Italians have a love of innovation and design and it shows at Maker Faire Rome. In this episode of Make:Cast, I look back at Maker Faire Rome in October 2019 during a pre-Covid time when live events could happen. I was guided through Maker Faire Rome by Alessandro Ranellucci, the curator of Maker Faire Rome, along with Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino. Maker Faire Rome 2020 is happening as a virtual event this weekend.

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What is it about larger-than-life versions of things that makes them so awesome? We’re not sure exactly, but this giant working Arduino definitely has the ‘it’ factor, whatever that may be. It’s twelve times the size of a regular Uno and has a Nano embedded in the back of it. To give you an idea of the scale, the reset button is an arcade button.

The Arduino Giga’s PCB is made of 3/4″ plywood, and the giant components represent a week and a half of 3D printing. The lettering and pin numbers are all carved on a CNC and filled in with what appears to be caulk. They didn’t get carved out deeply enough the first time around, but [byte sized] came up with a clever way to perfectly re-register the plywood so it carved in exactly the same places.

Although we love everything about this build, our favorite part has to be the way that [byte sized] made the female headers work. Each one has a 1/4″ audio jack embedded inside of it (a task which required a special 3D printed tool), so patch cables are the new jumper cables. [byte sized] put it to the test with some addressable RGB LEDs on his Christmas tree, which you can see in the build video after the break.

You can buy one of those giant working 555 timer kits, but why not just make one yourself?

We were struck by how attractive [mircemk’s] Arduino-based frequency counter looks. It also is a reasonably simple build. It can count up to 6.5 MHz which isn’t that much, but there’s a lot you can do even with that limitation.

The LED display is decidedly retro. Inside a very modern Arduino Nano does most of the work. There is a simple shaping circuit to improve the response to irregular-shaped input waveforms. We’d have probably used a single op-amp as a zero-crossing detector. Admittedly, that’s a bit more complex, but not much more and it should give better results.

There was a time when a display like this would have meant some time wiring, but with cheap Max 7219 board available, it is easy to add a display like this to nearly anything. An SPI interface takes a few wires and all the hard work and wiring is done on the module.

The code is short and sweet. There are fewer than 30 lines of code thanks to LED drivers and a frequency counter component borrowed from GitHub.

If you add a bit more hardware, 100 MHz is an easy target. There are at least three methods commonly used to measure frequency. Each has its pros and cons.

Wouldn’t it be nice if beer pong could somehow get easier the more you drink? You know, so you can drink more? [Ty Palowski] has made it so with automated, mind-controlled beer pong.

[Ty] started by making a beer pong table that moves the cups back and forth at both ends. An Arduino Nano controls a stepper that controls a slider, and the cups move with the slider through the magic of magnets. The mind control part came cheaper than you might think. Back in 2009, Mattel released a game called Mind Flex that involves an EEG headset and using brain waves to guide a foam ball on a stream of air through a little obstacle course. These headsets are available for about $12 on ebay, or at least they were before this post went up.

[Ty] cracked open the headset added an HC-06 Bluetooth module to talk to the Arduino. It’s using a program called Brainwave OSC to get the raw data from the headset and break it into levels of concentration and relaxation. The Arduino program monitors the attention levels, and when a certain threshold of focus is reached, it moves the cups back and forth at a predetermined speed ranging from 1 to an impossible-looking 10. Check out the two videos after the break. The first one covers the making of the the automatic beer pong part, and the second is where [Ty] adds mind control.

We’ve seen a different headset — the hacker-friendly NeuroSky Mindwave — pop up a few times. Here’s one that’s been hacked to induce lucid dreaming.

Via r/duino

A wise senator once noted that democracy dies with thunderous applause. Similarly, it’s also how privacy dies, as we invite more and more smart devices willingly into our homes that are built by companies that don’t tend to have our best interests in mind. If you’re not willing to toss all of these admittedly useful devices out of the house but still want to keep an eye on what they’re doing, though, [Nick Bild] has a handy project that lets you keep an eye on them when they try to access the network.

The device is built on a Raspberry Pi that acts as a middle man for these devices on his home network. Any traffic they attempt to send gets sent through the Pi which sniffs the traffic via a Python script and is able to detect when they are accessing their cloud services. From there, the Pi sends an alert to an IoT Arduino connected to an LED which illuminates during the time in which the smart devices are active.

The build is an interesting one because many smart devices are known to listen in to day-to-day conversation even without speaking the code phrase (i.e. “Hey Google” etc.) and this is a great way to have some peace-of-mind that a device is inactive at any particular moment. However, it’s not a foolproof way of guaranteeing privacy, as plenty of devices might be accessing other services, and still other devices have  even been known to ship with hidden hardware.

We’ve seen a fair number of automated wire cutting builds before, and with good reason: cutting lots of wires by hand is repetitive and carries the risk of injury. What’s common to all these automated wire cutters is a comment asking, “Yeah, but can you make it strip too?” As it turns out, yes you can.

