In this Instructable GeekMomProjects shares how they built this color changing ring:

This 3D printed ring holds an illuminated, color-changing “gem” to brighten your night!

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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!

The Fields Medal is generally awarded to younger [under 40] mathematicians and is one of the highest honors in mathematics. Maryna Viazovska is only the second women to be recognized with the award.

Via Nature:

Viazovska, who is based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), is the second woman ever to earn the award. She is best known for her solution of the sphere packing problem — finding the arrangement of spheres that can take up the largest portion of a volume — in eight dimensions.

Read more!

Come on by for JP’s Product Pick of The Week! A new product pick will be revealed. The show airs at 4pm ET / 1pm PT, TODAY!

Check out the livestream right here inside this product page, you won’t want to miss it because there will be a HUGE DISCOUNT during the show!

Tune in for:

• John Park’s latest product pick
• Learn how to use it
• Live Demo

The live video will also be on Youtube LIVE, Twitch, Periscope (Twitter) and Facebook. LIVE TEXT CHAT IS HERE in the Adafruit Discord chat! Come on into the chat to participate in the conversation! Zounds!

Every Tuesday @ 4pm ET/1pm PT!

Back in January, I wrote about Daniel Herrero’s “hack” of using a peristaltic pump to clean out his resin vat for his 3D printer. And then, based on comments to his post, he got a better idea: using large syringes to suck out the remaining resin. He experimented and determined that a 150ml syringe works best.

Again, comments to the rescue. He complains about the hard plastic syringe head scratching his FEP film at the bottom of his vat. Commenters suggested adding a short bit of rubber tubing to the tip of the syringe. He also mentions the resin scraper that comes with printers scratching the FEP and viewers remind him that a silicone plastic spatula (I got mine from the dollar store) won’t scratch the film.

New guide! Getting Started with Microsoft Azure and CircuitPython

There are many IoT platforms out there, including Adafruit’s own Adafruit.IO, but if you want to build really big projects or run a business using IoT, you’ll need to use a platform that provides support for projects that scale. Microsoft Azure has resources for these types of applications and the best news is that you can use it with CircuitPython.

We’ve launched a new guide that will walk you through how to get started with Microsoft Azure using a Feather ESP32-S2 TFT and a BME688 sensor to monitor temperature, humidity and air pressure.

Check it out here!

Good news! Getting the ESP32-S3 and a parallel-connected LCD to play nice was much less trouble than anticipated. Super smooth!

Espressif’s ESP-IDF framework includes an API and examples for working with a few different displays. The item we had on-hand — a 2.8″ TFT with ILI3441 driver, same as used in the PyPortal — was not among the supported devices. But it was a simple matter to start with their ST7789 display code and adapt this to ILI9341. They all have pretty similar register sets, it’s mostly the display hardware initialization that changes. Working through the pull request process now to get this merged.

Not that everything worked perfect on the first try. For some reason we were seeing color fringing and some artifact pixels along motion paths…

Fix was to not use the byte-swap setting of the LCD API, and instead configure LittlevGL (which is rendering the graphics) to handle endian differences in software. This should make no difference — same end result, bytes swapped — but hardware, especially new hardware, is finicky. Look! No more artifacts:

18- and 24-bit color graphics were mentioned last week as one possible incentive for using the S3’s LCD peripheral. ST7789 and ILI9341 support 18-bit color at most…but looking at the processing, RAM and bandwidth overhead this would incur, it really doesn’t seem worthwhile for just 2 extra color bits; 16-bit suits these displays really well. NT35510 displays (which we don’t currently have on-hand) can support 24-bit color, and the bandwidth overhead could be compensated for by using a 16-bit wide interface. The ESP-IDF code doesn’t yet support 24-bit color mode, it’s very 16-bit-centric across all displays, but it’s easy to see where such changes would be needed, if and when such a capability is required.

Maker Mark Komus has built a wonderful project which moves circles (or “pupils”) on circular displays when shaken. An Adafruit accelerometer detects motion and CircuitPython code translates that to movement of the graphics on screen.

The code is available on GitHub and you can see more on Twitter.

What screams summer more than a roller coaster? Maybe a roller coaster followed by a popsicle. While I prefer a Cyclone style roller coaster, the folks out there who like to be whooshed around upside down might enjoy (and not get sick) watching this video from Vox on YouTube:

If you’ve ever been on a modern looping roller coaster, you’ve probably experienced a thrilling, safe, and mostly comfortable ride. But this wasn’t always the case. Just over 100 years ago, loop-the-loops were painful, not sturdy, and much more dangerous than they are today.

See more

NASA has made available a collection of audio and ringtone sounds of Mars as recorded by the Perseverance Rover and other sources. The collection includes:

• NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight
• Sounds of Perseverance Mars Rover Driving
• First Audio Recording of Sounds on Mars
• Perseverance Rover’s SuperCam Records Wind on Mars
• First Acoustic Recording of Laser Shots on Mars

The sound of lightning on Jupiter via Voyager is fantastic.

Check out the collection on the NASA website.

After many requests and years of waiting, Fritzing finally got a simulator!

The primary purpose of the simulator is to teach electronics to beginners, and its current capabilities are very limited (only analysis of DC circuits). However, it is fully functional, easy to use, and works on the breadboard and schematic view. In addition, it performs some checks to see if any parts are working outside their specifications.

