Intro

Hello World, and welcome to That Maker Show with me, chalkers, your host to all things new in the maker movement.

This week we’re talking about virtual reality hoverboards, musical disk drives, a littleBits Arduino module and an awesome kickstarter project.

Story 1: Virtual Reality Hoverboard

Whilst there’s still a year for the Hoverboard to get invented, you’ll have to make do with a virtual reality version.

Over on the Hack A Day blog, a post showcases a project by YouTube user cratesmith. It’s a virtual reality version of a hoverboard using an Oculus Rift and a Wii Balance Board.

It’s great to see off the shelf hardware being mashed together to make awesome projects like this.

Story 2: Musical Disk Drives

Sticking with the Back to the Future theme, YouTube user Arganalth built a project that combines an Arduino, Raspberry Pi and a mixture of floppy and hard drives to create an orchestra in a box.

The Pi sends information to the Arduino, then the Arduino controls the disk drives, which produce a sound. The result is an awesome rendition of the Back to the Future theme. Over on his channel there’s plenty of other examples, so check them out!

Story 3: littleBits Arduino Module

Snappable electronics kit, littleBits have just gone digital. littleBits allows you to create analog circuits by snapping magnetised boards together. Now they’ve released an Arduino compatible board for you to write your own logic and take your circuits to the next level and get digital!

Story 4: Kickstarter of the Week

This week’s awesome Kickstarter project is the MagicBox.

MagicBox is a fully enclosed system to give a professional finish to your 3D prints. Place your print in the the chamber, the chamber becomes pressurised and acetone vapor smooths those rough ridges on your 3D prints.

If you want to make a professional 3D print, why not back the project now!

Outro

Once again, thanks for watching, remember to subscribe for your weekly dose of maker news.

Notable mentions

Hit me up @chalkers on twitter if you have any stories you’d like me to cover. If they don’t make it into the show I’ll include them as notable mentions in the show notes.

Hosted and Written by: Andrew Chalkley (@chalkers)
Produced by: Michael Poley (@michaelpoley)

Intro

Hello World, and welcome to That Maker Show with me, chalkers, your host to all things new in the maker movement.

This week we’re talking about a software giant getting into 3D printing hardware, the Arduino Zero, NFC manicures and an awesome kickstarter project.

Autodesk’s 3D Printer

The leading 3D modelling software-maker, Autodesk, is going into hardware. They’re releasing their own stereolithographic 3D printer.

Autodesk wants drive the adoption of its new Spark software. Autodesk wants Spark to be used by 3D-printer manufacturer startups, in the same way Android has been used for smartphone manufacturers. Other manufacturers can use Spark to power their 3D printers while experimenting with the design and polymers.

Arduino Zero

Arduino have officially announced the Arduino Zero. A 32-bit big brother to the 8-bit Arduino Uno.

All digital pins (except the transmit and receive pins) are now PWM. The Analog pins now offer 12-bits of resolution opposed to the 10-bits on the UNO. It also sports an embedded debugger so no additional hardware is needed. Details on pricing and availability are sparse but for more technical details check out the Arduino site.

NFC Manicure

Becky Stern over on the Adafruit YouTube channel shows a couple of experiments with NFC. She embeds them in novel places so it’s easy to unlock your Android smartphone.

She shows a couple of examples of embedding NFC tags into rings but the most fascinating example is painting an NFC tag on to your thumb nail with nail polish. Funky!

Kickstarter of the Week

This week’s awesome Kickstarter project is an ISP shield.

ISP or In System Programming is a way to shrink your projects down. If you don’t want to embed your full Arduino in your projects and want to program the Atmel chips to embed them instead, this shield is for you. It’s compatible with Arduino Uno and Leonardo and their compatible clones.

Outro

Once again, thanks for watching, remember to subscribe for your weekly dose of maker news.

Notable mentions

Hit me up @chalkers on twitter if you have any stories you’d like me to cover. If they don’t make it into the show I’ll include them as notable mentions in the show notes.

Hosted and Written by: Andrew Chalkley (@chalkers)
Produced by: Michael Poley (@michaelpoley)

Intro

Hello World, and welcome to That Maker Show with me, chalkers, your host to all things new in the maker movement.

This week we’re talking about DIY 3D filament colouring, creating shorter meetings, a MagPi’s birthday and an awesome kickstarter project.

Ultimate Filament Colorer

Mathew Beebe came up with a novel way of printing in colour with your 3D printer. Instead of buying several colours, which could be quite expensive, just pass your clear filament through the center of your favourite coloured Sharpie!