The key to making this automated wire cutter and stripper is [Mr Innovative]’s choice of tooling, and accepting a simple compromise. (Video, embedded below.) Using just about the simplest wire strippers around — the kind with a diamond-shaped opening that adjusts to different wire gauges by how far the jaws are closed — makes it so that the tool can both cut and strip, and adapt to different wire sizes. The wire is fed from a spool to a custom attachment sitting atop a stepper motor, which looks very much like an extruder from a 3D-printer. The wire is fed through a stiff plastic tube into the jaws of the cutter. Choosing between cutting and stripping is a matter of aiming the wire for different areas on the cutter’s jaws, which is done with a hobby servo that bends the guide tube. The throw of the cutter is controlled by a stepper motor — partial closure nicks the insulation, while a full stroke cuts the wire off. The video below shows the build and the finished product in action.

Yes, the insulation bits at the end still need to be pinched off, but it’s a lot better than doing the whole job yourself. [Mr Innovative] has a knack for automating tedious manual tasks like this. Check out his label dispenser, a motor rotor maker, and thread bobbin winder.

For some reason, when slot machines went digital, they lost their best feature — the handle. Who wants to push a button on a slot machine, anyway? Might as well just play video poker. [John Bradnam] seems to agree, and has built an open-source three-color matrix slot machine complete with handle.

In this case, you’ll be losing all of your nickels to an Arduino Pro Mini. The handle is an upgrade to an earlier slot machine project that uses three 8×8 matrices and a custom driver board. When the spring-loaded handle is pulled, it strikes a micro switch to spins the reels and then snaps back into place. Between each pull, the current score is displayed across the matrix. There’s even a piezo buzzer for victory squawks. We only wish the button under the handle were of the clickier variety, just for the feels. Check out the short demo video after the break.

If you’re not a gambler, you could always turn your slot machine into a clock.

It’s holiday time again! And that means it’s time to break out the soldering iron and the RGB LEDs! If you’re going to make a custom PCB to put those LEDs on, you’ll notice that you get few copies of your PCB in your order, so, might as well design it such that you can combine them all together into a single Sierpinski Christmas Tree, just like [Landon Carter] did.

Each PCB “tree” has three connections which can be used as either inputs or outputs by soldering one of two bridge connections on the PCB. The power and signal goes up and down through the tree, rather than across, so the connections go one on the top of the tree and two on the bottom. This way, each tree in the triangle can easily be connected, and each triangle can be easily connected to another. Each individual tree has three WS2812b-mini addressable RGB LEDs and the tree is controlled by an external Arduino.

The first order of 10 PCBs came in, which makes a 9 member tree – next up is a 27 member tree. After that, you’re going to need some pretty high vaulted ceilings in order to put these on the wall. On the upside, though, once the holidays are over, everything can be easily disconnected and packed away with the rest of the decorations. If you, too, are interested in RGB LED decorations, there are a few on the site for your perusal.

Building radio receivers from scratch is still a popular project since it can be done largely with off-the-shelf discrete components and a wire long enough for the bands that the radio will receive. That’s good enough for AM radio, anyway, but you’ll need to try this DIY FM receiver if you want to listen to something more culturally relevant.

Receiving frequency-modulated radio waves is typically more difficult than their amplitude-modulated cousins because the circuitry necessary to demodulate an FM signal needs a frequency-to-voltage conversion that isn’t necessary with AM. For this build, [hesam.moshiri] uses a TEA5767 FM chip because of its ability to communicate over I2C. He also integrated a 3W amplifier into this build, and everything is controlled by an Arduino including a small LCD screen which displays the current tuned frequency. With the addition of a small 5V power supply, it’s a tidy and compact build as well.

While the FM receiver in this project wasn’t built from scratch like some AM receivers we’ve seen, it’s still an interesting build because of the small size, I2C capability, and also because all of the circuit schematics are available for all of the components in the build. For those reasons, it could be a great gateway project into more complex FM builds.

You’ve probably seen a flipbook. That’s a book with pictures on each page. Each picture is slightly different than the last one so if you flip rapidly through the book you get a little animation. We like the German word, Daumenkino, which translates as “thumb cinema” and that seems appropriate. [Barqunics] put a decidedly new twist on this old technology. His flipbook senses a viewer and automatically flips the pages using a motor. You can see the Arduino-controlled device in the video below.

The presence detection is a ubiquitous sonar sensor. The frame is easy to make since it uses cardboard and hot glue. A DC motor like you find on many toy cars or robots provides the rotation. No 3D printing needed, but we did think it would be easy to 3D-print or laser-cut the pieces.

You’d think the flipbook would date back to antiquity, but apparently, the earliest known ones are from the mid-1800s. However, the idea isn’t that different from a phénakisticope or a zoetrope other than those devices use a disk or drum that would be easy to rotate. Something to consider if you plan to recreate this project.

We should have guessed there would be automated ways to generate images for a flipbook. That opens up a lot of interesting ideas for projects, too.