The simulator is only available in Fritzing 0.9.10 or later versions. It is disabled by default. To enable it, go to Edit->Preferences (or ⌘+, File->Preferences in macOS), select the “Beta Features” tab, and check the “enable simulator” checkbox. Fritzing will save this option, and you will only need to activate the simulator once. Of course, you can still disable it anytime in the preferences dialog.

After the simulator is enabled, you will see a simulate button next to the share button at the bottom bar.

The simulator is still in beta status and could have bugs that let Fritzing crash. Please help us improve it by reporting them at the issue tracker.

See the announcement post and download the latest version.

After many years of gradual improvement, the Vim editor takes a big step with a major release, version 9. Besides many small additions, the spotlight is on a new incarnation of the Vim script language: Vim9 script.

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient. It is included as “vi” with most UNIX systems and with Apple OS X.

Vim is rock stable and is continuously being developed to become even better. Among its features are:

• persistent, multi-level undo tree
• extensive plugin system
• support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats
• powerful search and replace
• integrates with many tools

The previous release was version 8.2 in December 2019. Since the latest source code is always available on GitHub, many have already picked up later patch versions (there are more than 5000 of them!). Therefore the changes have already been tried out by many users. On top of that, bugs have been fixed, security issues have been addressed, and many tests have been added. Code coverage has been dramatically increased. This version is more reliable than any before.

See the announcement post and download here.

If you’ve ever balked at the price of that new plate Business Insider is here to explain why porcelain is expensive:

The secret to these differences is in the clay. But even for experienced potters, porcelain can be challenging to work with. So how is porcelain made and why is it so expensive?

See more

Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

A stainless steel Demogorgon from FUTURA and AllRightsReserved’s FWENCLUB. See more at JUXTAPOZ!

Lovely GIF art from A.L. Crego.

Here’s more!

Wonderful recent piece from The New Yorker about Foley sound effects. The piece profiles two modern Foley artists employed by Skywalker Sound, Shelley Roden and John Roesch. It also gives some background information on Foley itself, including some fun film trivia, like how Roesch used raw liver, jello, and other random items to create the iconic sound for Spielberg’s titular character E.T.. I especially enjoyed the section wherein they discuss the the goofy but glorious lexicon some of the Foley artists used to describe what they are looking for:

Roden estimated that only twenty per cent of sounds onscreen are generated by the actual objects represented. This presents certain challenges: when a sound cannot be described by its referent, language starts to falter. Over time, Roesch, Roden, and Curtis have developed a lexicon to describe what they want. Sounds are poofy, slimy, or naturale; they might need to be slappier, or raspier, or nebby (nebulous). They are hingey, ticky, boxy, zippy, or clacky; they are tonal, tasty, punchy, splattery, smacky, spanky. They might be described phonetically—a “kachunk-kachunk-kachunk,” or a “scritcher”—or straightforwardly (“fake”). Tools, too, have their own names. Shings make shiny metallic sounds—a sword being drawn from its scabbard—and wronkers give the impression of metal sliding across a hard surface. “Like, chhhrtz,” Roesch clarified.

Read more

Anna Ellsworth is an accomplished harpist. She managed to turn her tunes into a controller and take down the Fell Omen. Defeating Margit via any method is an accomplishment. She has also gone onto defeat Godrick. Video from YouTube. More details from Kotaku:

“In terms of hardware and software, I pretty much followed a video by technology Youtuber ThioJoeTech,” Ellsworth said. “I’m a professional harpist and often need to amplify my instrument at gigs, so my harp already has a Dusty Strings pickup installed that allows it to be plugged into things, much like an acoustic-electric guitar. So, I plug my harp into an audio interface and then plug the audio interface into the computer. Then, I pull up two programs, MiGiC (which I access through a digital audio workstation…I used to use Bitwig but now I use FL Studio) and Bome MIDI Translator. MiGiC takes the notes I pluck, turns them into MIDI, and sends it to Bome MIDI Translator which translates the MIDI into keystrokes. The computer then recognizes this as if I were playing the game with keyboard and mouse.”

Read more!

In this video dsagman shows the features of this amp, via MusicTech:

Guitar amplifier in remodeled Vox amplifier cabinet using Raspberry PI, Python, PYO audio processing and a class D amplifier.

See more on YouTube and GitHub

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Via Boing Boing comes word of this 4-part video series on how to construct an extremely detailed cyberpunk book nook.

Great use of reverse engineering in this project video from Fran Blanche!

A two month long project that fulfills an 8 year long quest to know once and for all what the original writing instrument was for the famous Maillardet Automaton, which is housed at the Franklin Institute here in Philadelphia. The machine was created in the 1790’s, almost certainly as a collaboration between the shops of Jaquet-Droz and Maillardet ~ with the majority of the mechanism designed and manufactured under Jaquet-Droz and the programming (a very large bank of 3-axis cams) created by Maillardet. The automaton is essentially an elaborate 3 dimensional pantograph, and so I use a simple 2-D pantograph in a proof of concept project to replicate the way the Maillardet Automaton originally made its elaborate renderings with very high crisp detail using varying line widths. I conclude this one as Q.E.D. – Quod Erat Demonstrandum!