EP 037 DIY helicopter collective for flight simulators
Michael:
Welcome everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. I am really pleased to have on the show today, Kaleb Clark. He is a maker, extraordinaire, builds all types of cool stuff, makes videos some with element14.
And there’s a couple projects that I saw that I was just so pumped about, and I really wanted to reach out and talk to him and he’s willing to give us some time to talk about some of these projects and just the process of building them and that type of thing.
We’re going to be talking about a helicopter collective, and if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. We’ll talk about that in a second. We’re also going to be talking about conversion calculator built using an Arduino UNO. And we’ll get into both of these a bit, but welcome Kaleb. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk.
Kaleb Clark :
Hey, thanks. Glad to be here and thanks for having me.
Michael:
Great. I came across your video… Actually, Rich, one of our team members came across your video. I don’t know if you this Kaleb, but Rich and I are both helicopter pilots. I was in a past life. He is currently through the military.
So we’re both pumped into helicopters and stuff like that. And I’m like, “Man, your collective…” So a helicopter collective is when you’re sitting in a helicopter cockpit you know you got to control the helicopter, and a collective is one of the devices that’s used to control the helicopter. And if I understand correctly, you built it because you like to do flight simulation. Is that correct?
Kaleb Clark :
That’s correct. Yes.
Michael:
Okay.
Michael:
And I’ve never even been in a helicopter. So I’m glad you could explain it better than I can. I wasn’t sure if I explained it correctly. I knew what it did, and I had to do my research, but I had never spoken to a helicopter pilot before I built that. So I’m glad you-
Michael:
Well, yeah. I will tell you that it looks fantastic. It looks great. And I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but what I really like about the head of the collective, where you’ve got the buttons and stuff is that you said you didn’t make a replica, you just built it how you wanted it built.
That’s at least what it sounded like to me. You put the buttons on it, where you wanted them for your purposes and what’s great about it, is the layout looks very similar to collectives I’ve seen before.
So, I’m like, “Wow, that’s pretty smart there. That’s pretty cool.” So yeah, I don’t know. You want to walk us through this collective in how you built it. But Kaleb made a fantastic video about this build.
So we’ll make sure to link to that in the description of the video or in the podcast so you can see the build. But I just would love to hear more about how it all came together for me.
Kaleb Clark :
Sure. So I was playing some flight sims and at the time I was playing a lot of Arma 3, and that has a pretty good flight simulation package built into it. It’s not super accurate, it’s not the best, but it’s a lot of fun.
And I kind of went through every iteration of control for that. I tried using my mouse. I tried using keyboard. I tried using even my 3D connection, 3D mouse for CAD design. I have a joystick and a whole task throttle for airplane and none of it work right.
So I started looking around to see if I could buy a helicopter collective joystick. And I was just absolutely astonished at how few options that there were to buy one of these things. There was three or four, maybe on the market. And some of them were well over a thousand dollars.
And I think the cheapest one was three or $400. And that just didn’t seem right. It was their custom built kind of things that you would have to buy. So being a maker and having recently discovered that the Arduino micro specifically… Pretty much any micro controller that has the ATmega32U4 microprocessor chip on it can be seen by the host operating system as a human input device.
And that means it could be a mouse, it could be a keyboard, it could be a joystick. And I found it in Arduino library for that and just thought, “Well, I know how to hook up buttons and sensors and stuff to an Arduino, so if I can just figure out how to reroute all that stuff to joystick input to the computer, then I can do it.”
Michael:
That’s awesome. Yeah. I recently discovered the same thing. I think I was playing out the Leonardo. I don’t know if that’s one that… I was amazed at how easy it was. I just plugged it in and my computer’s like, “Hey, look, you got a new speed device.” I was like, “Holy crap, that’s so easy. How fun is this?” I can’t remember what library I was using, it was so easy to simulate mouse clicks and keyboard input and stuff like that. I was like, “This is so much fun.”
Kaleb Clark :
Yeah. So, that was the technology that gave me the idea to do that. And that’s how I do a lot of my projects is I end up finding some new technology or new to me anyways, and then it solves a problem that I had been thinking about for a long time like how do I emulate a joystick with an Arduino? I didn’t know that I could do that until I figured it out.
So I kind of went from there, but this project pushed my limits in a few different ways. There was a lot of mechanical design in it because I had to convert this motion to a rotational motion.