Mathew also says that passing the filament through the Sharpie before the extruder, cleans the filament. The ink cartridge of the marker consists of a fibre type material which catches dust particles quite nicely.

You’ve had your time!

This week’s Weekend Project by Make is the Bleeping Talk Timer. Do you or your co-workers talk too much in meetings. Well in this project you can build a simple countdown timer that buzzes you when your time is up.

This project doesn’t require an Arduino and makes use of the 555 timer. Check out the blog post and video for more info.

Happy Birthday MagPi

Earlier this week the Raspberry Pi magazine named the MagPi celebrated it’s 2nd Birthday.

The MagPi is a free to download and read magazine with countless tutorials and projects. For those of you who like the feel of a physical magazine in your hands you can purchase a copy too. In this birthday issue there’s £2000 worth of goodies up for grabs!

Kickstarter of the Week

This week’s awesome Kickstarter project is called the AttoDuino.

The AttoDuino has a built-in bluetooth module, battery management, and floating-point coprocessor. It can also be programmed wirelessly too!

If you need wireless and a little more punch to your Arduino projects check out their Kickstarter project now.

Outro

Once again, thanks for watching, remember to subscribe for your weekly dose of maker news.

Notable mentions

Hit me up @chalkers on twitter if you have any stories you’d like me to cover. If they don’t make it into the show I’ll include them as notable mentions in the show notes.

Hosted and Written by: Andrew Chalkley (@chalkers)
Produced by: Michael Poley (@michaelpoley)

Intro

Hello World, and welcome to That Maker Show with me, chalkers, your host to all things new in the maker movement.

This week we’re talking about flying drones with a first person view, Raspberry Pi clones, DIY light painting and an awesome kickstarter project.

FPV Drones

Over on Mats Krüger Svensson’s github profile there’s the source code and plans on how to use an Oculus Rift to give yourself a first person view when flying a drone.

There’s information on the hardware you’ll need and a two page abstract for the project for you to chew over.

Banana Pi

Love the Raspberry Pi but want a little more power? How about the Banana Pi by Lemaker. This unofficial souped-up clone supports Android 4.4, Debian, Ubuntu and a modified Raspbian operating system. It has a dual-core ARM Cortex A7 processor, 1 GB RAM, an IR Receiver, microphone and even a SATA port for full blown hard drives. Of course it has the usual SD card slot.

After shipping it’ll have cost you around 74 bucks to get one in your hands. If you need a more powerful Pi then this maybe for you. You should also check out Kano’s first look review of Banana Pi where they compare the speed and compatibility to the trusty Raspberry Pi.

What’s that in your eyes?

Adafruit released an updated MiniPOV or Mini Persistence-of-Vision project recently. It’s a fun project that is designed to get you comfortable soldering and you get a cool light painting toy at the end. You can program it via USB using the Processing platform to update the patterns you can light paint. It’s also Arduino compatible, I mean what isn’t nowadays and can be customised to your heart’s content.

Kickstarter of the Week

This week’s awesome kickstarter project is The Micro, an auto leveling, easy to use, cheap 3D Printer.

We had Pirate3D’s Buccaneer last year, now, it’s M3D’s turn. They claim it works straight out of the box, just plug it in, download a model and print. It sports a seamless design and power efficient electronics. Take a look at their Kickstarter project for further details but it looks like this could be a winner for those new to 3D printing.

Outro

Once again, thanks for watching, remember to subscribe for your weekly dose of maker news.

Notable mentions

Hit me up @chalkers on twitter if you have any stories you’d like me to cover. If they don’t make it into the show I’ll include them as notable mentions in the show notes.

Hosted and Written by: Andrew Chalkley (@chalkers)
Produced by: Michael Poley (@michaelpoley)

Intro

Hello World, and welcome to That Maker Show with me, chalkers, your host to all things new in the maker movement.

This week we’re talking about 3D printed hands, DIY Google Glass, a Raspberry Pi cell phone and an awesome kickstarter project.

$50 Cyborg Hand

The folks over at 3DUniverse.org have 3D printed a hand for a 53 year old man, who was born without most of his left hand. The cost of the material and parts comes to just about 50 bucks. Surprisingly he gives it a glowing review and said it performed better than a $42,000 device he already been using.

Even if you factor in the price of a “prosumer” 3D printer the cost of printing your first hand is far more cheaper than the traditional devices.

DIY Google Glass

Can’t afford Google Glass or are you a little freaked out by Google seeing everything you do? Why not make your own indie-style face-mountable wearable computer?

Over on the Adafruit youtube channel there’s a short video covering a tutorial. It involves disassembling a pair of video glasses and 3D printing a new enclosure that can even be affixed to your own prescription lenses! The DIY Glass can be hooked up to a Raspberry Pi in your pocket! Cool!

