Researchers from Rice University and Hanyang University have developed a new material that moves like skin while preserving signal strength in electronics. This can be a step forward in helping wearables fully-function as wireless and battery-free.
According to a study published today in Nature, an international team of researchers from Rice University and Hanyang University developed the material by embedding clusters of highly dielectric ceramic nanoparticles into an elastic polymer. The material was reverse-engineered to not only mimic skin elasticity and motion types, but also to adjust its dielectric properties to counter the disruptive effects of motion on interfacing electronics, minimize energy loss and dissipate heat.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
If you missed this week’s livestream of John Park’s Product Pick of the Week, not to worry, here’s the video. This week’s pick is the TRRS Trinkey! Watch the video to find out about the TRRS Trinkey, how to use it, a live demo, and more.
Want more JP’s Product Pick of the Week?! Tune in every Thursday at 4pm ET and 1pm PT on Youtube LIVE, Twitch, Periscope (Twitter) and Facebook. LIVE TEXT CHAT IS HERE in the Adafruit Discord chat!
Catch previous editions on YouTube and don’t miss our gift guide!”
The stories of Asian American veterans are on display at this new exhibit at the Bob Hope Patriotic Hall in Los Angeles. The LA Daily News shares.
The inaugural exhibit, themed “Duty, Honor, Country, Courage: Asian-Americans in Military Service,” includes personal artifacts, artwork and visual presentations that highlight often little-known stories of AAPI veterans — including Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean and Vietnamese American servicemen and women. Asian Americans have been in uniform from the Civil War through Afghanistan, and the exhibit focuses on “recognizing them as a cohesive group for the first time, regardless of country of origin,” officials said.
Neat write-up from Brazilian puzzle-maker/artist/maker Djair Guilherme.
As part of the work done in the Arcades workshop that I am teaching at Sesc São Paulo, I needed to develop a series of functions for detecting collisions, by color, by coordinates and also to detect the movement of the joystick. These functions are used in some way in all games, and as a teaching resource, I allocated them in a single test file, which moves a rectangle on the Neopixel screen.
See more details here on Hackster.io and here on Github.
Corridor Crew shared this video on Youtube!
n today’s episode, Matt and Jallen make a Dune parody using the famous Popcorn Bucket as a miniature. Adam Savage stops by to judge the short film: “Uber for Sandworms
Learn more and check out Uber for Sandworms!
You’ve seen the Dunes, all of them, even that one on the SyFy Channel, and you want more? Read the books too? And you’ve seen Jodorowsky’s Dune? Then there’s one more book to read. The extraordinarily rare, the storyboard book for the ill-fated Dune adaptation by legendary Chilean director Alexandro Jodorowsky sold for £350,000 at Peter Harrington. As it turns out, rare science fiction books are on the rise. Here’s more from the Financial Times:
…collecting first-edition sci-fi novels, once considered a niche trend, is becoming more mainstream. “Science fiction is a fascinating area to collect in, and there are a number of authors whose works have weathered particularly well,” says Anna Middleton of specialist Peter Harrington Rare Books. She namechecks “Iain M Banks’s Consider Phlebas, the first title in his Culture series, which can fetch around £1,750 for an inscribed copy, JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, which retails at around £3,000 for a first-edition hardback, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which will set you back around £2,000.” From here, prices can soar. “Inscribed copies of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot or a full set of his Foundation series are high spots, around £20,000 apiece,” she adds. “Other notable modern authors to collect are Ursula Le Guin, William Gibson and Dan Simmons.”
CB (or Citizen Band) Radios are still widely used by long haul truckers. They can also be fun for hobbyists and unlike Ham radio there is no license required. You can basically pick up and go. BUT if you want to fit in you better know the lingo. An introduction to CB and some handy lingo from Right Channel Radios:
Outside of slang (which we’ll go over in a bit), most coded language over a CB radio takes the form of something called a “10 code”. You may be familiar with some of these from popular culture, as they’re often used in movies and television whenever a truck driver is depicted using his or her CB radio. These 10 codes are often also used by police and emergency responders in the media as well. In fact, these codes were originally created for emergency responders by the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials International in the late 1930s and expanded again in the 1970s. While many emergency responders have begun to move away from them in favor of plain speech, you can still hear the unmistakable cadence of 10 codes just about every time you turn on your CB.
A different sort of teardown, Engineerguy deconstructs duct tape. As Apollo 13 or RedGreen taught, every work station and emergency kit needs some duct tape.
Part of the magic is viscoelastic materials with some unusual properties. These materials are both liquid and solid, and are elastic. We are all familiar with one viscoelastic: Silly Putty.
