Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Update: Open Source Mech”.
This week on maker update a dance activated, sampler megabots goes open source, a futuristic bike light, a vertical turntable, five ways to up cycle old filament reels edge banding with bob miter saw with deresta and controller hacking for a great cause. Hey i’m donald bell and welcome to another maker update, i hope you’re all doing well. I have another great show for you today: full of projects and tips, but first, let’s get started with the project of the week check out this midi step interface by kilomx on instructables. It’S like a giant sampler that you control with your feet. The build uses, hexagon cuts of acrylic sheet and pvc, a lot of neopixels and an industrial grade limit switch for each pad that senses each press, the frame underneath each pad uses steel square tubing.
They also created a larger frame from steel to hold everything together. Xlr cables were used to reliably connect up each pad to a central computer. There are two cables per pad: one that handles neopixel power and data, and one for the switch all the cables feed into one box that has a beefy power supply to drive all those leds and a single board computer. One of the most interesting takeaways for me is that, instead of a raspberry pi and an arduino, they used a product called latte panda.
It’S a 120 windows, 10 computer that has an arduino, leonardo, coprocessor built in and a section for all the usual arduino io. So the computer handles all the audio playback and the arduino handles the switch input and neopixel code all on one board. I think that’s a neat idea in news this past week, the team behind the megabots giant fighting robots have open sourced the design for their robot iron glory. The files come as an autodesk inventor cad design.
You’Ll need to pay 25 to get it, but they’ll also send you a cool looking poster and honestly, if you ever want to build a giant fighting robot, this is a great place to start. I have some more projects to share the ruiz brothers. Have a new guide up on making a neopixel bike light? It’S a neat design that sort of looks like a mini jet engine as you’d expect. There’S some 3d printing involved, including a frame for the led rings and a separate battery pack that mounts on your bike frame.
One really nice touch on this project is that they used a color changing mode, select button on the battery case and made it so that the color of the button matches the color of the light. It’S a great look on instructables. The winner of the recent audio contest. Is this vertical turntable design by yappa spawns the design uses a stepper motor, an arduino, a servo, a tone arm and an internal amplifier there’s a lot to it.
But it’s a really cool idea and a great guide for building, even just the normal turntable, it’s time for some tips. For some reason, i came across a bunch of ideas on how to reuse old 3d printer filament reels on the 3d printing facebook group dennis lutton suggested using them to organize and store holiday lights, which sounds really smart and then on thingiverse caesar dom from prusa just Published four projects for reusing filament reels, though they’re specifically using proof cement filament, which has a unique real design. He shows you how to make a spirograph containers a chandelier and a windmill over on make zine mac bell, describes a process for cutting designs in cardboard, using a video projector to project a series of templates that you can cut by hand. He calls it a poor man’s laser cutter, but i think it’s a great idea that you can scale up or down for whatever you need he’s even built a dedicated app for it that you can download from github.
Bob claggett has a new bits. Video up that goes over techniques for adding edge banding to your plywood furniture projects. I had no idea, but apparently you can just iron this stuff right onto your wood. Jimmy deresta has a new video showing off tips and tricks for using the miter saw. I feel like it’s been a while, since we’ve seen a tips, video from jimmy focused just on a single tool. This one doesn’t disappoint on make scene gareth, branwyn’s tips of the week.
Roundup has tips on keeping wood putty fresh using heat activated sandpaper to make little sanding tools and modifying your breadboard for extra room, and finally, caleb kraft made an update to his site the controller project, to make it easier for people to request game controller modifications. For someone with unique physical needs and match them up with a maker to take on the project, if this is something you’d be interested in doing check out the site, along with caleb’s, step-by-step videos on modifying game controllers maker faires. This weekend we have rochester new york.
Montreal quebec, munich, germany, kolkata, india and poughkeepsie new york ones near you, don’t miss it. You can also check out makerfaire.com to find out when your local fare is happening, and that does it, for this week’s show be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. You can get on the maker update email list to get show notes emailed out to you automatically every week with a few bonus projects thrown in, and i volunteer my time to do this – show because i think it’s an important show to do.
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