Raspberry Pi Smartphone

Dave Hunt has made his own cell phone, the PiPhone. He uses about 160 bucks worth of parts and is able to create a solderless smartphone. It may look a little bare right now and you wouldn’t want to take it out with you. It’s a bit of a challenge but you could print your own enclosure to have the peace of mind that you know exactly what goes in your smartphone!

Kickstarter of the Week

This week’s awesome kickstarter project is reflow soldering controller called the Reflowster.

It’s a smart outlet designed to instantly turn your toaster oven into a reflow soldering station. What reflow soldering is is a process to solder a whole PCB board at once by first applying paste to the board and parts and then baking it. This results in a finish seen on commercially soldered boards.

This is different to other DIY solutions out there because it requires no hacks to your toaster oven itself. Awesome! If this type of soldering is what you’re looking for in your projects back this Kickstarter now!

Outro

Once again, thanks for watching, remember to subscribe for your weekly dose of maker news.

Notable mentions

Hit me up @chalkers on twitter if you have any stories you’d like me to cover. If they don’t make it into the show I’ll include them as notable mentions in the show notes.

Hosted and Written by: Andrew Chalkley (@chalkers)
Produced by: Michael Poley (@michaelpoley)

Intro

Hello World, and welcome to That Maker Show with me, chalkers, your host to all things new in the maker movement.

This week we’re talking about building houses under 3 hours, printing food, gigantic neopixel rings and an awesome kickstarter project.

Printing with Cement

A few weeks ago I told you about a dutch architecture firm, Dus Architects, wanting to 3D print a canal house out of plastic – in Shanghai, WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. are printing with cement, and can build 10 houses in under 24 hours.

The houses are fairly small at 650 sq feet and cost $4,800 to make. It’s quite interesting to see 3D printing bleeding into architecture and that skills learnt on the desktop are bleeding through there too.

Food Magic

The same may be true of in the kitchen. Natural Machines have released details on their latest kitchen appliance, a 3D food printer called the Foodini.

The printer can be used to print sweet, savory and fresh food. Examples on their site include cookies, burgers, chocolate, fish and chips, sweet potato hashbrowns, pizza, ravioli and spaghetti.

They are currently Kickstarting the Foodini now.

DIY Ring Light

Over on the Adafruit blog there’s a project that shows how to use their 60 NeoPixel Ring as a light source for your macro or close up shots.

The ring comes in 4 parts that needs to be soldered together. You can 3D print a mount to turn this ring into a camera light. The electronics enclosure fits into any DSLR’s hot shoe. Awesome!

Kickstarter of the Week

This week’s awesome kickstarter project is the Illuminated Raspberry Pi Safe Shutdown Switch.

This switch communicates with the Pi’s OS to tell it to shut down, once the OS finishes, it stops the power.

The project is already funded so it’s a sure bet if you back it you’re going to get it, it’s reasonably priced and what I like about these small projects is that it’s scope is limited so generally they don’t suffer from the same delays as the bigger projects.

Outro

Once again, thanks for watching, remember to subscribe for your weekly dose of maker news.

Notable mentions

Hit me up @chalkers on twitter if you have any stories you’d like me to cover. If they don’t make it into the show I’ll include them as notable mentions in the show notes.

Hosted and Written by: Andrew Chalkley (@chalkers)
Produced by: Michael Poley (@michaelpoley)

Intro

Hello World, and welcome to That Maker Show with me, chalkers, your host to all things new in the maker movement.

This week we’re talking about embeddable Raspberry Pis, musical gloves, an open source Siri alternative and an awesome kickstarter project.

RAM a Pi in to Your Project

This week the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a new form factor for the Raspberry Pi. It’s the in the form of an embeddable board with standard DDR2 SO-DIMM connector. It has 512 megs of RAM and 4 gigs of flash, so no more SD Cards!

You can buy them initially with the Compute Module and IO board for prototyping and now you can use a tonne more GPIO pins! Awesome.

Just don’t try and put it in to your PC or else it’ll probably destroy the universe or at least your computer’s motherboard along with your new Pi.

Musical Gloves

Musician Imogen Heap wants a more expressive way to perform music. But there was nothing out there that fulfilled her requirements. So for the past 4 years she’s teamed up with other makers and came up with gesture recognizing gloves.

Each gesture can be translated in to music, modifying sounds in all sorts of ways.

She’s currently Kickstarting the project and upon completion she’ll be releasing the gloves software and hardware to the open source community.

Control Everything with Your Voice

Siri betta watch out, there’s a new personal assistant the block, Jasper. And he’s open source, and extendable.