So it was linear to rotational to get it into an encoder or something that a potentiometer or encoder, I didn’t know what it was at first, but I knew I had to convert that linear motion to rotational. And so that was quite interesting on the mechanical side.
Michael:
The collective is like a lever, essentially, right? It’s a lever that’s a long stick and imagine, one end of the stick is attached to the cockpit and then the other end you’re pulling up and down on it. And that’s the motion that you’re talking about right there.
Kaleb Clark :
Yes.
Michael:
Got you.
Kaleb Clark :
My first thought on that was to use a potentiometer and many of those are not linear and they typically don’t move 360 degrees. And I had just been using some regular encoders. And so since this was an element14 project, I went to element14 or their parent site, Newark is where I get my parts for a lot of these projects and looked for a really high resolution encoder.
And I found one that had a hundred and 128 detents in it. So per 360 degree rotation, there was 128 locations that it could read. And that seemed like it was a pretty high precision for what I needed. And it ended up working okay. If you watch the video, you can see that my math was wrong in one spot.
And I did a six to one and it really needed to be more or like a nine or 10 to one on the collective. When you pick up on it, I had a gear on there that rotated the encoder. And so I wanted to get a full 360 degrees out of that, but I was really only getting about 75 or 80 degrees out of the turn.
Michael:
Okay. I see what you’re saying. The fact that you even making gears to me, I was like, “Wow, those look like beautiful gears.” That impressed me. For somebody listening who hasn’t heard of a rotary encoder, essentially, it looks just like a potentiometer, right? I mean, it looks really a lot like a potentiometer. I’m trying to think of potentiometer, but potentiometer usually has two stops.
It goes all the way one direction, it stops. And then you turn it all the other direction, it stops. Basically you’re adjusting a resistor whatever. Adjustable resistor, right?
Kaleb Clark :
Yeah.
Michael:
But this encoder you’re talking about, the one I think you mentioned, you’re using absolute encoder for the collective. And so that has individual, you know the exact position this encoder. So you turn that rotary encoder somewhere and you know the exact spot. You could say, “Oh, it’s in zeroth position, it’s in 50th position or it’s in 127 position.”
You get that information immediately when you turn the device on, with the absolute encoder?
Kaleb Clark :
I believe so. That was quite a while ago. That was the only time I’ve used the absolute encoder. I mostly used that model for the high resolution.
Michael:
I’ve never used absolute encoders before. I’m more familiar with the incremental encoders which I think you also use on the head of the collective. It’s the same thing, except that instead of tracking the absolute position, it tracks the relative position to where you last turned essentially. So they both do the same thing. It sounds like there can be more resolution in an absolute encoder potentially or at least in the one you were using.
Michael:
Yeah. The one that I was using has a much higher resolution. The standard type encoder that you were just talking about, that’s on the head of the collective, they have two [pins 00:09:53] that you read. And I don’t have super in depth knowledge of exactly how these encoders work, but it reads a pulse on either one of those two pins.
And so you can determine if it’s going up or it’s going down. And that’s pretty much what you have and that’s it. And so there’s two pins on it. And on this other high resolution encoder, I think there was eight pins that were reading to get the absolute value because it had, I believe somewhere in there, one of the pins was kind of a calibration. So it would know where it was at any given time.
Michael:
Oh, okay.
Kaleb Clark :
And I used a library that I found for that, that was kind of obscure and not easy to find because people don’t typically use those. But I do want to say one thing about that subassembly of the project is when I posted this on element14, you can watch this on YouTube, but element14 is really the community where people discuss it.
And I post links for all the code on GitHub and all the 3D model files and all of that kind of thing. I think there’s been four or five builds of this and every time it gets better.
Michael:
That is so cool. Yeah. And we make sure to link to the post there on element14 so people can find it. But that’s got to feel good to have people rebuilding it and making it better.
Kaleb Clark :
Oh yeah. The people have made it way better because my version of this was the first iteration and the first pass at developing a product essentially, right, is to say methodologies is standard product development in this. And it was the first iteration. It was the alpha prototype version. So the next person who wanted to build it was like, “Hey, why didn’t you use a hall effect sensor for determining that position?” It’s going to be way better and way more accurate.” And I was like, “Oh, of course. Yeah. That would’ve been better.”
