Three years ago in April of 2018, maker and YouTuber Simone Giertz gave her own Ted Talk. It was titled “Why You Should Make Useless Things”, and it was about Simone’s own journey growing up while struggling with performance anxiety and perfectionism. She eventually found an outlet for those issues (and a career!) through building what she affectionately calls “shitty robots”.
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In last month’s article, I built my own DIY split-flap display. Although the display is amazing and can show just about anything, when I started the split-flap project I had just one goal in mind: being able to create a dedicated subscriber counter for my YouTube channel.
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It’s incredible how far display technology has come. Nowadays LED walls are found at every major concert venue, flat panel televisions are ubiquitous, and everyone has a high resolution, full color LCD display in their pocket. It’s difficult to imagine that just a few short decades ago it was a struggle to create a large, dynamic display for an economical price.
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For my latest project I needed to film some footage in front of a greenscreen so I purchased some additional lighting: a pair of Neewer 660 LED video lights. These lights are a great budget option for videography but there’s one problem: the power supply. To drive the matrix of 660 individual LEDs the lights come with a standalone 15V, 3A power supply “brick” which connects to the unit via a barrel jack on the back. When the lights are raised up on a light stand this power supply dangles, only supported by the barrel jack and the soldered power wires within. This stresses the barrel jack and the power supply’s wiring which makes it more prone to failure.
To solve this problem, I designed and built a 3D-printed light stand mount for the Neewer 660 light’s power supply.
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I’ve always been fascinated by RC cars. The dynamics, the engineering, the speed… all wrapped up in a package that you can hold in one hand. Almost more than the cars themselves I’ve always loved the remotes. Ever since I watched Back to the Future and saw that awesome modded Futaba remote I’ve been captivated by the possibilities contained in one of those mystical black boxes. I was playing a racing game the other day when the idea came to me: what if I could modify an RC controller to control a racing game?
And just like that, I decided to convert an RC controller into a gamepad to play Forza Horizon 4.
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For my latest project I needed to connect an RC receiver to an Arduino and read the state of the PWM servo signals. I couldn’t find a library I liked that was interrupt-based, robust, and supported flexible output ranges and remapping. So I decided to build my own.
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The news is currently very bleak. Just the pandemic alone is enough to make you want to never read the news again. Thankfully there’s a solution: “Bweaking NuwuS” (@BBCBweaking), a Twitter account that posts news stories passed through an “UwU” kaomoji filter to make them “cutesy”. The result is some serious dark comedy, with posts about corruption, sickness, and death translated into something exceedingly saccharine.
After reading a bit about the automation behind the news account, I thought it would be fun to do something similar and make a browser extension to convert Twitch chat into “OwO”-speak on the fly.
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I have a friend who likes to stream on Twitch, and he has a problem. Every hour or two he likes to be healthy and take a five minute break – standing up, stretching, going to the bathroom, etc. During this time he mutes his microphone and puts on some background music to keep the audience entertained. But when he comes back he frequently forgets to unmute his microphone so that the stream can hear him. It’s not unusual for him to be talking to himself for five minutes or more until some kind soul in chat speaks up and says “you know you’re muted, right?”
To help him and others who frequently forget to unmute their microphone, I decided to build a physical indicator for the mute status in OBS Studio.
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