this week on maker update: making your own3d printed computer museum, fusion 360 learns a new trick, a smoking laser sword, a newdrawbot, a reason to buy a dental vacuform, and a giveaway for a full raspberry pi computersetup from wd labs. it’s wednesday december 7th, i’m donald bell, and welcome to another episode of makerupdate.
raspberry pi 3d printed case, i’m going to try something new this week. i found a lot of cool things to include inthe show and instead of tossing half of them out to keep things tight, i’m going to leavethem in. this is going to be the floppy episode, alright?
it’s just going to be loose. let me know what you think. let me know if you’re into it. but i will keep with the tradition of startingthings off with the project of the week. this week, over on adafruit the ruiz brothersnoe and pedro have a great tutorial on making this mini reproduction of the commodore pet. making its debut in 1977, the pet is consideredthe first personal computer ever available for retail customers. the version from the ruiz brothers is essentiallya 3d-printed shell for an adafruit feather
board with a 16x9 matrix of leds on top. all in, the electronics will set you backaround $42. the print comes in 10 small pieces, requiringonly a few dollars of filament. if you don’t have a 3d printer, orderingthe design printed on 3d hubs came to around $30 shipped. just the 3d print itself would be fun, butwhat i like about this project is that it’s a great excuse to dip your toe into the arduino-compatible adafruit feather boards. i’ve heard lots of great things about them,but i just haven’t had a project yet that could take advantage of their small size andpower and ecosystem of cool little shields
like that led matrix. but i want this. i also like that the code that animates thescreen is written by phil burgess, whose work on adafruit i really enjoy. the animation cycles between typing code,conway's game of life, the matrix effect, and a blank screen w/blinking cursor. if you’d rather lock it into just one ortwo of those, the code makes it very clear what to do. if you want to roll your own graphics, theadafruit graphics library for arduino has
some examples of what to do. when you’re all done, you get this neatlittle rechargeable vintage computer reproduction that you can keep on your desk just in caseanyone had any doubts about what a geek you are. while you’re at it, over on thingiversethere’s an amazing collection of other mini vintage computer designs. atari, amiga, trs-80, apple iic. some of them are super tiny, but a few ofthem look like they could be adapted to a similar led matrix retrofit if your commodorepet gets lonely.
and now for news. last week, autodesk showed off an unreleasedversion of their fusion 360 3d design software that seamlessly integrates eaglecad’s printedcircuit board design software. it’s not a huge surprise considering thatautodesk bought up eaglecads parent company cadsoft back in june, but it’s the firstwe’ve seen how the capabilities of both programs might work together. in the demo video, you can see how the designerwas able to zoom in from the design to the board, adjust the placement of a mountinghole, and then automatically re-route the circuit traces and pull back out.
it’s a neat trick, though arguably the sameengineer designing the vehicle isn’t the one tweaking the circuit design (or shouldn’tbe). but from an organizational perspective, ican see the appeal of having your whole team plugged into one piece of software that doesit all and tracks changes all in one place. like i said, though, this is a preview andi don’t believe autodesk has put a date on when we’ll actually see this. speaking of autodesk, this past friday i gotto go see the artist-in-residence showcase at autodesk’s pier 9 mega workshop, whichis also the home of instructables. i saw some amazing projects, including a 3dprinter that prints in glass, and the vote
with your feet project i mentioned back inepisode 8 -- the one with the flipdots! best of all, i got to catch up with scottmcindoe, whose projects i’ve geeked out on across multiple episodes of this show -- andi’m about to do it again. all of scott’s projects were on display,including the laser cut topographic maps from episode 5, the orbiting time-lapse rig, thewarping infinity mirror, and new projects scott published on instructables such as theblack hole table, a gorgeous periodic table lamp, and this solar analemma chandelier thattracks the position of the sun over the course of a year. i’ll include links to these new projectsbut to talk about them and do them justice
would take a whole other episode. i will say this, though. one project of scott’s that really drewa crowd and isn’t yet on instructables at the time i’m recording this, is this lightsaber,which i’m sure for legal reasons scott will have to call a laser sword or something. it’s a 3d printed hilt that incorporates12 red laser pointer lasers and an e-cig vaporizer just like his portable fog machine projectfrom episode 8. it’s non-lethal, and i can’t imagine it’stoo expensive to build. when scott gets the instructions up expectto see this again in an upcoming show.