To understand how duct tape is engineered, Bill dissolves the tape in solvent to reveals its three components — plastic backing, adhesive, and cloth reinforcement. He explains the function of each part, highlighting that the adhesive is a viscoelastic substance — a substance that can act like a liquid or a solid and it can behave elastically. It is these behaviors underlying the characteristic behavior of duct tape: adhere when light pressure is applied, hold tight, then let go when peeled from a surface.
This is a screen for advanced hackers who like the look of the tri-color e-ink display we put into the 1.54″ Tri-Color eInk / ePaper Display and the Circuit Playground Tri-Color E-Ink Gizmo. Unlike those breakouts, this is the earlier version that is 152×152 pixels. Still, it’s a perfectly good e-Ink display.
This is just the raw display module – no PCB or supporting circuitry is included!
We’re selling this module bare for those who want to integrate it into their project. Using our CircuitPython or Arduino libraries, you can create a ‘frame buffer’ with the pixels you want to activate and then write that out to the display.
The library we wrote does all the work for you; you can interface with it as if it were an Adafruit_GFX compatible display. When writing to the display, remember to select the IL0373 driver configuration!
Note: This is just the display. You’ll want your own eInk Breakout Friend or ThinkINK Feather Board.
Check out this fun and informative video from SciShow that explains what periodic table elements make up the human body. Beyond CHNOPS and sulfur, potassium, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium, which make up 99.9% of the human body, there some other bioessential trace elements making a little go a long way.
About 99.9% of your typical human body is made of just 11 elements from the periodic table. But hiding in that remaining 0.1% are some elements that do some very important jobs to keep you alive and healthy. Including some elements you may have completely forgotten about.
You’ve got your Star Trek and your Battlestar Galactica, but have you heard of Far Out Space Nuts or The Questor Tapes? The 70s had a lot of strange fun in outer space. Here’s more from OldSchoolShirts:
Also produced by Sid & Marty Krofft, this sci-fi comedy series aired on Saturday mornings on CBS. It starred Bob Denver of Gilligan’s Island fame and Chuck McCann. The two, after loading food into a rocket, are accidentally launched into space. Each episode found them running into or, being captured by, all manner of alien life. The series lasted 15 episodes.
We’ve got so much happening here at Adafruit that it’s not always easy to keep up! Don’t fret, we’ve got you covered. Each week we’ll be posting a handy round-up of what we’ve been up to, ranging from learn guides to blog articles, videos, and more.
A Nature Documentary on Your Cat, Made with Raspberry Pi
Those of us with cats can lose hours to watching our furry friends antics. At times we can feel as if we’re zoologists, observing some strange new animal for the first time. We can even imagine David Attenborough narrating the curious behavior of our cat. Now we don’t have to.
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Master the legacy weapon of the Covenant!
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Check out this fantastic build from maker Arnov Sharma.
Greetings Vault dwellers, and I’m back with a new watch project.
Meet PipWatch, a PipBoy-inspired wrist watch powered by a FireBeetle ESP32 board along with a round GC9A01 display.
Full details here on Hackster.io
71 years ago today, pilot Jackie Cochran broke the sound barrier. Smithsonian‘s piece from 2010 elaborates on Cochran’s trailblazing.
On May 18, 1953, Cochran took off from Rogers Dry Lake, California, accompanied by Air Force Captain Charles “Chuck” Yeager, who six years earlier had been the first man to break the sound barrier. In an F-86 Sabre plane, borrowed from the Royal Canadian Air Force, Cochran surpassed Mach 1; over the course of her flight, she averaged speeds of 652.337 miles per hour.
How many times have we heard, “Hey, you could have just replaced that microcontroller with a 555”? Maybe 555 times! But we always find wiring up a timer chip to be a bit of a pain. You need quite a few components, especially if you want a buffered output. That’s why we designed the Adafruit 555 PWM Output STEMMA—a fully assembled 555 timer board with adjustable PWM square-wave output.
We originally came up with this idea when someone requested we make a ‘PC Fan Dummy’ board that can generate a 100Hz signal for faking a PC fan’s tachometer signal to a motherboard. But then we thought that sometimes we want a square wave for driving a piezo, as an audio input, or to modulate an IR signal, so we made it a little more general-purpose.
You can select between two ‘ranges’: approximately 1.5K~25 KHz or 1.5~250 Hz. The onboard trimmer pot will tune the actual output between those values. You can use a logic analyzer, oscilloscope, multimeter with frequency counting, or even an audio input jack on a computer to determine the precise value if you need more than a rough number. The output is a DC square wave, driven by a 74HC1G04 buffer so it can sink/source up to 12.5mA.
