New Project! How to Make Star Trek Combadge #Othermill #CNC #3DPrinting
Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is a great piece of kit for this sort of project because it features lots of components and sensors already on the board – Making it a versatile platform for all sorts of projects. In a recent demo sketch, Phillip Burgess (AKA PaintYourDragon) put together the “comm_badge” example, which plays the infamous “chirp” sound from Star Trek whenever the accelerometer senses its been tapped. It’s a neat little demo and showcases how the on-board sensors can be combined to make interesting projects. PhilB thought it’d be a cool if Pedro and I 3D printed the Combadge to dress up the demo and make it into a little cosplay prop. Being Star Trek’s 50th anniversary, we thought’d we step it up a notch and try CNC milling it out of actual metal stock.
Using the Othermill Pro desktop CNC, we choose to machine the Combadge out of 360 brass and 6061 aluminum, both being machinable friendly materials. We designed the parts in Autodesk Fusion 360 and modeled them around the Circuit Playground board. This project posed an interest set of challenges because we needed to learn how to use CAM tools in Fusion 360. The parts utilize common machining procedures such as 2D pockets, contours and chamfers. The Othermachine company provides a custom Fusion 360 Tool Library, which made setting up GCODE files relatively easy to get started. They also provide a great support page on their website with recommended speeds & feeds settings for various materials.
Surprisingly, we didn’t run into too many issues with this project (yay, no broken bits!). The Othermill software, Otherplan, makes it easy to catch tool collisions and generates a rendered preview so, we knew exactly what we were getting. The only thing we had to redesign was the brass base plate – Only because we originally made it too thick (It was just too heavy to wear ;-). Other than that, we were really pleased with the final result.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: CircuitPython 9.2.1, What is DMA, PyConUS 2025 and More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