So they built it that way. And I haven’t used that one, but I can imagine that it’s pretty smooth. It eliminated all of the gears and all of that stuff. So there’s no contact or friction in that area anymore.
Michael:
Oh, nice. I see what you’re saying. Because before you had it geared down from that main assembly there. All right. And so that smaller gear would turn the absolute encoder. But what you’re saying is that just having the hall sensor on the main assembly itself then you’re just reading directly from that. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah.
Kaleb Clark :
Yeah.
Michael:
Why didn’t you think about that? What the heck?
Kaleb Clark :
I know. It’s funny because that’s what a lot of the comments on YouTube were, [crosstalk 00:12:42] “Why didn’t you do it this way?” Because I did it the other way.
Michael:
Oh, that’s true.
Kaleb Clark :
I didn’t know about it. I mean, I knew about hall sensors, but it just didn’t occur to me to use it in a rotational manner like that. And it totally makes sense. And so the first guy that built one of these, he’s got pictures on the element14 site for it. And it’s just amazing. He used carbon fiber tube where mine was kind of this scuffed up aluminum piece and it’s really great.
And then there’s some subsequent builds from that where people just make it better. All my electronics were on this big proto board and stuff on the bottom of the collective and now people have it all mounted inside the tube. So they have a little slide out core that goes inside the tube that has [crosstalk 00:13:29] electronics on it. It’s great.
Michael:
That’s really cool.
Kaleb Clark :
It’s great to see how people iterate on my idea that was just for fun and playing a game, but these people really took it seriously and put a lot of effort at least as much as I have into it to iterate and make it better.
Michael:
Yeah. Well, I was really impressed with the build. Have you spent a lot of time doing three… Or at least it appears to me you’ve spent a lot of time doing 3D design because I felt like the assembly you built looked really nice. I don’t know, I thought it looked great.
Kaleb Clark :
Yeah, I have now and at that time it’s probably three or four or five years into doing 3D design, but I can’t draw a circle. I’m not an artist in that way. My creativity is in totally different spaces. And so when I design and I do things it’s mostly very practical and I use Fusion 360 as my platform for drawing a 3D.
And that’s a very practical platform. You’re building brackets and robot parts and helicopter collectives and that sort of thing, rather than modeling a figurine for D and D or something. It’s not the same, it’s not mesh modeling it’s more of a… I don’t even know what they call it, what type of modeling that is. But yeah, so most of my stuff is very practical and parts and brackets and things that hold other parts together.
Michael:
Right.
Kaleb Clark :
Yeah. So I’ve been doing that for quite a few years. And in the past three months, my current project that I’ve been working on, which is not my own project, I’ve been in Fusion 360, 4 or five hours a day, every day and I’m learning a lot. So I’m looking forward to my future projects which are going to be even that much better.
Michael:
That’s cool. That’s fun to gain those skills and then be able to use them on other stuff. That’s awesome. What would you say was the most difficult part of the collective? Would you say it was the mechanical, the software part or what do you think?
Kaleb Clark :
The mechanical part was a lot of fun. So I don’t want to say that, that was difficult. I didn’t really push my limits too far. I mean, creating the gears was something I had never done before. And I had to watch a dozen tutorials on how to do that in Fusion. And if you watch the video, you can see one of them is not a full circle. It’s just kind of a part of it. So I had to create the entire round gear and then cut that part out of it and just use that. So maybe some of the 3D modeling… It was a challenge because that was new to me on how to do that stuff.
The circuit for it, the electronics, not really that difficult, the encoder, there’s the GPIO Expander. There’s a lot of finicky wiring and that wasn’t difficult, but it took a lot of time to make sure that I created the proto board correctly and made sure that there were no shorts and just kind of go through all of that. So I think I would have to say the 3D modeling was probably the most difficult part.
Michael:
Okay. Yeah. I really enjoyed the build video watching you solder. I don’t know, there’s something about watching soldering happen at higher speeds. It’s like watching a fire burn, so this is great. And then the way you recorded, maybe it was for the other project and I guess this is a good… We can just jump into the other project which is a conversion calculator that you used in Arduino UNO to do the processing for.
But so before I lose this thought though in the video you show the 3D printing of the… I think must have been the calculator, I guess. But you’re able to show the 3D build. So you’ve got the video on the bed, but you never see the head of the printer.
