This week on Maker Update: text for your chest, a robot that writes on tape, thumb actuated throttles, hot glue gem charms, threaded inserts, and beer crates for your batteries.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.284]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Real-Life Subtitles by Zack Freedman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTK8dIBJIqg

-=More Projects=-

Masking Tape Plotter by MichiMartini
https://hackaday.io/project/185279-masking-tape-plotter

Hot Glue Gem Charms by Randomona
https://www.instructables.com/Wire-Rimmed-Hot-Glue-Gems-Charms/

Thumb Speed Control for Mobility Scooter by Rays Fix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAEXZgYUG6E

-=Tips & Tools=-

How to Use Threaded Inserts by Sean Charlesworth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u1z1bApFo4

Cura 5.0 Review by Lost In Tech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRyRlEzUIaA

What Glues Work on 3d Prints by Thomas Sanladerer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGE509zjf7E

Cheap Flocking Materials by Bill Making Stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duDjTX6-abw

Beer Crate Battery Holder by Jarda K 66
https://www.printables.com/model/149774-beer-crate-battery-holder-aa-aaa-boxes

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

What is an Inductor?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-zzmhCDIt4

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: Text for your chest, a robot that writes on tape, Thumb actuated throttles, Hot glue gem charms, threaded inserts, and beer crates for your batteries.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner and I hope you’re all doing great and your projects are coming together without too many snags. We’ve got a great show for you so let’s check out the project of the week.

Closed captions are a wonderful way to enhance your viewing of movies and television. I know some people find them distracting but really, they can help fill in gaps of dialog you may have misheard, sometimes seeing the spelling of a proper noun can help clue you into its cultural origins, and most importantly, they can help bridge an accessibility gap for any deaf or hard of hearing friends you might have. But the biggest problem with captioning is you don’t get them for conversations you have in the real world with real people.

Until today. Everyone’s favorite internet cyborg Zack Freedman has modified this hoodie with a delightful, lime green-framed screen, a shoulder mounted Raspberry Pi, and a lavalier microphone to try to bring real-time captioning to in person conversations.

The brains of the project is a cloud-based, real time speech to text service from a startup called Deepgram. They’ve done all of the code heavy lifting to detect and parse the speech, but that doesn’t mean Zack’s coding job is done. He needs to parse the speech into manageable chunks that can be handed off to the Deepgram API so they can turn it into text. And then the returning text needs to be displayed on the screen long enough that it can be read easily.

With everything bolted together he was able to take the realtime captioner on its shakedown run at the local Microcenter. And to be honest, it worked pretty well. The single biggest issue he found was that the lavalier microphone was a lot less isolating than he’d planned on, but that just meant that the folks he was chatting with got to be captioned as well. It’s a fun project, and should be pretty easy to pull off on your own if you wanted to give it a try.

With that out of the way, more projects! On hackaday I discovered this masking tape Pen Plotter by michimartini. Presented as a label maker whose expendables are nearly free, this is a 3d printed armature that advances and retracts a spool of masking tape and moves a pen on the Y axis to write whatever you want on the tape. The whole thing runs on an Arduino Nano with a CNC shield. An Odroid C1 handles the hard computational work, but you could probably replace it with a Raspberry Pi. Like a lot of small pen plotter projects, the linear system from a DVD drive moves the pen, and a micro hobby servo moves it up and down. This seems like a fun one to build, and you can get all the code and files by following the link down in the description.

On instructables I found this project for making wire wrapped hot glue charms by Randomona. These are cool little jewelry pieces you can make pretty easily. She begins by creating a boundary out of craft wire and then placing it over a backing material. That backing material is where you can get really creative. Aluminum foil works great since you can color it with sharpies and show off different textures, but you can use craft paper, or paint, or just experiment with your own ideas. Then you flood the wire with the clearest hot glue you can find. The surface can fog up over time, but you can preserve the shine with a bit of clear nail polish – it’ll help seal up the back too.

And on the 3d printing facebook group I found this thumb throttle modification for a mobility scooter by Rays Fix. Ray’s father recently had a stroke and needed to be able to use the scooter with just one hand – normally the throttle is on one side and brake/reverse on the other. Fortunately the two levers are connected, so he designed and 3d printed this mechanism to make it easy for his father to control the scooter with just his thumb. The bonus feature of the mechanism is tailoring the top speed of the scooter by modifying the length of this push rod. After a few iterations he was able to nail down an appropriate top speed and a good reverse speed too. Check it out.

Time for some tips and tools, On Tested, Sean Charlesworth has a comprehensive guide on adding threaded inserts into just about any material – wood, 3d printed plastic, acrylic, even metal. Sean covers everything from the humble T-Nut to helicoils and rivet nuts – and he shows a ton of helpful techniques for working with each of them. I thought I was familiar with most of these, but I’d never seen these knurled press fit inserts that have a split flared collar that expand the first time you thread a screw in. If you need to add machine screws to any project, give this one a watch.

This kinda got lost in the excitement of the ultimaker / makerbot merger news, but Cura 5 was released a few weeks ago. It might not seem like a huge change, but this video from Lost in Tech shows that its actually a pretty massive upgrade. The biggest changes are in the back end of cura engine – the slicer now has the ability to solve for line widths that are narrower than the diameter of your nozzle. This will make printing fine details with an FDM printer a lot more possible than before. It’s not all perfect though, since its an early release there are a lot of UI bugs, and there’s a number of plugins that haven’t made the transition yet. So it might be worth a wait before installing, or if you can live with those limitations, check it out.

On YouTube, Thomas Sanladerer has a video on the best adhesives to use to attach 3d printed parts. I see this question get asked all the time, and while there’s a handful of go-to answers, Thomas is making a comprehensive test of hot glue, CA glue, two part acrylic, JB Weld and VHB tape. With all the test probes glued up, he then unleashes a couple of torture tests on them to see which is the strongest. I suppose it isn’t too surprising that the CA glue and the 2-part glues held the strongest and did the best at filling any gaps. While some of the others – barely held at all. Granted, these tests are a worst case scenario for this kind of glue joining, and he explains where some of the other adhesives can still be useful.

If you’re into model making or painting, Bill Making Stuff’s recent video about DIY flocking is full of great little hints. A painted miniature just isn’t complete with a bare base, and this video will get you through the whole process of making a proper base without breaking the bank – from thrift store wooden coasters, aquarium gravel, grass and foliage made from chopped up twine – all of this stuff can really add up when you buy it from the hobby shop, but can be a lot more affordable if you buy it elsewhere.

And finally, there’s no small number of 3d printable organizers for batteries, but I’ve been really enjoying these beer crate battery olders by Jarda K 66. The AA battery crate holds 12 batteries and the AAA holds 20. They’re a fairly quick print, batteries are easy to get out, they’re stackable, and they look great. I enjoyed them so much I designed my own extra long one for my Panasonic camera batteries.

For this week’s digikey spotlight, they’ve got a new video in their Another Teaching Moment series about Inductors. Inductors are nothing more than coils of wire that generate a magnetic field. The clever part is that they can store electricity in that magnetic field. These can be helpful because it allows them to resist changes in the circuit – if you want the voltage of your circuit to rise gradually when you connect a power source, an inductor can do this – or it can stabilize a circuit if power is briefly disconnected. They sound super useful, and the best part is, you can make them yourself.

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show! Thank you so much for watching, I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, give us a thumbs up, leave us a comment, maybe sign up for the Maker Update email list – you’ll get the show sent directly to you every week, and maybe you can still get in on Donald’s shop purge. Big thanks to Digikey for making this all possible! Take care, we’ll see you soon.