials, but there’s also a ton of great tips here for the cosplayers that are really out in the world, traveling to Cons, improvising costume repairs, taking photos with fans.

Even if cosplay isn’t your thing, there’s some great gems in here on traveling, hotels, self-care, and taking great photos, things that could really benefit everybody.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out this short video on converting both metric and imperial measurements.

Not only is it a handy refresher, but it’s also a reminder that Digi-Key has a great online conversion calculator in their resources section.

You can use it to convert lengths, but also temperatures, volumes, weights, and even decimals to fractions. Dig deeper and you can find Digi-Key calculators for wire gauges, pressure, Ohms law and more.

Alright, and that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. I can’t believe it’s been 300 shows! A big thanks to Digi-Key electronics for making this whole thing possible. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you soon.