The picture’s always taken when the head of the printer has moved out of the display. And so it looks as though magically the build is getting built up I’m like, “That is just…” I don’t know. It’s so much fun to watch that type of thing happen in fast?
So that was pretty good video footage there. Could you tell us about this conversion calculator? Maybe just explain to people listening slash watching what it is and what your thought was there.
Kaleb Clark :
Sure. It’s a unit conversion calculator. I want to talk a little bit about the problem I was trying to solve is that as a maker and just building stuff out of lots of different parts, get something from reputable vendor like Newark and element14. And then I get another part from AliExpress and I get another part from Amazon, and then I’m trying to put them all together.
And the spec sheets and the data that comes with it, it can be a metric, it can be in imperial fractional or Imperial tents. And I have to do a lot of conversion to put that all together in my build, which I generally do. Every project I can build the entire thing in Fusion 360. I build it in 3D, so I know all the parts fit together. I know that it’s all going to fit.
And then that automatically gives me my design for my 3D printed parts if I need them. So I’m always doing these conversions and the best way to do that is just to open up a browser window and type in what you want. Five sixteenths to tens. And sometimes Google will just give it to you. Sometimes it doesn’t understand, and you’ll get a table from some old geo cities website and you have to look it up and figure it out. And I just wanted something that was sitting on my desk. I could push buttons and it would tell me what it was.
I didn’t know the math on how to do that at the time. And I thought, “Eh, that could be pretty easy. There’s probably some libraries out there that can just do all of that for me.” Turns out there were not.
So I had to write on my own software. But that’s what the problem was and what it ended up doing was I could just type in what I wanted and enter or equals and it would tell me the conversion to the other unit.
Michael:
Okay. That’s nice. And it looks like… I’ll try to just draw a mental picture for anybody listening to the show right now. It looks like, I would say like a old school calculator. Old school in the sense like a big sizable calculator that you would see on an accountant desk or something like that, back in, I don’t know, 1980? I don’t know, what do you think, 1980?
Something you would think in the bottom is going to have a bunch of batteries, just a substantial piece and the buttons are nice and big. And it’s just got a really nice aesthetic to it. And then it’s got an LCD screen at the top and I think you also have a rotary encoder on that too, right?
Kaleb Clark :
Yes. Yeah. I have a rotary encoder and two buttons as input next to the display. And then there’s a full set of keys for the data entry side.
Michael:
That’s awesome. And that’s what I love about rotary encoders is they’re so useful. It’s hard not to use a rotary encoders. It’s like “Yeah, I’ll use it for this to select a menu or I’ll use it…” It’s got the built in button so you can press down and you got the button option. I feel like it’s one of the most useful input tools out there.
Kaleb Clark :
I agree with that. Yes.
Michael:
So the way this thing works is, basically you select the unit you’re going to start with, then you select the unit you want to convert to. In between, you just kind of put the numbers in there, you hit enter and then it’s going to convert it to the unit you want essentially is what it’s doing.
Kaleb Clark :
Yeah. The way that I set it up is there are units that are in pairs and that was kind of constrained by software the way that I wrote the software to display all of that on the LCD screen.
It was an odd constraint. That I was something physical, the display on the screen was kind of constraining me to how the unit would work by itself and kind of vice versa.
So the way that it ended up was that there are pairs of units. So it’ll say tens to metric. And the way that I use the rotary encoder is when you push down on it and use the button, it will flip flop those so tents to metric, press the button metric detents.
Michael:
Okay. I got you.
Kaleb Clark :
And then I had to create in the software, all of the different pairs that I wanted to convert to and from. And so it’s kind of a long list in the software, but it was easy to implement a new set of conversion because of the way I wrote it kind of object oriented so I could just link the functions to whatever unit was being converted.
Michael:
Okay.
Kaleb Clark :
And that ended up being quite helpful in the use of the device itself. Because I could just quickly turn the rotary encoder to cycle through all of those different pairs and then get to the one I want. It would be in the right direction I wanted, or I just hit the button because my finger was already on the rotary encoder to flip, flop it back and forth the way that I needed it to be.
Michael:
Right. That’s nice. Yeah. It’s interesting how as you’re making something constraints get imposed upon you from just reality. I don’t know. It’s interesting how you can start in your mind with a number of constraints and then as things are getting built, you’re like, “Oh, that’s a new interesting constraint. I’ve got to figure out…” I don’t know. I find that part of the fun I think of building something up.
