This week on Maker Update, a steering wheel for your Xbox controller, a new tax on filament, Adafruit reinvents the MEGA, two new 3D printed r/c boat designs, robot operation, a LEGO battery pack, a project board for Halloween, and drilling at a right-angle.

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Donald’s friendly robot hoard:

Tinkerbot on Let’s Robot
https://letsrobot.tv/robocaster/makerdonald/robot/67834441

Spottington on Let’s Robot
https://letsrobot.tv/robocaster/makerdonald/robot/33768290

Show Notes

Project of the Week

This Clever 3D Print Turns Thumbstick to A Steering Wheel
https://makezine.com/2018/08/16/this-clever-3d-print-turns-thumbstick-to-a-steering-wheel/

Original Steering Wheel design on Thingiverse by pixel2
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3049220

Couldn’t resist printing up Thingiverse thing 3049220 for my #forza obsessed son today. Had to sacrifice a skateboard bearing, but how cool is this mini steering wheel?! Great design by Brent Scott. #3dprinting #xbox

A post shared by Maker Project Lab (@makerprojectlab) on Aug 18, 2018 at 9:29pm PDT

News

TARIFF EXPANSION SET TO HIT 3D-PRINTING RIGHT IN THE FILAMENT by Dan Maloney
https://hackaday.com/2018/08/12/tariff-expansion-set-to-hit-3d-printing-right-in-the-filament/

THEO JANSEN INVENTS A FASTER, SIMPLER, WIND-POWERED STRANDBEEST by Steven Dufresne
https://hackaday.com/2018/08/16/theo-jansen-invents-a-faster-simpler-wind-powered-strandbeest/

Adafruit’s New “Grand Central” Board, a Return to the Arduino MEGA? by Alasdair Allan
https://blog.hackster.io/adafruits-new-grand-central-board-a-return-to-the-arduino-mega-3f1273b0030

More Projects

WiFi Propeller Boat II by gzumwalt
https://www.instructables.com/id/WiFi-Paddle-Boat-II/

Tiny Boat MK2 by Gophy
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3039719

Adabot Operation Game by John Park
https://learn.adafruit.com/adabot-operation-game

Tools/Tips

Online SVG tools for Cricut users by Clever Someday
http://cleversomeday.com/svgtools/

LEGO Compatible Battery Case by Ruiz Bros.
https://learn.adafruit.com/lego-compatible-battery-case

Adafruit Hallowing
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-hallowing/spooky-eyes

John Park overview
https://youtu.be/YovsR1I0pEM?t=7m54s

DeWalt Right-Angle Attachment for Drills and Drivers
https://kk.org/cooltools/dewalt-right-angle-attachment-for-drills-and-drivers/

Maker Faires

Trondheim Norway
Tulsa, Oklahoma USA
Springfield, Missouri USA

Sept 22+23 WORLD MAKER FAIRE NEW YORK

Find a Maker Faire near you:
http://makerfaire.com/map/

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, a steering wheel for your Xbox controller, a new tax on filament, Adafruit reinvents the MEGA, two new 3D printed r/c 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 a case of robot fever, and the only cure is more robots. I’ll leave a link to my growing family of internet-controlled robots in the show notes and I’ll try to leave one on when this video goes live so you can play around with it. But 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 you can use with car games.

The design prints in three pieces, though there’s two different types of steering wheels 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 thumbstick 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 tariff 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 Theo Jansen has been showing of a new, faster design for his beach-roaming Strandbeests. He calls it an Uminami, which means ocean wave in Japanese. It’s kind of a wind-powered skid that pulls this segmented body behind it that compresses and expands as it goes.

Compared to his other strandbeests, 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 MHz. 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 ago, this one is bigger and faster. It’s essentially using the same inexpensive electronics.

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 airboat design on Thingiverse by Gophy. This design uses tiny motors and a controller board pulled from a $10 toy quadcopter and mounts them on their side to create this mini airboat.

It doesn’t look quite as fast as Gregs, 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. 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 Cricut cutting machine users, but really can be useful for laser cutters, CNC machines, pen plotters, or anywhere SVG files are common.

The Ruiz Bros. have a guide up on making this 3D printed LEGO compatible battery case. It’s an 8×8 block that fits 3 AA batteries. Great for working into any motorized or light-up LEGO projects.

Also on Adafruit, there’s a new board out called the Hallowing. It’s a skull-shaped version of an Adafruit Feather M0 Express board, with a built-in display. It 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’m maybe a little too excited about this board, and 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. 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 faire.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. I enjoy reading them. You can get on the Maker Update email list to get show notes sent out to you the day of the show along with some bonus links for projects I couldn’t fit. And I volunteer to do this show because I’m crazy, but if you think it’s worth a few bucks, you can buy me a coffee using the link down here. Alright? Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next week.