You can power the board from 3V to 12VDC, an onboard regulator will pin the input to the 555 and buffer to 5V max. That means that between 3V and 5V power, the signal peak will be at the same logic level as the power. Above 5V, the output will be pegged to 5V.
Each STEMMA board is a fully assembled and tested PCB but no cable. No soldering is required to use it, but you will need to pick up a 2mm pitch, 3-pin STEMMA JST PH cable. Alternatively, if you do want to solder, there’s a 0.1″ spaced header for power/ground/signal.
The Adafruit S-35710 Low-Power Wake Up Timer Breakout is a low power ‘watchdog timer’ chip that can be programmed to alert with a digitally-configurable alarm from 1 second up to 194 days, thanks to a 24-bit second counter. It’s an interesting alternative to a real time clock or internal sleep timer and might be useful for some ultra-low-power projects that want to have a separate (and possibly separately-powered) chip to handle time-keeping and alarms.
The Adafruit S-35710 Low-Power Wake Up Timer Breakout guide has everything you need to get started with this breakout. There’s pages for overview, pinouts, CircuitPython, Arduino, and resources for download.
Read more at Adafruit S-35710 Low-Power Wake Up Timer Breakout
Nice CircuitPython project from Brazilian maker Djair Guilherme.
Creating the Marquee effect on the Neopixel 16×32 panel, using Seeed Xiao RP2040 and CircuitPython
See full details here on Hackster.io
You could spend a big chunk of cash to buy vintage Star Wars playsets, or you can make your own Star Wars diorama out of repurposed materials! Here’s more from Mathieu Stern!
No, it’s not the latest iteration of your favorite hometown band. This is an actual simulation of a plunge into, and through, a Black hole. The first video is 360 video so it is more effective on a phone or tablet. The second video goes through more slowly and explains each phase.
The destination is a supermassive black hole with 4.3 million times the mass of our Sun, equivalent to the monster located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. To simplify the complex calculations, the black hole is not rotating.
A flat, swirling cloud of hot, glowing gas called an accretion disk surrounds the black hole and serves as a visual reference during the fall. So do glowing structures called photon rings, which form closer to the black hole from light that has orbited it one or more times. A backdrop of the starry sky as seen from Earth completes the scene.
The project generated about 10 terabytes of data — equivalent to roughly half of the estimated text content in the Library of Congress — and took about 5 days running on just 0.3% of Discover’s 129,000 processors. The same feat would take more than a decade on a typical laptop.
Debra Ansell with Make: talked with three teachers running school Makerspaces. A great look at how STEAM is being incorporated with more hands-on activities.
Makerspaces bridge the gap between abstract knowledge and the practical skills to build things that help our world function. Running a makerspace can be challenging and expensive, but schools that do so often see rewards in increased student engagement, collaboration, and enthusiasm for problem solving.
Each took an unconventional and idiosyncratic path to acquire their skills, but they share a high degree of dedication and persistence, a desire to keep current with new tools and technologies, and the flexibility to allow their students to work in ways that best suit their learning styles. It’s worth noting that private schools generally have more funding and flexibility than public schools.
It’s JOHN PARK’S WORKSHOP — LIVE! — Coming up at 4pm ET / 1pm PT Today! LIVE TEXT CHAT IS HERE in the Adafruit Discord chat!
Today’s project: MIDI Monitor with TFT Display
Also:
The live video will be on Youtube LIVE, Twitch, Periscope (Twitter) and Facebook.
Join maker John Park in his workshop each week as he builds, demos, hacks, and mods projects live on air! “John Park’s Workshop — LIVE” is the place to see creative projects come to life, as John uses a wide variety of tools and techniques to make everything from mystery boxes to synthesizer controllers to drink robots, using digital fabrication, hand and power tools, microcontrollers, and more. Come on into the chat to participate in the fun! Every Thursday @ 4pm ET/1pm PT!
Harlem is Everywhere is a podcast presented by The Met with a focus on how the Harlem Renaissance influenced art, fashion, music, and literature. Although it was 100 years ago, the influence can still be seen and heard today across all demographics.
Introducing Harlem Is Everywhere, a brand new podcast from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hear how music, fashion, literature, and art helped shape a modern Black identity.
Presented alongside the exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, the podcast is hosted by writer and critic Jessica Lynne. This five-part series features a dynamic cast of speakers who reflect on the legacy and cultural impact of the Harlem Renaissance.