Kaleb Clark :
Yeah.
Michael:
You 3D printed everything on this, right? Straight up the entire enclosure is 3D printed. Is that correct? Even the keys themselves are 3D printed?
Kaleb Clark :
The key caps yes, were 3D printed. Everything was 3D printed except obviously the components. But yeah, I did the case and the board that the… It’s not a board, it’s a little bracket that all of the Cherry MX keys go into. I 3D printed that, and this was one of my first projects where I focused a little bit on aesthetic and making sure that I didn’t have visible fasteners. All the fasteners were on the bottom that screwed it together and there weren’t big screws through the sides and that kind of thing.
At the time I was working with somebody who was giving me a ton of inspiration. She is an industrial designer and has worked for IDO and Apple and HP and all these big companies. And it was really interesting watching what she did.
And learning and then applying that to what I was doing, which is totally different scale. She was doing buildings and all this really interesting stuff. And I’m building these little widgets on my desk. But I had a lot of inspiration from that. So I focused on that and I have this old Canon calculator that I’ve always liked the design for the industrial design on that.
It’s from 1977, it’s a Canon Canola L812. So I just had to design the whole thing. And that was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed doing that part of it and figuring out I can just change the angle of the keys by just a few degrees and it made a huge difference. It originally it was just flat and I was like, “Oh, that might look better if it was tilted up a little bit.” So I raised it five degrees or something like that. And I was like, “Wow, that’s amazing. I’m going to leave it just like that.”
Michael:
Now you mentioned, you said in passing Cherry MX buttons, I’m not sure I followed who that is.
Kaleb Clark :
Yeah. There are a type of switch that are used on keyboards.
Michael:
Okay.
Kaleb Clark :
So it’s the same type of switch that’s on many keyboards and cherry MX are some of the nicer ones. I used Cherry MX Browns, which this company Cherry MX I think is the company, but they have scales of their switches and they name them on color.
So there’s blue and brown. I’m not really that familiar with them, but I had some browns. I had a handful of those and bought more for this project.
And there’s a lots of tutorials and information on the internet about how to create a matrix with these. And so that’s what I went with. Then they feel pretty nice, just a regular keyboard. And I could print a key cap, I could 3D print a key cap that would fit just like on a normal keyboard.
Michael:
Okay. I see. Do you buy the individual key or do they come in grids already or?
Kaleb Clark :
Nope. They’re all individual keys.
Michael:
Okay. And then you just place those keys inside of a 3D model, essentially that kind of holds them in place then? Okay.
Kaleb Clark :
Yes.
Michael:
All right. That’s cool. Back to the soldering, watching you soldering the… I think it was diodes and staff… man, it was so cool to watch you put that together, then go check out the build video.
It’s truly not that long and just fast forward to that section and watch it. It’s fun. The whole video is good, but as I was watching the build, I was trying to piece together what that was now that makes more sense how that was going to get… Cool I’ll have to check this out, Cherry MX [crosstalk 00:27:30].
Kaleb Clark :
They’re pretty nice for creating any type of button that you have to press a lot. One of the projects that’s on my list to do one of these is a hot key type thing for when I’m working in 3D design. I have the 3D connection space mouse, which is a nine degree freedom kind of thing that I use with my left hand while I’m working so I can rotate the model and position it in the model space so I can get to what I want to get to, but would like to have 10 buttons at my fingertips right in front of it so I don’t have to reach from here over to the keyboard to press a button, to measure something. I could just do it all in one space.
And that’s the type of thing that those keys are really good at because they have a massive duty cycle for [crosstalk 00:28:25] type on the keyboard. How many times do you hit on a keyboard in its lifetime with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, I guess, but they don’t wear out that fast and they just feel really good and you can buy keys.
You can 3D print your own keys or you can buy keys. And if I were to do that project again, I would say that was the toughest part was 3D printing the keys, sanding them, getting visible letters on them. I had this idea of embossing the letter in there.
And then my plan was just to put some acrylic paint over it and then sand all that acrylic, excess paint off. And then I would just see what was kind of embossed into the key. It turns out that paint bleeds into the 3D print quite a bit. And I was using white keys and black acrylic paint and it bled and it just didn’t work out. So if I were to build that again, I would probably try to find keys that I could buy.