i have a lot of tools and tips to cover thisweek. the first is the new and improved axidrawv3 from evil mad scientist laboratories. this is a $475 computer controlled pen plotterdesigned just to lay right on top of whatever you want it to draw on. it looks like a lot of fun and this versionruns twice as fast as the previous generation. over on adafruit, they’ve got two new arduino-compatible distance sensors that use a unique time of flight sensor that shoots out a tiny laserand looks to see how long it takes to reflect back. this makes it more narrow and specific thanan ultrasonic sensor, and more precise than
an ir sensor. it’s also super small and comes in two flavors-- one that measures motion close up (around 5-200mm), and one that looks a little furtherout (between 50-1200mm). they’re $14 and $15 respectively. here’s a cool trick from one of my favoritemakers, ben light, who took a $100 vacuform machine typically used for molding dentalimpressions, and used it to form custom enclosures for his hand made circuits. it looks really cool, the thin plastic sheetscost just pennies, you can paint it, you can cut away any openings with a razor blade.
i think it’s an awesome technique for enclosingyour prototype boards. way to go ben. i’ve got a link to the machine he used inthe show notes if you want to give it a try. finally, if you’ve ever wanted to setupa raspberry pi so that it just plays a loop of videos, maybe for a museum installationor an office waiting room -- the adafruit blog pointed me to the mp4museum.org project,which is just an sd card image preconfigured to play any videos on an attached usb drivein alphabetical order. that’s all it does. it boots up and automatically plays throughthe videos on loop until you turn it off.
and now you know. speaking of raspberry pi, this week’s showis sponsored again by wd labs, a raspberry pi obsessed division of western digital. they’ve got three new products out thati genuinely think you guys will be interested in. the first is called the wd pidrive node zero. it’s a raspberry pi zero fit onto a 314gbhard drive using an adapter that offers up 2 full-size usb ports. all together the whole thing is $44.95 andcomes with a microsd card preinstalled with
a custom version of noobs that runs the os from the hard drive. the second product is called the wd smartcable module. it’s an adapter for the raspberry pi computemodule that includes two usb ports, an ethernet jack, 802.11b/g/n wi-fi, anda multi-function push button. it’s $24.95, and you have to supply yourown module and power adapter, but i’ve never seen anything like it. it's like a full raspberry pi, but in a slimmer, oval form. the third is called the wd pidrive computecentre. it’s a pi 3, a 375gb hard drive, a case,a wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, drive cable, preloaded microsd card and power supply.
connect this up to your tv or monitor, andyou’ve got everything you need to start playing with raspberry pi right out of thebox. they sell the whole package, pi included for$109.99. and the really great news is that i’m givingaway one of these pidrive compute centres. all i need from you is your best idea fora raspberry pi project you want to try. it doesn’t have to be an original idea,just share with me a raspberry pi project that you’re itching to do, include somerelevant links and a convincing plea so that i feel good about sending you a $110 raspberrypi setup instead of keeping it for myself. the winner will be whoever i think has thecoolest, most interesting idea that i honestly
think they want to pull off. so email me your ideas at donald@makerprojectlab.com. i’m going to choose a winner next week. you got 1 week. all i’m asking for is an email of an idea. do it now. i’ll also pick 4 runner ups who will geta pidrive kit to give their pi projects more storage. the other cool thing about the pidrive system,which also comes in the compute centre, is
that you can set it up automatically with5 partitions that they call project spaces. so instead of having multiple projects storedon little microsd cards that you swap out and have to keep track of, you can jugglebetween multiple projects or setups using just one drive. i think that’s pretty cool. okay? email me your project ideas. i know all of you have some pi project bookmarkedsomewhere. that you're just waiting to get to. now's your chance.
or go scour instructables or make or hackadayor magpi. just find your idea, email it to me at donald@makerprojectlab.com. help me show wd labs that my audience is awesomeand that they’re smart to sponsor this show, ok? maker faires! there’s only one left for 2016 and it’sthis weekend in bogota columbia. if anyone’s watching this in bogota, letme know how it went. send me an email or leave a comment. alright and that’s it for this week’s show
i want to encourage all of you out there tostay safe, okay. i don’t know how to talk about the oaklandtragedy without crying, so i’m not going to. but i do want to let you know that i foundsome time this past weekend to get my fire extinguisher off the floor and mounted onthe wall and showed my kid how to use it. and i encourage all of you this week to findsome time to make your homes or your workspace
safer. ok? that’s it. thanks for watching and i’ll see you nextweek.