The Adafruit USB Host BFF makes it easy to add USB Host support to your QT Py board, especially now that TinyUSB supports it in the Arduino library as a ‘native’ interface for host support. This BFF uses the MAX3421E – a tried and true USB Host chip. It uses SPI plus an IRQ pin to send data to just about any USB device. To keep the BFF very compact, we use a micro-B USB “OTG” connector.
The Adafruit USB Host BFF guide has everything you need to get started with this BFF. There’s pages for overview, pinouts, CircuitPython, Arduino and resources for download.
Read more at Adafruit USB Host BFF
The Last Jedi might not be The Last Jedi, but for now the Sith can hope. Snoke’s gone, but so is Luk Skywalker. Long live Kylo Ren! Revenge of the 5th is Upon us!
All the People Who Created the Death Star Weapon Throughout Star Wars History
From Emily Asher-Perrin over at Tor.com.
So now that the Rogue One is near and its prequel–Star Wars: Catalyst—has hit shelves, we have an intriguing new piece of info on Jyn Erso’s pops, Galen (it was made clear in the trailer, so it’s not a spoiler)–he had a hand in the creation of the Death Star, specifically the weapon-y laser part.
Here’s the thing, though. Do you realize how many people have been made responsible for the construction of that dented oversized softball in the history of Star Wars? Because it’s a lot. Like, a whole lot. Of people.
Remember when Darth Vader was cute little Anakin Skywalker, podracing back on Tatooine? 300zxcolin over on Thingverse knows something you don’t: Darth Vader podraces too, and there are files there for you to 3D print your own Darth Vader Podracer. Now that’s podracing!
This is Darth Vaders Pod Racer that he competes with when he’s had a long week hunting rebels.
Prints without supports except for the stand.
Download the files and learn more
Recreate the Red Throne Room Battle with this Star Wars Praetorian Guard Costume
Maker Jim Tripon crafted a Samurai version of their scarlet armor and shared it with the Replica Prop Forum. He says:
Armor is painted flexible fiberglass. Can be rigged up out of the box in 1 night. Will probably cast this in red. We’re experimenting with gelcoat however it looks like a much more expensive and labor intensive undertaking.
Undersuit is made of textured synthetic leather with jersey and mesh used in the hidden sections. Not perfect but i think will pass for basic. Skirt is fleece/wool.
Read and see more on Facebook.
Two Guys Build a Wrecked Super Star Destroyer
An amazing project from Grant Davis and Eli Willsea:
This is a recreation of a scene that is only on screen for a brief moment in Star Wars: The Force Awakens when we are first introduced to Rey and see her scavenging through a broken down Star Destroyer. I planned and started this build by myself, but by the end it turned into a full on Collab MOC with my good friend Eli Willsea. Total build time, photography, and editing for this MOC was just under 3 weeks in total, quite a short time frame for a build over 7 feet long!
If you want to be a Sith or Jedi, you don’t have to base your costume on a character in the Star Wars universe. You can create your own take on an existing look or come up with something completely different. Issabel Cosplay designed an original Sith costume loosely inspired by some fan art of Asajj Ventress. She decided to make her Sith a Rattataki, which is similar to a Dathomirian (which is what Ventress is).
We’ve got so much happening here at Adafruit that it’s not always easy to keep up! Don’t fret, we’ve got you covered. Each week we’ll be posting a handy round-up of what we’ve been up to, ranging from learn guides to blog articles, videos, and more.
May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, 2024
Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month honors the history, contributions and representation of these diverse groups. This year we are excited to shine some light on incredible stories of the American Dream. Check back all month long.
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Build a prop replica of the Memory Gun from the Gravity Falls TV show. Powered by the Feather PropMaker RP2040 and CircuitPython, this 3D printed prop lights up and plays blaster sound effects. Read more.
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New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent out once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up NOW for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter
The Otter House Project tried to think like an otter when designing this habitat. Otters are intelligent, social animals and ZOO Architects tried to build these structures to meet their behaviors. Via DesignBoom:
The Otter House Project by ZOO Architects (see more here) focuses on how these animals usually live together and form family groups. Otters often sleep holding hands, which is a manifestation of their social behavior, and live together in families or groups, typically consisting of a pair of adult otters and their offspring. They communicate with each other through sounds, postures, and odors. The behavior of sleeping hand-in-hand usually occurs among family or group members, helping to strengthen their bonds and trust. Otters also practice monogamy, which means they manifest loyalty to their life partners.They will store enough food inside their nests to prepare for unexpected needs.