Michael:
Yeah. I mean, in the video, the keys look beautiful. They just look so good. And I’m just thinking like, “How the heck did he 3D print those things,” that was so cool.
Kaleb Clark :
Yeah.
Michael:
But I know people are probably curious, what 3D printer did you use for this project? Did you use different types or is it the same one for everything or?
Kaleb Clark :
I have a Prusa MK3. That’s my workhorse. I have some other 3D printers and I’ve had many different ones in the past, but the Prusa MK3, I’ve been using that thing for years. I’ve got hundreds, if not in the thousands of prints on it.
And honestly, a handful of failures in all of those prints. I mean, it just goes, and it doesn’t stop. Printed something yesterday, I hadn’t printed anything in probably two months and I needed a part. So whipped it up, went out there, printed it. Absolutely perfect. Came out.
Michael:
That’s so nice.
Kaleb Clark :
Yeah.
Michael:
That’s great. I love the fact that you said it’d been two months since you printed something because that’s always my fear. If I go for a while without a print, I’m always afraid. And I’m not a big into 3D printing, I don’t print a ton, but I’m always like, “It seems as though the more frequently I do it, the more honed in I can get it to go?”
And then if I let it rest, I’m always afraid like, “Oh man, is it going to be the day long struggle to make sure this thing prints right.” But that’s cool. So with the software on the conversion, you mentioned you had to write your own libraries and stuff for that. Was that pretty difficult? Did you run into any constraint there as you were coding that up?
Kaleb Clark :
On the software, one of the biggest constraints that I ran into was the ancillary part of the software that I wanted to implement, which was a basic arithmetic calculator that did not get done.
That turned out to be so much more difficult than what I was doing with a conversion, because there were two sets of inputs. On a normal calculator, you say three plus three equals. And with a conversion, you just say you select the conversion type, you type in the one thing and hit equals. Just the way that you have to store all of the data as you’re going through that, so three that’s one input type. And then you have the operator, which is a different input type. And then you have the other number that you’re putting in as another input type. I couldn’t figure it out.
I spent hours and hours and hours trying to get that done and I could not do it. Somebody on GitHub claimed that they implemented it and created a poll request for it. And I tried to get ahold of them to ask a couple of questions because I couldn’t see what they actually changed in the code on the poll request, but they claimed that they implemented it and they just never responded to me.
So if you’re listening, respond to my message so we can put request in and make it go. Other than that, dealing with fractions and the Arduino wiring programming language like C++ which is not my strongest programming.
I’ve been writing software for 20 years or something, but I started with Perl, then I went into PHP and Python and kind of these interpreted languages which are very flexible with their variables and how you type variables.
And then C++ is super strict about it. And I was dealing with a lot of data. I’ve always tried to not use the string library on Arduino because I’ve run into problems before where it doesn’t work that well one, and it takes up a lot of memory for the Arduino to have that library in the software as a library.
So I was trying to figure out how to deal with strings and how to manipulate them and then do the manipulation with different data types and then display it back onto a screen, which of course is a string or a chart type.
Michael:
Right. I know. It’s so funny because like that, same way I almost never used the string library in Arduino. It wasn’t that, I guess I’ve ever ran into difficulties necessarily, but it’s been… I don’t know, I’ve just been told that or so… I don’t know. That’s what I’ve learned from the internet like, “Hey,” there’s so many form posts that mentioned yeah, you might be better off not using the string library.
And then it’s like you’re working with C which doesn’t… I want a string. Hey, it’s an array of characters. No-no, I want a string. No-no, it’s an array of characters. You sit there, sketching your head for a while like, “Wait, wait, wait.” And it’s like, “Oh my Gosh…” Because I don’t know, every other language you can think of it’s like, “Yes, a string is a string is a string.” It’s one of those interesting things I feel like with C, which I don’t know, I think it’s kind of fun to play around with when you really wrap your head into it, but it’s definitely, it’s kind of fun.
Kaleb Clark :
Part of the difficulty in that for me was something that I like to do on most builds that I do for whatever project it is. I like to learn. I want to always be learning something new and on that project I knew how to do it. It wasn’t a learn, it was kind of like leveling up my skill on creating my own libraries in the Arduino environment so I could keep my code really clean and have all that hardworking stuff off in a library somewhere.
