 This week on Maker Update, turn your drink up to infinity, a book powered by feathers, secret codes, volume knobs, marshmallows, home automation, and cracking the code on machine learning. Hello everyone and welcome to another Adafrit edition of Maker Update. I hope you're doing great. I've been keeping busy starting maybe half a dozen new projects and sometimes finding the time to finish one or two of them. I hope that's not where you're at, but maybe if it is and you're ready to start a new one anyways, that's great because we've got an awesome show for you full of great projects. So let's get right into it with the project for the month. There's few things more startling than the first time you walk in between two mirrors that are parallel to one another and you see your own image stretching off into infinity. That's the basic idea behind this project from the Ruiz brothers, a portable and compact infinity mirror coaster. A ring of nail pixels gets sandwiched between a pair of two-way mirrors. You can see in from the outside, but their reflective quality means that the pixels look like they're stretching impossibly down into the table. It's a cool effect. Typical of the Ruiz brothers, the design shows a remarkable sense of economy of space. The 3D printed parts hide all of the electronics while giving ready access to the power switch and USB port for programming and charging. Some of that compact design comes from the itsy bitsy Bluetooth LE board that's running things. It has a tiny footprint, but plenty of power to drive the light show on circuit Python and the NRF 52840 chip means that you can control the lights remotely from your mobile phone. Infinity mirror projects aren't especially new, but it's great to see one so small and so tightly packaged. A small lipo battery means you don't need it to be tied to a wall wart, which makes it a little more impressive at your next sci-fi bar crawl. If you're ready to take this project further, the Ruiz brothers also have a tutorial for making this desktop NeoPixel Infinity Cube. It uses the super skinny NeoPixel strips, so you'll need a steady hand when soldering, but it's a mesmerizing result if you're ready for the challenge. Time for the news. Adafruit just announced the official release of Clue, a sensor-packed project and development board. Similar in design to the Microbit, Clue packs in a 240 by 240 TFT display, a 9 degree of freedom accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer. A proximity, RGB, and gesture sensor, a microphone, temperature sensors, and more, along with the five alligator clip-friendly connectors at the bottom. It'll support circuit Python and make code, and there's a stem-a-quick connector for additional hardware, if they've forgotten something you need. Come on, get a clue. Hackaday and Adafruit have announced their winner for the take flight with Feather Contest, the open book project from Oddly's Specific Objects. You might remember this one from a few months back. It's an E-ink reader powered by a Feather SAMD51 microcontroller. There's a whole lot that's remarkable about this project, like the onboard flash chip for configurable languages and typefaces, but my favorite is the huge PCB with its information-rich silk screen. Keep a lookout for this one. It'll be a cool project to get your hands on. Speaking of purple PCBs, this year's badge for the Open Hardware Summit runs on circuit Python. It's sort of a wristwatch form factor with a 1.5 inch LCD display. But there's loads more other sensors for temperature, pressure and humidity, an IMU, a gesture sensor, a STEM-a-quick connector, and it supports Bluetooth LE. And for the final touch, it's also the 100th board to support circuit Python. Time for more projects. Brent Rebelle created this adorable desktop TOTP authentication friend for your two-factor authentications. This project runs on the PyPortal, displays the codes constantly, and a simple touch interface lets you switch between different logins. It's worth mentioning that because the code runs on circuit Python, the auth strings are easily available to anyone who has physical access to the project and knows where to look. So this is better suited to home than office use. But it's a great project, and it looks particularly handsome in these classic CRT enclosures designed by the Ruiz brothers. Last month, John Park wowed us with his Apple Notification Service Center Notifier for the circuit playground Bluefruit and the TFT Gizmo. This month, he's gone a little crazy with it. He's built three different Bluetooth based remote controls for various devices, and they're all pretty great. The first one is a now playing display running on the circuit playground TFT Gizmo that makes use of the Apple Media Service Library to display the song that's currently playing. Another one is a volume knob that works with anything that understands the USB HID library so you can control the volume remotely. The last one uses the same library and a few push buttons to create a rudimentary keyboard. It's not hard to imagine that he's going to eventually vultron these all together into a remote media console, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see. It's getting easier and easier to dip a toe into the machine learning pool, but the most charming way is this serial sorter powered by Teachable Machine. Teachable Machine is a service provided by Google. That's a web based machine learning interface. Here it's being used to look at bits of serial and separate the marshmallows from the other bits. A tiny servo with an adorable face and mandatory googly eyes wiggles to vibrate the serial bits down a conveyor where it will be evaluated by a webcam. And if it's a marshmallow, it gets dumped into one cup or another if it's not. From the Adafruit community this month, we've got a Pie Portal sensor and control interface for Home Assistant. Home Assistant is perfect if you want to get into home automation, but would rather roll your own than trusting all of your home info to the cloud. The portal here is just controlling a few smart lights and responding to the light sensor on the Pie Portal. But with all the sensors it has on board, you could easily use it for temperature control and plenty more. And the touchscreen interface could make for a convenient wall-mounted control surface. Time for some tips and tools. Lady Aida brought up this tutorial for calibrating your gyroscopic sensor. It goes into a little bit of how these tiny components work and why they come from the factory with some non-zero data, even when they're at rest. She tells you how to dial them in, the data you get from them is a lot more usable. Colin Cunningham has a pair of hacks for the Oculus Quest. The first is a tutorial on how you can side-load software onto your headset. You'll need to register as an Oculus developer, but that seems to be the most intrusive step. The other hack is a lot less involved. It's just a quick tip for adding a battery to the strap of your headset for added playtime and hopefully more comfort. We talked about Teachable Machine earlier. Lady Aida also has a tutorial for it on the Adafruit Learning Center. She teaches it how to identify her face, her face with her hoodie up, and when she's not present at all. And then it displays the results on a circuit playground. If you're ready to dig in and see what machine learning is all about, or you just wanna see what computers on the back end are doing with all those capture images you click on, check this one out. Powering a number of projects in this episode, this month's Adafruit product spotlight is the Itsy Bitsy NRF 52840 Express Board. True to its name, it has a really minuscule footprint of only 1.3 inches by 0.7 inches to fit into just about any project, but it packs an incredible punch. It supports Bluetooth low energy, a special output pin for five-volt applications, human interface applications, and more. You can code for it in CircuitPython and the Arduino IDE. You really don't wanna miss this one. And that is gonna do it for this month's show. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, give us a thumbs up or leave us a comment. It's always great to hear from you and hear what kind of projects you're working on. As always, huge thanks to everyone at Adafruit for giving this show a home and to you for watching. Stay busy, we'll see you in March.