This week on Maker Update: leaping tall forklifts in a single bound
a canoe 100 years in the making, a perfect three point sculpture,
digital drums, colorful kicks and How to not Set your Workshop on Fire.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're all doing great.
I've taken a little bit of time off
from my workshop to do some traveling, but I'm really excited
to get back into a few projects and I hope you are too.
We've got another great show for you to hopefully spark some inspiration.
So let's get started with the project of the week.
Colin Furze has a real problem with gravity.
I guess we all do, more or less.
But over his maker career, he's developed a number of projects
that take the fight directly to Sir Isaac Newton.
And his latest project is another haymaker in that punch up.
This machine is sort of a pivoting swing arm.
It's actually quite a lot like that camera jib
I talked about several episodes back.
The only difference is that instead of a camera as the payload,
it's his own body.
With some proper counterweights,
This should allow him to make superhuman leaps, flips and jumps
with his bodyweight otherwise supported by the mechanism.
Of course, to make everything secure and safe,
this mechanism needs to be pretty big.
The swing arm itself is around seven meters long
and the base looks to be around a three meter square.
The scale alone of this thing makes this build so much fun to watch.
He has to lift most of the parts with this oversized
forklift just to move it around his shop.
There's certainly a good bit of shop envy to be had here,
but it's just a joy to see him using his to the fullest.
The other surprise is that he didn't go into this with a master CAD design.
He's just sort of figuring a lot of this out as he goes along.
Of course, he's doing little bits of computer work here and there to plan his next step,
and making some really gratuitous use of laser cut templates
to check the fit and function of parts before making them out of steel.
He finishes up by adding the harness that will secure him to the swing arm
and a hydraulic ram that will allow him to extend and retract
to the end of the arm to fine tune the balance.
Of course,
the video is a little bit of a tease since you don't get to see him using it.
Other than a few quick tests.
That's coming up in the video he hasn't released yet.
So keep an eye out for that one.
Still, there's a ton of great stuff in this one from tips
to working on all projects big and small.
More projects.
Jimmy Diresta has been working on a project that similarly massive
in scale, but on a different axis:
Time.
He’s finally put the finishing touches on the canoe that he's been working on for over a year.
But in a way, this boat has been with him for even longer.
Since most of the wood that's gone into it has been reclaimed from the porch
that's been on his house for a hundred years.
The deck slats were all really tight grain
Douglas fir boards that were still in great shape.
Of course, each piece has to be milled down and have the paint removed.
His plan was to keep all the cleaner sides of the boards
facing outward on the canoe and anything that showed
any stains from finishing or weather, would face inwards.
Overall, it's a gorgeous project
that's consumed a lot of time and shop space over the past year,
and the payoff of seeing him out on the water with it is just perfect.
JBV Creative has built this beautiful
basketball-inspired sculpture for a local museum exhibit.
The idea is based around this mechanical arm
that repeatedly creates a perfect three point shot over and over again.
You'd think that when
he nailed the mechanism, that's when the hard work is complete.
But really, that's just where it begins.
Again, this thing has to be a sculpture,
so it needs to look good, be repeatable with minimal effort.
And he needs to decide which parts are going to be hidden and which are visible.
It's a great lesson and how the final 10% of a project
can easily be 90% of the work.
You can find links to the 3D printable files for you
to build your own down in the video's description.
And finally, we have an instructable by BingoBanjo45 on
how to convert traditional acoustic drums into digital drums.
And the best part is the conversion is completely reversible.
The only hardware is this beam that spans the diameter of the drum body,
which gets bolted onto the metal hardware that hold the drum head on.
At the center of the beam is a piezo sensor and a foam cone that just
barely touches the heavy duty mesh that replaces the traditional drum head.
The leads from the piezo sensor can then be soldered into a
1/4” TRS, which can be used to interface with an electronic kit’s head unit.
With a little bit more electronics hacking,
I bet you could skip the head unit
altogether and roll your own Circuit Python MIDI controller.
Time for some tips and tools.
This video is a few weeks old now, but it's such an important lesson
in shop safety, It deserves a shout out.
Bourbon Moth Woodworking wanted to get to the bottom of the occasional phenomenon
of spontaneous combustion happening in wood shops that can result
when you don't properly dispose of oil soaked rags.
He devised a scientific method of testing
using using three different finishes in five different disposal environments.
The really insidious thing
about this phenomenon is it can take hours for it to happen -
easily in the middle of the night after your workday is done.
TL;DR Let those oily rags
dry out on a flat surface before throwing them out.
Tim Hunkin has a new video out in his Secret Life of component series,
and it's all about Programable Logic Controllers or PLCs.
These are a little bit like modern microcontrollers,
but they're intended for industrial applications,
so there are a lot more robust in their construction and reliability.
In the video, he covers how they work, how to program them,
and how to find and make use of used PLCs
since they can be a lot more expensive than their microcontroller counterparts.
If you're looking to beef up your project, check this one out.
Back on Instructables,
CuttingPaths has a guide on how to understand
and design around your laser cutter’s particular kerf
to make snap fit parts that require zero gluing.
The kerf is the width of your cutting tool
and the width of the material that's removed.
The kerf of a laser is really tiny, but it's not negligible,
especially if you want tight fitting parts.
If you have a set of feeler gauges, you can use these to measure your kerf
or you can just do it by trial and error.
Once you know it, you can either incorporate it into your designs
or if you use software
like Lightburn, you can have it make those offsets automatically.
And Becky Stern has a great new video on different methods
for creating your own custom shoes from boring plain stock.
She goes through a few different techniques: hydro dipping using purpose
made film, hydro dipping with marbled spray paint and two dyeing techniques.
Stove top dip dyeing and marble dyeing.
She even street tests each of these to see how they hold up in the real world.
Personally, I love the look of these two-tone dyed shoes
and it seems like they should hold up to regular wear, too.
For this week's Digi-Key spotlight, Shawn Hymel has a video introducing
the concept of Thread.
This is a mysteriously named technology which serves as a standardized
networking protocol for various IoT and smart home devices.
You'll get to learn how the network stack works,
how the network topology gets formed, and what advantage Thread has over
conventional protocols like Zigbee and Z-Wave.
He finishes the video by talking about a few dev boards
that use Thread so you can start playing with the protocol on your own.
All right.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
Thank you so much for watching and I hope you found something you liked in it
if you did.
Tell us about that time in the comments.
Maybe give us a thumbs up and hit subscribe,
so you don't miss the next one.
As always, big thanks to Digi-Key for making this show possible
and to you for watching.
Take care. We'll see you soon.