Over on the project page on github it show’s Jasper running on a Raspberry Pi with off the shelf hardware. It goes over the list of hardware you need and how to extend Jasper.

Now beside this being an awesome project, I love the fact that they used a video and their project page is like a product page selling the project to developers. This is a new standard which hopefully more projects will emulate.

Kickstarter of the Week

This week’s awesome kickstarter project is called the MicroView. A tiny Arduino compatible microcontroller with an embedded OLED screen.

For the first time you can see instantly what your Arduino is thinking. This can be used as a powerful tool for teaching electronics. The MicroView has a library for showing gauges, images, graphs and smiley faces!

It can be used for games, robot brains, wearables and much more. When backing make sure you get the MicroView with a programmer for easy plug-and-play flashing.

Outro

Thanks for watching, remember to subscribe for your weekly dose of maker news.

Notable mentions

Hit me up @chalkers on twitter if you have any stories you’d like me to cover. If they don’t make it into the show I’ll include them as notable mentions in the show notes.

Hosted and Written by: Andrew Chalkley (@chalkers)
Produced by: Michael Poley (@michaelpoley)

Intro

Hello World, and welcome to That Maker Show with me, chalkers, your host to all things new in the maker movement.

This week we’re talking about a gigantic 3D printer, coffee cups powered by Microsoft, an open source hardware laptop and an awesome kickstarter project.

3D Print a House

Over on The Guardian, Oliver Wainright talks of an ambitious project under taken by Dus Architects. They aim to 3D print a full size canal house.

The dutch architecture firm were already familiar with smaller 3d printers and sought out Ultimaker, a dutch 3d printer company, to help realise their dream of making a cheap, zero waste, recyclable canal house. With Ultimaker they made the KamerMaker or the Room Builder.They set the printer outside their office and has become quite the spectacle for passers by.

Windows on Devices

This week saw the Build conference from Microsoft. And they’ve got plans on bringing Windows to devices.

With devices like Intel’s Arduino compatible Galileo on the market and the increasing size of the maker movement, Microsoft have taken note. They’ve launched, all be it a soft launch, WindowsOnDevices.com where they suggest creating smart coffee mugs, talking bears and robots.

While the details are scarce at the moment, they’re planning to release an SDK soon. Whilst Microsoft aren’t known historically for their openness or friendliness to hackers, it seems that the tide is changing and may invite new people with different backgrounds and skillsets into the maker movement.

Novena Open Laptop

The Novena Open Laptop crowdfunding project has been launched by bunnie. This is probably one of the most important developments in the Open Source Hardware movement to date.

We see small electronics open sourced all the time, but a Laptop! That’s insanely awesome. Bunnie’s motto is if you can’t hack it you don’t own it.

It has the kitchen sink when it comes to ports and slots. It has two ethernet jacks, SD, micro-SD, micro-USB, regular USBs, serial, a high speed expansion port for an FPGA and much more.

There’s a bare board, desktop, laptop and heirloom versions and are available to backers on the Crowd Supply website.

Kickstarter of the Week

This week’s awesome kickstarter project is from the folks over at Polymakr.

They’ve come out with 3 new filament types. The first is an improved PLA called PolyMax. It’s impact strength is 20% greater than ABS and over 8 times greater than regular PLA.

The next is a flexible print material called PolyFlex. They claim that their flexible filament, unlike others currently out there is compatible with most (if not all) FDM/FFF printers.

Finally they’ve got PolyWood, a wood-like material that contains no wood at all. Other wood-mimic materials out there do have wood particles in the filament which can result in messier prints. The folks at Polymakr use a foam to pull this off, and to their knowledge they are the first to bring a printable foam filament to the market.

These types of innovations get me really excited for the types of things we can start making in our own homes. It’s exciting times!

Outro

Thanks for watching, remember to subscribe for your weekly dose of maker news.

Notable mentions

Hit me up @chalkers on twitter if you have any stories you’d like me to cover. If they don’t make it into the show I’ll include them as notable mentions in the show notes.

Hosted and Written by: Andrew Chalkley (@chalkers)
Produced by: Michael Poley (@michaelpoley)

Intro

Welcome to That Maker Show with me, chalkers, your host to all things new in the maker movement.

This week we’re talking carbon nanotubes, bluetooth low energy, DIY smart-locks and an awesome kickstarter project.

Carbon Nanotube Printing

Gigaom published a story about a 3D printing startup called Arevo. They’ve created a series of 3D printer filaments with carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes, also known as graphene, has a number of awesome characteristics. Objectives made from them are stronger, lighter, and more durable and can conduct electricity.

