Mayke 2025

For a few months I tried to emulate @jasonmade's wonderful year-long project where he made a thing every day. Later on it morphed into part of #makevember and Mayke (making a thing a day in November and May respectively).

Older stuff is here, 2025 is below. 

Ma(y)ke Manifesto
------------------------------

Grasp the means of production 
and
Make something, big or tiny, every day in May
unless 
You want to slack off for the day.

There is no fayle, only mayke

Mayke 1: Play wav file using Circuitpython on a pico

These first few are going to be part of a larger thing. I want to play birdsong on a small cheap device and I had a pico 2 to hand. I followed this guide from Adafruit as I happened to have a MAX98357A handy. Adafruit do a nice pdf book on Circuitpython and the pico. I needed to fix the sample rate on my file (which came from the Merlin app for bird identification) using ffpmeg - I used this as a guide for the bitrate and mono and sampling, and the command was ffmpeg -i birds_sm.wav -b:a 22K -ac 1 bird_mono_22k.wav

a jumbled pile of different coloured ripstop fragments, mostly greens, yellows and blues

Mayke #2: Materials

Choosing some ripstop offcuts from the Scrapstore for my birdsong project, working title "mental health umbrella" or "spring simulator" (£2, need more green).

I missed a day!

Which is definitely fine and within the rules!

a clear umbrella with one blue panel

Mayke #3: Umbrella re-cover

I really wanted to reuse a dead umbrella, but the leaves for the spring simulator will need a substrate so I ended up fixing an umbrella badly. It's really difficult - new respect for umbrella makers. Onwards!

vivid acid green 'leaves' cut from ripstop fabric offcuts gluegunned to a clear plastic umbrella panel. They overlap creating darker areas like real leaves.

Make #5: Leaves

Experimenting with overlapping leaves on my umbrella. It's not too bad but I wonder if tissue paper might be better than ripstop.

The umbrella from the inside with pleasing leaf overlaps

Mayke #6: Tissue

Trying out tissue paper for the laves instead of fabric. It's maybe a bit better (and gluegun works better with paper than with fabric), though I couldn't get the acid green colour I was looking for.

2 picso attached to I2S amps via jumper wire and thence to small flat speakers

Mayke #7: 2 * birdsong

I want to make a primative surroundsound of birdsong so I found another pico (1 this time) - all worked happily as before.