Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Update: When in Dome”.
This week on Maker update an interactive geodesic, dome wire, bending animatronics and ornament printing ornament motion machines and eye tracking. I a unique wire strainer and a closer look at different types of e6000. Hey I’m Donnell Bell and welcome to another maker update. I hope 2019 is treating you well so far.
I have a lot of projects to catch you up on. So let’s get started with the project of the week on Instructables Amy. Good child has an outstanding guide on how she made this geodesic dome covered with over 4,000 LEDs that react to a Microsoft Kinect.
This is Amy’s final project for her master’s at the Bartlett School of Architecture, she’s, using a build with hubs kit to create a dome from connectors and wooden beams for the LEDs. She had to cover 33 plywood triangles with a hundred and 70 lights per panel using addressable LED strip. A combination of eleven fade candy LED controllers, each with their own power supply were needed to drive all the lights. Then came the programming. She used. The free program.
Processing to map out and coordinate all the different lights and take input from a first-generation connect. The Kinect is mapping the distance and movement of people in the dome to color hues that are fed into the processing animation sketch. The whole thing is awesome and Amy generously includes every detail, template and bit of code go check it out. It’S time for some news.
Earlier in December, Disney research published a video and PDF of how to use cnc wire bending joints to create animatronic or robotic skeletons that bend in predictable ways. The team developed a program that could analyze a computer animated character and then determine the best placement and types of bends to use in order to recreate the same movement in armature wire. The software isn’t something you can play with, but the ideas are right for using in your own project. I also think that CNC wire, bending machines still haven’t made the jump into desktop maker tools, mostly because there isn’t a broad demand, but if you could bundle an application like this for making lightweight robotics that could be something more projects.
On Christmas Eve, Sean Hodgins released a guide on how he made this 3d printed ornament, that 3d prints its own mini ornaments. He pulls off the seemingly impossible trick by creating a little vat of resin that sits on top of a mini LCD, backed by UV light. It works like a tiny SLA printer curing the resin layer at a time and raising the print out of the liquid. I know the ornament season is over, but you owe it to yourself to check out all the little hacks and techniques Sean uses to get this working for something totally.
On the other end of the spectrum, wonderful idea, co-published a guide on how to use a simple system of 3d printed and laser-cut parts to create battery-powered motion machines. These basic inexpensive, robotic platforms are a great way to introduce kids to kinetic motion and the effect different shapes of cams have on how the bots move around. I saw some of these in action at East Bay, Mini Maker Faire and the kids have a lot of fun playing with them and rearranging the wheels. I also came across this project by homemade garbage for creating an animated LED eye that you can control from the movement of your actual eye.
There are two fun aspects of this project. The first is creating a big eye using strips of addressable LED over a kitchen strainer. The second and more unique challenge is creating a way to track your eye movements. The technique here is surprisingly simple: using two five-dollar reflectance sensors mount it on the inside of some glasses and pointed towards your eye and Arduino mini reads: the sensors and the code detects the whites of your eye moving and adjust the animation accordingly.
This also makes it able to detect blinks. It looks like fun and I hope so many mash this up with the animated I project by Phil Burgess. I had some tools and tips to share on Instructables loan soul.
Surfer has a guide up on using test tubes and a test tube rack to organize resistors. I’M not sure if I have the patience for it, but I love the way it looks by way of Emily Velasco. I learned about a collection of wire straightener designs by Roger Cheng. He has a great post up talking about the process of creating them with the goal of making it easier to make freeform circuit designs. Best of all he links to his CAD design on on shape, which has a free maker tier that you can sign up for to play around with I’ve been playing with these designs all weekend, and I think they’re great, the small ones are a quick print and You can size them up or down a percentage for different gauges and the results. Look nice Bob Claggett from I like to make stuff is making his own full-size r2d2 and posting video updates on his channel. If you’ve ever wondered about diving into the world of astromech fabrication, bob does a great job explaining the options. Finally, just this week, I published a new video on the cool tools channel looking at 8 different variations of the beloved maker adhesive Yi 6000 for years. I’Ve just been grabbing the standard formula at my local hardware store. But if you love this glue, there are options worth knowing about so check that out maker faire season officially kicks off on the 19th in Bangkok, Thailand, in the mean time, an interesting event in the San Francisco Bay Area worth checking out is the first-ever plotter people Meetup January 14th, at github, Lanois redmond from evil mad scientists will be one of the two speakers talking about plotter projects and the axial.
The event is free, all right, Matt does it, for this week’s show be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment get on the maker update email list. If you want to be kept up to date on each week’s show notes and a big thanks to my patrons on patreon, they are the only way I make a dime doing this show if this is something you enjoy consider joining up. Alright, thanks for watching I’ll, see you next week, you .