This week on Maker Update, a servo word clock, the 2019 Hackaday prize, a phone that only plays hold music, organizing parts with google assistant, cheap robotics, and punching holes.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Week=-

Word Clock Controlled by 114 Servos By mosivers
https://www.instructables.com/id/Word-Clock-Controlled-by-114-Servos/

-=News=-

2019 Hackaday Prize Begins Now
https://hackaday.com/2019/04/03/2019-hackaday-prize-begins-right-now/

-=More Projects=-

Greatest Holdies: I Hacked an Old Phone to Play the Greatest Hold Music. By Fuzzy-Wobble
https://www.instructables.com/id/Greatest-Holdies-I-Hacked-an-Old-Phone-to-Play-the/

Related: 90s Payphone Boombox Hack
https://www.instructables.com/id/90s-Payphone-Boombox-Hack/

FindyBot3000 – a Voice Controlled Organizer By Inventor22
https://www.instructables.com/id/FindyBot3000-a-Voice-Controlled-Organizer/

Solenoid Steamengine by The_M3chanic
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3507489

Mohit Bhoite’s Satellite Pummer Circuit Sculpture
https://hackaday.com/2019/04/04/solar-circuit-sculpture-pumms-the-night-away/

Inspired by Gareth Branwyn’s Pummer Design
https://cdn.makezine.com/make/08/pummer.pdf

More of Mohit’s Circuit Sculptures
https://www.bhoite.com/sculptures/

ESP32 Micro Robot Arm by Electron Dust
https://www.instructables.com/id/ESP32-Micro-Robot-Arm/

Change unipolar 28BYJ-48 to bipolar stepper motor by Jangeox
http://www.jangeox.be/2013/10/change-unipolar-28byj-48-to-bipolar.html

3D-Printed Cassette Tape Player by Igor Afanasyev
https://imgur.com/a/HTWf5vJ

-=Tools/Tips=-

The Polygonia Design Suite, a web app for easily creating symmetrical, repeating patterns and designs
https://boingboing.net/2019/04/01/the-polygonia-design-suite-a.html
https://polygonia.design/

Elastic Ties – Optimized for 3D-Printing by Turbo_SunShine
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3514312

M3 screw knob (parametric) by plaztech
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3404522

Shop Tips: Tools for Punching Holes (via Tested)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuOJsm40Brc

-=Product Spotlight=-

SG90 micro servo motor (Positional Rotation)
https://www.digikey.com/short/pj0h7m

SG90 micro servo motor (Continuous Rotation)
https://www.digikey.com/short/pj0h7q

-=Maker Update Playlist=-

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHvctKwAXIO93gMWere3Yfa7VXI3dHs16

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, a servo word clock, the 2019 Hackaday prize, a phone that only plays hold music, organizing parts with google assistant, cheap robotics, and punching holes.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell and welcome to Maker Update, my first episode here on the Digi-Key YouTube channel. If you’re new to the show, basically I round up cool new projects from all over the web that I think you’ll be into, and include links to everything down in the description. To show you what I mean, let’s start with the project of the week.

Check out this servo controlled word clock by Mos Ivers on Instructables. You may have seen clocks like this before that spell out the time, but I guarantee you’ve never seen one like this.

Inside the enclosure here are 114 servos that move 3D printed letters in and out of focus. Each letter is backlit by its own addressable LED that helps each word stand out even more by changing its color.

Don’t let the minimal look fool you. It took 798 individual 3D printed pieces to make this, attached together with over 600 screws and around 500 individually soldered wires.

The brains of the whole project is an Arduino Nano connected to a Real Time Clock module. All the code you need to calibrate the servos and run the clock is included.

In fact, this incredibly thorough guide covers everything from 3D printing, laser cutting, wiring, and frame construction. There’s even a Fusion 360 file that you can pull apart and have fun with. It’s an incredible project and a very unique clock.

Some news to share this week — the 2019 Hackaday Prize is now underway, and Digi-Key is one of the sponsors. This is an annual competition to encourage engineers, makers, hackers, artists and hobbyists to really focus on collaborating around a project they propose.

Often there’s a theme or a number of themes. This year’s theme is to get beyond the prototype and create a product that could actually be manufactured.

The Grand Prize, which will be decided in November, will win $125,000 and a design residency at SupplyFrame. But along the way there are a number of $10,000 prizes attached to the themes of Concept, Design, Production, Benchmark, and Communication.

So if you’ve been sitting on a cool idea, this is a great excuse to give it a try.

Speaking of great ideas, let’s run through some more projects. Fuzzy Wobble has a great one showing how he turned an old landline phone into a jukebox of the world’s worst hold music.

He calls it the Greatest Holdies, and to make it work he’s using an Arduino Mega, and the Adafruit Music Maker Shield, which stores all the music on a micro SD card and works with a bunch of audio formats.

If you’ve ever looked at an old phone and thought about hacking it, this is a great place to start. Also, check out his older guide on hacking a full sized payphone into a jukebox for 90s music.

