Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Update: Thumbstick Steering Wheel”.
This week on maker update a steering wheel for your xbox, a new taxon filament adafruit reinvents, the mega two new rc boat designs, robot operation, a lego battery pack, a project board for halloween and drilling at a right angle. Hey i’m donald bell and welcome to another maker update, i hope everyone’s doing well. I’Ve been dealing with the case of robot fever and the only cure is more robots. I’Ll leave you a link to my growing family of internet controlled robots in the show, notes and i’ll try to leave one on when the show goes up so that you can play around with it. But for now, let’s get started with the project of the week. Brent scott posted this design of a 3d printed adapter for an xbox one controller. That turns it into a little steering wheel that you can use with car games the design prints in three pieces, though there’s two different types of steering wheels that you can try. You have to supply your own standard skateboard wheel, bearing, but aside from that everything just snaps right in on an xbox one controller, essentially you’re, using a linear, rack and pinion gear to push the thumb, stick back and forth, it’s a fast print with a fun payoff. I made one for my son this weekend and he got a kick out of it: lots of little news items this week on hackaday there’s a piece on how the next round of u.s tariff expansion could cause a dramatic price increase for 3d printer filament. The tariff is scheduled to go into effect tomorrow, august 23rd and imposes a 25 duty on both imported filament and the raw material that goes into creating it.
So even us-based filament manufacturers may be affected by the tariffs if they rely on some portion of imported materials. We’Ll see how this plays out, but it might not be a bad idea to stock up on good deals. While you can legendary maker and artist tail johnson has been showing off a new, faster design for his beach roaming strand beasts.
He calls it uminami, which means ocean wave in japanese is kind of a wind-powered skid that pulls the segmented body behind it that compresses and expands as it goes compared to his other strand beast. This design looks simpler to create and results in what seems like a faster design which isn’t to say that there’s any practical advantage to kinetic art pieces being fast, except to make them a little more terrifying. In last week’s, ask an engineer. Video adafruit’s lady ada showed off a prototype of a new board they’re working on called the metro, grand central.
It’S a relatively giant board modeled after the arduino mega form factor like the mega. It will be geared towards projects that could benefit from extra processing power or extra inputs and outputs. Adafruit’S version will be both arduino and circuit. Python compatible running on a sam d51 processor, which is a 32-bit arm, cortex m4 processor running at up to 120 megahertz.
No announcement yet on pricing and release date. It’S time for more projects. Greg zumwalt has another 3d printed, wi-fi controlled boat design. Unlike the paddle boat, i featured a few episodes back.
This one is bigger and faster, it’s essentially using the same inexpensive electronics. But what i love about this particular design is that greg has designed a pair of 3d printed drive shafts to spin the underwater propellers, while keeping the motors above water. It’S a smart design and looks like a lot of fun to give it some competition. I also found this 3d printed air boat design on thingiverse by gophie.
This design uses tiny motors and a controller board pulled from a 10 toy quadcopter and mounts them on their side to create this little mini airboat. It doesn’t look quite as fast as gregg’s and you can’t control it over wi-fi and you miss a chance to learn about arduino and motor drivers, but as a simple project and a fun way to repurpose a cheap drone. I think it’s a great project build them. Both for something totally different check out this robot operation game made by john park john’s using the capacitive touch pads on the adafruit circuit playground, express and running them out to copper tape surrounding the operation holes. If your metal tweezers touch the copper tape, a buzzer goes off on the circuit playground.
A printable template for the game is included. I have some more tips to share this week over on the clever someday blog. I found this great roundup of over 50 online tools for creating or working with svg files.
The roundup is intended for qriket cutting machine users, but really can be useful for laser cutters. Cnc machines, pen, plotters or anywhere svg files are common. The ruiz brothers have a guide up on making this 3d printed lego compatible battery case. It’S an 8×8 block that fits three double-a batteries great for working into any motorized or light-up lego projects.
Also on adafruit there’s a new board out called the holowing. It’S a skull, shaped version of an adafruit feather m0 express board with a built-in display that ships with an animated eyeball demo by phil burgess. You can wear it like a badge and it has a bunch of i o on the back for connecting up led strip. There’S a light sensor and a motion sensor built in along with a speaker, a power switch and a rechargeable battery connector that can charge over the usb port. I may be a little too excited about this board, but i think it’s great that adafruit is branching into making fun halloween specific project boards like this over on the cool tools blog. My review of the dewalt right angle, drill adapter is up. It’S been a handy solution for drilling or driving screws into tight spaces, and i recommend checking it out maker faires. This weekend we have trondheim norway, tulsa, oklahoma and springfield missouri, and don’t forget world maker faire coming up in new york on september 22nd and 23rd i’ll, be there hanging out all weekend and if none of those are near you head to makerfaire.com to find your local Fare and that does it, for this week’s show be sure to subscribe. Leave me a thumbs up or leave me a comment. I like reading those comments.
You can also get on the maker update email list, which gets you show notes sent out to you automatically the day of the show, each and every week, with a few bonus links thrown in there that i couldn’t fit into the show, and i volunteered to do This show, because i’m a little crazy, but if you think it’s worth a few bucks, you can buy me a coffee using the buy me a coffee link down here. Alright, thanks for watching and i’ll see you next week, you .