 This month on Maker Update, a 3D printed drummer, Adafruit at the newsstand, going live, a voting calendar, an eyeball shootout, and a panic button for all your Zoom calls. Hello and welcome back to the Adafruit edition of Maker Update for September, 2020. I'm Tyler Weingunner and between the fires and the hurricanes and the protests and the pandemic, I'm so grateful you've taken time out of this chaotic year to check out another episode. We've got an awesome show lined up for you, so let's kick it off with a project of the month. There's no getting around it. Electronic instruments are cool, but they're so much cooler when a MIDI instrument can make music by striking an acoustic surface like a drum head instead of just generating a tone. The Ruiz brothers built this robotic MIDI drummer from 3D printed parts that they designed and some large push-pull solenoids. Each one can strike its own surface, like these toy symbols, a drum practice pad, or whatever you have on hand. The project runs on an Adafruit M4 Express using Circuit Python code written by Liz Clark. The board will appear as a MIDI instrument to your computer so you can do all of your sequencing in your favorite DAW or set up custom triggers for them. The solenoids are driven by an eight-channel Darlington chip. It allows the board to drive the solenoids using a GPIO pin for each one, while the 12-volt circuit provides the heavy lifting. The four outputs from the Darlington driver are all connected to these four barrel jacks so you can easily swap out different beader mechanisms for different instruments. Most of them use this lever design, but for the kick drum, the solenoid is attached to a segment of 2020 rail so it can strike the center of the drum. There's a lot of fun ideas here to explore. If you wanna build one for yourself, look for the code and the design files down in the show notes. Now for the news, keep an eye out for Adafruit at your local newsstand. That is, if you still go out to your local newsstand. Hackspace Magazine issue 34 has a huge feature about the Feather platform. There's an interview with Lamore that covers the history of Feather, why it exists, and how the form factor came about, and some other boards that are being made for the platform. You can click your way to a free PDF of the issue down in the show notes. You'll also find a fantastic article about Python on hardware in volume 74 of Make Magazine, written by Helen Lee. You can read about the differences between MicroPython and CircuitPython as well as the hardware it works on. And don't forget about CircuitPython Day on September 9th, which is just a few days away. Ann Borrella just posted a schedule of events for the day, including a deep dive into CircuitPython, a CircuitPython show and tell, and a special edition of Ask an Engineer with the development team behind the language. Don't miss it. Let's check out a few more projects. John Park made this beautiful LED sign that ties into the YouTube API and lights up when a particular channel goes live. The way I see it, you could use this two different ways. Either it could let you know when your favorite streamer is going live, or you can put it outside your home studio to let folks know when they should be quiet when you're live streaming. It uses the 64 by 32 RGB LED matrix while an Adafruit Metro runs the code. For a more flexible but less automatic version of this project, check out this busy sign by the Ruiz Brothers. At the flip of a switch, you can light up this sign that lets people around you know that you're busy. Whether you're in a Zoom call, recording a podcast, or you just need some focus time. Perfect for anyone working from home these days. The sign itself is based around Lego, so it's easy to make the flexible LED strip, say whatever you want. It's too late to catch the Perseid meteor shower, but there's never a bad time to photograph the night sky. Dylan Harada built this robotic sky tracker to move his camera in alignment with the night sky so we can capture clear images free of star trails. His guide includes a template for the wooden base plate for the mechanism, as well as some helpful hints for testing, troubleshooting, and aligning the tracker. After months of Zoom calls from home, chances are you've had at least one incident where you hastily fumbled for the camera and mute buttons while you dealt with the issue. What you need is a panic button, and apparently John Thurman needed four of them. Using the pie ruler he already had around, he turned each of the large capacitive pads into macros that turn off his camera and muted his mic for each of the four video conference apps that he uses. There's even a 3D printed enclosure, so it looks great on his desk. I don't think this can be said enough. Go vote. And a big part of voting is keeping track of each date and deadline, which is why Alvaro Figueroa created this Pie Portal US election calendar. The code is configurable for the state and county where you live, so you get the information most pertinent to your election. Put it on your desk, put it in your home, just make sure to get your vote out. Now for some tips and tools. Over the past few years, there have been quite a few projects using Adafruit TFT screens to create spooky eyes for masks and other Halloween costumes. And now we're seeing the same sort of screens show up in off the shelf costumes and props. But how do they compare? Phil Burgess goes into full teardown mode, determining components and comparing code, and even going as far as to replace the animations with Adafruit's own. It's a fun ride, go check it out. If you've been eyeing the new Raspberry Pi high quality camera, but are a little lost on what camera lens to use, this guide by Dylan Harada is a perfect first stop. Between the tiny sensor size, crop factor and capturing video, and the broad range of lenses available, it's easy to get lost. Dylan breaks it all down, showing the resulting image from a handful of different lenses in different situations. It's a good breakdown and a wonderful resource. SD cards are a great tool for any microcontroller project, whether you need to store sound files, images or your capturing gifts or doing sensor data logging. But sooner or later, you'll realize the problem. They're slow. With only a single data pin, there's only so much data you can move. So it's time to meet the SDIO interface. It's not supported by every piece of hardware out there, but you can use up to four GPIO pins for faster reads and writes. Jeff Epler has the complete guide to using this SDIO breakout board. Speaking of speed, this month's Adafruit feature product is the Sharp Memory Display breakout. It's just a monochrome display, but it features the low power consumption of an e-ink display, but the fast refresh rate of an LCD. And the best part, it's huge, measuring 2.7 inches across the diagonal. It requires a high RAM chip, like the SAMD 21 or 51, because it needs to write the entire buffer on the microcontroller level. It can be driven by either three or five-volt logic, and you can pick it up in the Adafruit store for $44.95. And that is gonna do it for this month's show. I hope you had as much fun watching it as I did making it. If you did, give us a thumbs up or leave us a comment, and be sure you hit subscribe so you won't miss the next one. As always, huge thanks to everyone at Adafruit for making this show possible and to you for watching it. Take care out there. We'll see you in October.