You also have to see how Dustin Dobransky made a voice controlled parts bin assistant he calls the FindyBot3000.

With it, you can ask your Google Home to tell you which bin has your LEDs, or your breadboards and it will light up the bins that match your request.

But you can also search by tags, like things that are red, or tools, or IoT — whatever you define in the database you set up ahead of time.

For the hardware, Dustin is using a Particle Photon board programmed with Arduino, and addressable LED strip.

The software is the really intense part of this, which bounces from Google Assistant to If This Then That, to Microsoft Azure, which looks at an SQL database you’ll need to build listing and tagging all your components.

It’s way more than I’m capable of doing, on many levels, but it’s cool to know it’s possible, and it may be a useful way to go for anyone dealing with large, critical organization problems.

For something more my speed, check out this solenoid-driven steam engine on Thingiverse by The Mechanic. Not really a steam engine, since it’s all electrical, but it looks just as satisfying, and much less likely to blow up in your face.

The project is mostly made from 3D printed parts and a handful of small nuts and bolts. You’ll also need a ball bearing, a magnet, and a limit switch. What I think is kinda cool is that you have to wind your own coil to build the solenoid. The end result is a pretty cool desk toy, or even something you could give as a gift.

Another gift-worthy geek sculpture is this freeform solar circuit design by Mohit Bhoite (boy-tay). If you’ve never seen any of Mohit’s brass rod circuits before, be sure to see the link in the description.

For this satellite-inspired design, Mohit is using a type of BEAM robotics circuit called a “pummer”. It absorbs light during the day and then pulses the LED light at nighttime.

To learn more about pummers, I’ve got a link in the show notes to an old Make magazine article by Gareth Branwyn that inspired this particular circuit.

You also need to check out this robot arm that Electron Dust was able to make using $3 stepper motors and an ESP32 project board, programmed with Arduino.

Aside from being an inexpensive robot arm, there are two noteworthy angles on this project. One is that by using the faster processor on the ESP32 board, he was able create a stepper motor driver library that uses ultra smooth sine wave velocity curves.

I’m not smart enough to explain how it works, but you can see just by looking at it the way it locks in and out of position that it’s unusually smooth for a robot made out of scrap wood.

The second cool tip from this is that you can modify these cheap stepper motors by cutting a trace on the built-in driver board and instead, connecting them up to an equally cheap A4988 stepper driver. The payoff is better torque and precision out of a motor that costs less than a sandwich.

Finally, a project that demonstrates what a difference an enclosure can make. To update the look of an old portable cassette player, Igor Afanasyev designed this 3D printed enclosure that puts the playback mechanism front and center.

The dials and switches also got an update with salvaged components that fit the Dieter Rams retro aesthetic of the new design.

Aside from a few new LEDs he wired in for a cool look, the cassette player itself is essentially unchanged. I think it’s a cool idea, and for better or worse, a new excuse for me to hoard more thrift store electronics.

We’re almost done here but I have a few extra tips to share. First, through Gareth Branwyn on Boing Boing, I learned about the Polygonia.Design web app. You can create a free account that lets you make intricate patterns that you can download as SVG or DXF files and drop into your laser cutter or 3D printer. If you’re making a project enclosure and you want a little fancy touch, this is one way to go

On Thingiverse, I came across this quick print that lets you turn a rubber band into a bongo tie. These are great for tying up cables or extension cords.

I also found this little 3D printed knob that fits right into an M3 hex screw. What’s cool about this is that the design is parametric, so you can use the Thingiverse Customizer tool to adjust the knob and socket and knurled edge to fit what you need.

Over on the Tested channel, Sean has a great video showing a range of tools used for punching holes. From leather punches to precision metal punches, it’s a 7-minute crash course on a lot of the options out there worth knowing about.

Finally, I like to do a little product spotlight at the end. This week, inspired by the servo controlled word clock, I thought we’d take a look at the same SG90 Micro Servo used to move those letters in and out of focus.

These are available on Digi-Key for under $5 and you can get them in two flavors. The standard option is what’s called a positional rotation servo that’s limited to 180 degrees of movement. That’s what’s used on the word clock.

What I didn’t know is that you can also get this same servo in a continuous rotation option. This means it can continuously rotate in either direction. The downside is that you can’t recall these back to a home position — so they’d be no good for something like the word clock.

But what’s cool is that you can use these like little geared motors for slowly moving things around. They’re great for little robots and because of the design there are all kinds of interesting attachments you can stick on these. You can find Digi-Key links for both options down in the description.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, and because this is my first show on Digi-Key, I’d really appreciate you leaving a thumbs up here or a comment about a project you liked from the show. I also encourage you to get on the Maker Update email list, so you can get show notes sent out to you each week along with a few bonus projects that I couldn’t fit. If this is your first Maker Update, I’ll also include a link to check out old episodes. A big thanks to my patrons on Patreon. Thank you all for watching, and I’ll see you next week.