And so I was working with these strings, something I didn’t really know how to do very well, as well as created all in a library. And so I was passing these data types back and forth in and out of libraries as objects. And that was kind of my own personal constraint to force myself to have something to learn or get better at.
So that created more difficulty, which just turned into time, really learning and figuring it out lots and lots and lots of troubleshooting to figure out why this string type wouldn’t convert to this other type for a minute so I could do the math on it and back and all that.
Michael:
Your video was only 20 minutes. So I figured the whole bill took about what, 40, right?
Kaleb Clark :
Yeah.
Michael:
It’s amazing. It comes together in the video. Let me tell you.
Kaleb Clark :
It’s fun that you mentioned that. And you mentioned earlier about the time lapse and watching me solder. I don’t remember specifically for that one, but all of those time lapses I do that edit personally. And some of those are four hours worth of video or four hours worth of my time and four hours worth of video that I then edit down and do that time lapse into two minutes for a four hour long thing, because maybe I’m working on something and then I had to go check on the laundry or I had to figure out something that wasn’t working correctly and stop and do some Googling and then come back to it. Or it just takes a long time. Soldering all of the matrix for all of the keys it just took time.
I had to bend a lot of little wires. I had to cut them and snip them and trim them down, figure out how they were going to line up and not touch and all of that side sort of thing. So if you watch the video, it’s maybe two minutes for that part of it, but it was really several hours of work to get that down to that.
Michael:
Yeah. It’s impressive. It’s great.
Kaleb Clark :
Yeah.
Michael:
Yeah. The work that goes into this stuff, it’s amazing. I’ve really enjoyed talking about these two projects and I know you’ve worked on a bunch of different projects. So let’s say somebody’s listening to this. A lot of people are new to Arduino, new to micro [crosstalk 00:37:30] programming. Some people have a lot of experience, but it might not be in hardware, it might be more in software. I don’t know any advice for… Kind of last words, last thoughts, advice for somebody kind of getting into this space?
Kaleb Clark :
One of my favorite sayings is just do it. If you’re thinking about it and you’re interested in an Arduino, you can buy a kit that has an Arduino and about 45 sensors and different types of things relatively cheap.
I mean, it doesn’t have to be an Arduino brand or Arduino. You can get the Elegoo or whatever brands for, I think they’re eight, 10 bucks or something. But you can buy the whole kit and then you have it and then you can just do it.
I started a YouTube channel a while ago that’s kind of been abandoned. I want to convert all of the content to my new space that I’m going to create.
But one of the ideas behind that whole channel was to bring awareness of new and different parts. And then do a tutorial on how to use that part in your project right now. For example, like a rotary encoder. If you Google or go on YouTube and try to find a tutorial for a rotary encoder, you’re going to find somebody who’s got a 45 minute video explaining exactly how all the internals work and all the pulse readings and everything.
And then they spend about three seconds showing you how it’s connected to an Arduino. And so my idea was to focus on the other side of here’s an Raspberry Pi, here’s an Arduino, here’s how you hook it up and make it work, here’s the libraries you use. And after doing 10 of those videos or so it really came to me that as a maker, we only know about what we know about and we can’t use a part in our project until we know about it.
And that goes with the same thing of if you’re interested in this and you don’t have the hardware yet, meaning an Arduino and a couple of sensors and LEDs and a switch and of all that stuff, just get it and have it available to you and ideas will come from there and you’ll be able to look up a video and follow along with a tutorial and do that.
And I think that’s maybe one of my most important messages that I like to tell new makers or people wanting to get into this sort of thing is stop thinking about it and just do it.
Michael:
Just do it. That’s good advice, Kaleb. Awesome. Hey, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Where can people find you online?
Kaleb Clark :
I’m in the middle of a rebrand. And so the only media outlet I have right now is Instagram and that’s kalebthemaker.
Michael:
All right. Awesome, kalebthemaker on Instagram. Fantastic. Awesome. And we’ll make sure to leave links into the description for all the stuff we talked about like the community chat and element14 and probably also just links to the videos.
I think the videos might be on those links, but anyway, we’ll have a bunch of awesome links in the description that you can check out along with if you want to get in touch with Kaleb. So Kaleb, thanks again so much for taking your time to talk. I really appreciate it.
Kaleb Clark :
Thanks for having me.
