Electromaker Show Episode 14

Welcome to the Electromaker Show, episode 14! This week saw a ton of inventive projects, from a do-it-yourself electric skateboard to DOOM running on a pregnancy test. Check out the latest maker, tech, DIY, embedded, and crowdfunding updates!

Perfect Projects

Rideables are all the rage. Sure, you can buy many pre-built electronic skateboards, scooters, and one-wheels, but you could also make your own DIY electric skateboard. Clever maker Eben Kouao has accomplished just that. His DIY electric skateboard is Arduino-powered and features Adafruit NeoPixel RGB LED light strips. It's ridiculously cool looking and rivals many off-the-shelf units.

I like using Lego parts, especially joints, when I need to build something quickly, I just 3D-print an adapter and save time .... well, then I waste that time making a useless video :-) from r/3Dprinting

LEGOs remain fun to play with for all ages. I had just as much fun putting together my Harry Potter Hogwarts castle as a kiddo as when I was an adult. Ok, granted, I'm probably never going to truly grow up, but still, LEGOs are rad. Inventive DIYer with the appropriate Reddit handle u/DIY_Maxwell enjoys using LEGO parts for building and prototyping, so they whipped up a 3D-printed LEGO adapter. It's captured in stop motion on a Raspberry Pi HQ camera.

Pets are great. I love my dog, Sebastian the Dorkie (he's a Dorkie, so you know we're related). Do you want a pet but don't want to clean the litter box or pick up its waste? You could buy the pricey Boston Dynamic Robot Dog and pray that Skynet doesn't launch, or you could build a robot cat!

There's a joke about running DOOM on virtually everything. The original 1993 id Software quickly amassed a cult following, spawning a successful franchise with entries as recent as 2020's DOOM Eternal as well as DOOM clones such as Alien Trilogy and Star Wars: Dark Forces. DOOM has since been ported, officially and unofficially, such that it runs on everything from PCs and consoles like the PlayStation 1 and Nintendo Switch to calculators and...pregnancy tests? Gender reveal: It's a DOOMSLAYER! Why you'd want to play DOOM on a pregnancy test is beyond me, yet at the same time why you wouldn't is also beyond me.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is the best overall single-board computer for most people. It's powerful, well-documented, and reasonably priced. You can get great performance from a stock Raspberry Pi, but overclocking affords additional benefits at the expense of heat production. Keep your Pi cool under load with a look at overclocking and cooling your Pi! You can find a lot of heatsinks which reduce the Pi's operating temperature to avoid thermal throttling.

Crowdfunding Chat and Product Updates

Over on Crowd Supply, there's a Roverwing Adafruit Feather Wing for robotics up for funding. It rocks an onboard 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 and a slew of other neat features. The DipDuino, also on Crowd Supply, is a super-thin Arduino engineered for breadboarding. It's extremely small, yet retains Arduino IDE functionality. And the M5Stack M5StickC Plus is a nifty ESP-32-PICO Internet of Things development kit replete with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for all of your IoT prototyping needs.

Electromaker Show Episode 14

This week has been eventful as ever, with some super cool DIY maker projects like an Arduino-based electronic skateboard and DOOM running on a pregnancy test, as well as some sweet wallet-emptying hardware on the crowdfunding and product update side. While these were out favorite stories, we may have missed something.

Got a story you'd like to share? Comment below and let us know!