We’ve got the New nEw NEW for you right here:
You’ll need a good pair of tweezers when soldering delicate surface-mount (SMD/SMT) components. These are a great pair of everyday tweezers. They’re anti-static and anti-magnetic, with a sturdy stainless steel body and ESD plastic tips. The tips are flat to pick up components without risk of scratching or twisting, but because they are plastic, they’re not good for holding parts during hot air rework or if you’re going to get close with your soldering iron.
RJ-12 or RJ-11 Telephone Round Panel Mount Adapter Plug
If you need to add a panel-mount connection for telephone-interfacing projects but don’t have the time or ability to cut a custom oval or square hole, this RJ-12 or RJ-11 Telephone Round Panel Mount Plug is the easiest and fastest way to panel-ify your existing phone kit. It’s about 30mm in diameter so that you can drill a hole in your wood, plastic or metal with a common hole-saw or bit, no special shapes or filing required. Unscrew the plastic nut, insert the plug, and re-attach. Ta-da: Now you have a pass-through RJ-12 jack.
Adafruit S-35710 Low-Power Wake Up Timer Breakout – STEMMA QT / Qwiic
The Adafruit S-35710 Wake Up Timer is a low power ‘watchdog timer’ chip that can be programmed to alert with a digitally-configurable alarm from 1 second up to 194 days, thanks to a 24-bit second counter. It’s an interesting alternative to a real time clock or internal sleep timer and might be useful for some ultra-low-power projects that want to have a separate (and possibly separately-powered) chip to handle time-keeping and alarms. We covered this component on EYE ON NPI and thought it would make for a nice breakout in the shop.
Adafruit CH552 QT Py – 8051 Dev Board with STEMMA QT
What a cutie pie! Or is it… a QT Py? This diminutive dev board comes with a throwback processor – an 8-bit 8051! This tiny core is a big change from something like the the ESP32-S3 QT Py with two 240MHz 32-bit cores, but there’s lots of folks interested in the CH552 and given the smol size, it is a nice matchup for a smol board.
Visit www.adafruit.com/new for more info.
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New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent out once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up NOW for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter
It’s JOHN PARK’S WORKSHOP — LIVE! — Coming up at 4pm ET / 1pm PT Today! LIVE TEXT CHAT IS HERE in the Adafruit Discord chat!
Today’s project: USB Host MIDI Masseuse
Also:
The live video will be on Youtube LIVE, Twitch, Periscope (Twitter) and Facebook.
Join maker John Park in his workshop each week as he builds, demos, hacks, and mods projects live on air! “John Park’s Workshop — LIVE” is the place to see creative projects come to life, as John uses a wide variety of tools and techniques to make everything from mystery boxes to synthesizer controllers to drink robots, using digital fabrication, hand and power tools, microcontrollers, and more. Come on into the chat to participate in the fun! Every Thursday @ 4pm ET/1pm PT!
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What a cutie pie! Or is it… a QT Py? This diminutive dev board comes with a throwback processor – an 8-bit 8051! This tiny core is a big change from something like the the ESP32-S3 QT Py with two 240MHz 32-bit cores, but there’s lots of folks interested in the CH552 and given the smol size, it is a nice matchup for a smol board.
The CH552 is an ‘enhanced’ E8051 core microcontroller, compatible with MCS51 instruction set but with 8~15 times faster instruction execution speed. You can run this core at 16MHz and 3.3V logic, and it’s gotbuilt-in 16K program FLASH memory and, 256-byte internal RAM plus 1K-byte internal xRAM (xRAM supports DMA. It’s also got some cute tricks up it’s sleeve, like 4 built-in ADC channels, capacitive touch support, 3 timers / PWM channels, hardware UART, SPI, and a full-speed USB device controller. The last one means it can act like a native USB device such as CDC serial or mouse/keyboard HID.
If you’re interested in playing with this chip, we’ve wrapped it up in a QT Py format. The pinout and shape is Seeed Xiaocompatible, with castellated pads so you can solder it flat to a PCB. It comes with our favorite connector – the STEMMA QT, a chainable I2C port that can be used with any of our STEMMA QT sensors and accessories. We also added an RGB NeoPixel and both a reset button and ‘bootloader enter’ button.
Please note! This is a minimal 8-bit microcontroller, and it definitely does not run CircuitPython or Micropython. It also doesn’t really run Arduino. There’s an Arduino ‘board support package’ we recommend, but the compiler is for C not C++, which means you cannot use any Arduino libraries. It’s very very bare-bones and for hacking/experimenting with this ’40 cent chip’
