This week on Maker update: all the darts, all at once.
3D space mice, robot parts.
Big displays and leaky prints.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're all doing great and staying inspired.
I just finished up my first full project in Circuit Python
and I'm really excited to play around with it more.
Let us know what kind of projects you're working on down in the comments.
We've got another great show for you so let's check out the project of the week.
Making an existing machine
faster is sometimes pretty easy.
You put in a more powerful motor, maybe make the parts lighter
and there you have it. It's faster.
That works until you hit some other limitations.
So when you're trying to make a machine that's significantly faster
you run into a lot of those limits pretty quickly.
Which is why I love projects like this one.
3D Printed Life is trying to make a Nerf gun
that can fire 100 darts a second all through the same barrel.
It's definitely not one you can solve with just a bigger motor.
Which is not to say there aren’t some impressive motors to get the darts into the barrel of this high-speed dart slinger.
To get the darts into the barrel fast enough,
they need to be arranged in this drum magazine, which is really just
nine magazines arranged in a pinwheel,
and it needs to be spun up just so the gun can fire.
the darts are accelerated using a belt fed system.
And there's a ton of cool tricks in the design of this,
like how to join polyurethane belts, and using crown pulleys
So the belt is self-centering.
The other problem that needs to be solved is the dart advancer that helps
get each dart out of the magazine and into the pulleys.
He was originally planning on
using a really powerful solenoid to push each one into place.
that he's yet to be able to find any
that are fast enough to get all the darts into the barrel.
This problem remains unsolved and he'll be tackling it in a later video.
In the meantime, he can still advance each of them by hand
and get one full rotation into the barrel with all the darts firing.
It's clear that this is showing
real potential to make this impossible feat a reality.
More Projects Salim from OCR Lab
wants to build a 3D space mouse
to make his navigation and CAD software a little bit easier.
His outline for the project goals seem
manageable enough, while still making this a worthwhile project:
Easily navigate in 3D space, and have shortcut buttons for home views
and to be made with parts he already has on hand.
Fortunately, a Stemma 3-axis magnetometer from Adafruit
is really the only sensor he needed,
along with a stack of powerful magnets.
The controller is essentially a stewart’s platform made from springs
with the QTPy RP2040 handling
the code and a 3D printed enclosure,
This seems like a really handy tool to build for yourself,
and the parts are pretty affordable too.
And on Instructables, we have another
great robotics project from AaedMusa.
In this one, he's designing a 3D printable robot actuators.
Robotic actuators might just be a fancy word for motor,
But really, there's a whole lot more to it than that.
you'll need to consider high accuracy positioning,
strong holding torque and compliance, which allows the motor
to act like a spring with varying stiffness depending on the holding torque.
Aaed’s design uses a pancake style brushless motor,
a field oriented controller, and a planetary gearbox.
The result is a fairly compact design
with really good torque properties overall.
It's easy to service and inexpensive to print,
and it's also entirely open source
so you can find everything you need on his git repo.
Time for some tips and tools in this video by 3D Musketeers,
I learned about the cut feature, which is a new to Prusa Slicer 2.6.
These tools have been around for a while in separate applications,
but it's nice to have it in your slicer.
you can move the cut plane around
while seeing the entire cross-section and change the angle of the cut.
And you can even generate holes and printed dowels
that you can use later for assembly and registration.
this next tip might be a little self-serving,
but I came across this great video by Mark Rhodes
with some helpful tips on SLA printing.
When printing large models,
It's common to hollow at the object, so it consumes less resin.
When you do this, you also need to add drain holes to your print.
Otherwise, you can trap a large volume of uncured resin inside your print,
making it the worst pinata ever.
But those holes can also reduce the amount of effort
the print bed needs to lift away after curing each layer.
since the air can now move in and out of the print freely.
It no longer creates a massive vacuum when lifting away.
I learned a lot from this video.
Hopefully you will too.
Getting output from a
microcontroller to a small TFT display is cool and all,
but outputting to a full sized monitor is a lot cooler.
The good news is you're in really good hands with that regard.
We've seen the Feather RP 2040 DVI
show up in a few projects already.
This is the Feather R.P 2040.
You probably already know and love, but with an HDMI port on the other end
you can use displayio to write directly to the output
and there's a ton of great tutorials to get you up
to speed on what to do there.
And from Bitluni, there's also the ESP 32 S3 VGA board.
this one is a little more DIY since you'll need to assemble your own boards.
But if you're looking for the analog look, this is a cool one to know about.
And from Ecordeir3295, I found this instructable
on building a program in Scratch to generate crochet patterns.
You can just draw out a design in its own editor,
Select your stitch and it will create a crochet pattern for you.
It's maybe a little limited since you can only create patterns
that are 15 stitches wide and 15 stitches tall,
but they walk you through every part of the code
so you can probably adapt it for larger designs.
For this week’s Digi-Key Spotlight, in light of Salim's 3D Space Mouse, we're taking a look
at this helpful video from Shawn Hymel on how to calibrate a magnetometer.
These are hyper sensitive devices that are good at reading from the environment,
but that also means they can be easily thrown off by their environment.
Enclosures, electromagnetic interference and metal objects nearby,
All of these can throw off your readings.
Shawn shows you how to clean up your data
and get good results.
All right.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
Thank you so much for watching.
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As always, great big thanks to Digi-Key
for making this show possible and to you just for being here.
Take care. We'll see you soon.