The filaments aren’t for sale yet but when they are Arevo will also sell optimised print heads to use the filament. This is a very exciting development to keep on your radar!

Adafruit Bluefruit LE nRF8001

This week Adafruit released an awesome new bluetooth product. It’s called Adafruit Bluefruit LE nRF8001 breakout board.

Bluetooth LE is also known as Bluetooth 4.0, Bluetooth Low Energy or Bluetooth Smart. It’s in every new smartphone and is being embedding in everything from heart monitors to dog collars.

If you want to embed Bluetooth LE into your Arduino or other microcontroller projects this is the board for you. Adafruit have even released an iOS app to help you experiment with the breakout board. Follow along with their tutorial to get it up and running.

DIY Smart Lock

Over on the Twilio blog, Jonathan Gottfried, show’s you how to make your own Lokitron smart lock.

The project allows you to send an SMS to lock or unlock your door. It involves the Twillo API, Node.js, a serial connection, an Arduino Uno and a servo.

By the end of the article you should have a rudimentary DIY smart lock. Alternatively you could buy one, ready assemble without the ducktape and cardboard but where’s the fun in that.

Kickstarter of the Week

This week’s awesome kickstarter project is EPIC! It’s called AgIC - Ag Inkjet Circuit – which allows you to print circuit boards with a standard inkjet printer.

AgIC comes in two parts, the ink and the paper. You put them in a standard inkjet printer. Your new circuits require no soldering, just use conductive glue or tape. You can prototype your circuit boards at home before sending them off to be manufactured in a more finalized form. It’s the fastest, cheapest and easiest way to create circuit boards on the earth!

There’s only a couple of days left so if you want to be the first to get your hands on the equipment to print circuit boards at home, back them now!

Outro

Thanks for watching, remember to subscribe for your weekly dose of maker news.

Notable mentions

Hit me up @chalkers on twitter if you have any stories you’d like me to cover. If they don’t make it into the show I’ll include them as notable mentions in the show notes.

Hosted and Written by: Andrew Chalkley (@chalkers)
Produced by: Michael Poley (@michaelpoley)

Intro

Welcome to That Maker Show with me, chalkers, your host to all things new in the maker movement.

This week we’re talking birthdays, slow mo video on the Raspberry Pi, laser etching experiments and an awesome kickstarter project.

Arduino Turns 10

On March 29, it’s Arduino day celebrating the 10th anniversary Arduino platform. Has it really been that long? Anyway, both official and independent events are being hosted all over the world.

Check out the interactive map on day.arduino.cc for your nearest event!

Pi Camera Gets Slow-Mode

When the Raspberry Pi camera board came out there were two main modes supported. A high resolution stills camera with a 4:3 ratio and a 1080p 30 fps video mode.

Some engineers from Broadcom (the company who makes the chips on the Raspberry Pi) with the folks from Omnivision (the people who build the cameras) banded together to add some new modes on the existing hardware.

One of the funky ones is a VGA resolution 90 frames per second mode. Which slows everything down when played back at normal speed.

If you’ve got a Pi and camera board you should test it out! When I got my 5s I was slow mo-ing all the time. It’s super fun!

Etching Denim with a Laser Cutter

Have you ever seen those laser engraved laptops or smart phones? Ever wondered what else you can etch? How about jeans!?

Over on the Hack A Day blog there’s a post covering the denim etching experiments carried out by the folks at qbotics’.

They found that setting the 75W laser to 15% power at 100% speed worked best for Epilog laser cutter.

In the Hack A Day post there’s some more bizarre and dangerous uses of a laser cutter. Check them out to have your eyes opened! But I’d totally not recommend trying those ones at home!

Kickstarter of the Week

This week’s awesome kickstarter project is the PiUPS or the Uninterruptible power supply for Raspberry Pi.

The PiUPS provides a clean power supply to your Raspberry Pi and can be connected and disconnected to the mains without causing a spike that could cause the Pi to restart.

The great thing is is that if you need more power you can chain more than PiUPS together! Sweet.

The project is already funded but if you want to get your hands on one for your Pi projects, head over to Kickstarter and help them out!

Outro

Thanks for watching, remember to subscribe for your weekly dose of maker news.

Notable mentions

We’d like to thank ADX Portland for being the venue for this show. We really appreciate them for opening up their space for us to use. You should check them out.

Hit me up @chalkers on twitter if you have any stories you’d like me to cover. If they don’t make it into the show I’ll include them as notable mentions in the show notes.

Hosted and Written by: Andrew Chalkley (@chalkers)
Produced by: Michael Poley (@michaelpoley)