This week on Maker update, an upside down 3D
printer, a step'N'snack fanny pack, telling time with bubbles,
paper cutters, Loki crowns, and making sacrifices to Leatherface.
Hello and welcome back to another Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner, and I hope you're doing great.
I recently got to visit with a whole gang of makers here in upstate New York,
and it was a great opportunity to recharge the creative batteries.
I've got an awesome show for you.
So let's check out the Project of the Week.
There's a lot of different designs for FDM 3-D printers,
but pretty much every single one has the print head in the same orientation:
with the nozzle pointing downwards and extruding the plastic in vertical layers.
But Krayln 3-D has a radical new design
for a 3-D printer that's not only portable and compact,
but it turns the entire design for FDM printers on its head.
And it's called the Positron.
It might not be obvious, but gravity has very little effect on FDM 3-D printing.
We know this because there's a 3-D printer on the ISS
that can print in microgravity.
But that doesn't mean that designing
a printer in this way is as easy as just flipping the Z-axis.
To make it easy to inspect the first layer for print problems,
The heated build plate is a clear piece of borosilicate glass.
To keep the gantry as compact as possible,
It's driven by an inverted H-Bot drive.
And to keep the extruder as short as possible.
The hot end makes a right angle bend,
so it doesn't need to be as tall as a conventional print head.
And it's not all clever design for clever design's sake.
Because of that right angle in the hot end, the heated part of the nozzle
is larger and can push more plastic without under extrusion.
And because the print head is lighter and the gantry is more rigid,
it can print faster and more accurately while maintaining a low center of gravity.
And because the gantry is rotated 45 degrees, it increases the build volume
without increasing the footprint of the machine.
Over the past few years, we've seen good FDM 3-D printers get cheaper and 3-D
printers get better overall, largely due to advancements in software and firmware.
But this is the most
radically different printer design I've seen in a good long while.
It may not turn into the next craze
in printer design, but it's exciting all the same.
At the time of this video, Krayln 3D has released a bill of materials
design files, PCB files and configuration settings
for the positron and plans to do a full video build series.
So you can build your own and put it through the paces.
Check it out down in the description.
More projects! We've seen ultrasonic levitators before,
but not quite like this one. From UPNA Lab comes the Sonic Surface.
It's a pair of jumbo sized PCBs, each one carrying
256 ultrasonic emitters in a 16 by 16 grid.
And what can you do with such an outlandish number of emitters?
Well... this.
The whole thing is managed by a pair
of FPGA processors and a single Arduino Nano.
One of my favorite parts of this project is the custom software
for positioning and animating the foam pellets.
This is a complex and expensive project to build.
But I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this.
On Instructables, I found this project by ShinodaY, where they've built
a numerical display made entirely out of illuminated air bubbles
Currently functioning as a clock
when it's time to display a new number, a row of solenoid valves introduces
bubbles into these vertical tubes, which are flooded with glycerin.
Similar to an old dot matrix printer,
the number is made out of several rows and columns of bubbles
that then slowly drift up and out of sight.
It takes a while for each number to form, and the numbers deform
pretty quickly as they float up out of the display.
But it makes it cool, soothing sound as each digit is formed,
and it's incredibly cool to watch.
Over on YouTube after a long hiatus, Lynn
from Darbin Orvar is finally back to making videos.
She's already released two, and both of them are related to bookbinding.
In this one, she creates a type of paper cutter called a book plough.
Instead of a traditional guillotine style paper cutter,
the pages of the book are held in a book binding vise
while a blade is attached to the sliding carriage to cut the pages.
The result is a clean and effortless method of cutting all the pages to size.
Also, check out the build video for the book binding vise
just to see how she built these wooden lead screws.
If you've been watching the Loki series on Disney plus, you've probably fallen
in love with a certain character who appears towards the end of the series
and maybe thought, could my pet be a Loki variant?
Techno Chic has an instructable to show you how to make
a Loki crown for your pet.
If you've never worked with Craft EVA foam,
this is a super accessible tutorial with a ton of great tips:
like how to use your scissors to get a clean line, where to add sculpture wire.
It's good stuff.
And finally, on the Hackaday blog, I found this ridiculous project
from Sam March, who has built a fanny pack that dispenses
a single M&M every time he walks 100 steps.
The device is simple enough.
Data from the accelerometer is used to determine when a step is taken.
And once 100 steps get counted, an Auger injects a single M&M from the hopper.
The decision to serve a single piece of candy ever 100 seps is purposeful
since the average person burns a single calorie
every 25 steps, and a single M&M contains four calories,
he's achieved caloric equilibrium.
It's silly and kind of pointless, but it works.
I also love how he came up with this idea.
He's been collaborating
with fans on his channel to give him ideas for his projects.
Once he completes the project,
it gets gifted to the person who he collaborated with.
It's a great way
to get out of a creative rut and also sends the project off to a happy home,
so you don't get stuck with it.
We're kicking off this week's Tips and Tools section with 10 Bullets:
The original heavyweight video from the Tom Sachs studio,
and this one is full of incredible tips.
This video was originally released as the 10 essential rules
of working at the Tom Sachs studio.
It covers topics like thought, process, organization, workflow and communication.
They're very particular about how the studio works,
So carbon copying these to your own workspace might not work for you.
But it's an essential thought exercise in determining how you work best,
whether you're alone in your own shop, working with a small team
on a large project, or establishing the rules of conduct in a makerspace.
Although one rule every workspace should adopt?
Always Be Knolling.
From Create Inc, I found this video about how to make 3-D prints
with seemingly impossible features, like printing in midair with no support.
The heart of this process is a Web site that allows you to write formulas
to generate Gcode parametrically, and he spends a good bit of time
explaining how to use it to get simple and increasingly more complex results.
Because he's generating the G code directly and without a slicer,
he's able to inject custom code, like shifting the print speed way down.
To achieve these seemingly impossible overhangs,
this is a completely different approach to 3D printing,
but you should be able to use it to get some really unique results.
Over on her channel, Liz Clarke from Blitz City
DIY takes a quick look at the ASUS Tinker Board 2.
the Tinker Board 2 is a single board computer with a similar form
factor to the Raspberry Pi, but with a total of six cores
of processing power and a comically large heat sink.
The bulk of the test consisted of running a series
of benchmarks on the Tinker Board 2, and comparing the scores
against the original Tinker Board and the Raspberry Pi 4.
There's a few surprises in the data, but overall, if you need a single board
computer with a little more grunt than a Raspberry Pi,
this could be the answer, though you might find yourself very much on your own.
There's a much smaller user base
for the Tinker Board and not as much software available.
But really, why can't every single board computer have color coded GPIO? Please?
Lastly, I thought there was a great tip for bending aluminum in this project video from Narwhal Labs.
In the video, they're building touchscreen, kiosk-style computers
to use in the shipping department of Total Boat and Jamestown Distributors.
To build the sturdy enclosure,
They're milling out flat pieces of aluminum with this slotted pattern.
The places where the shapes need to be bent.
That's a great tip on its own.
But the other piece of the puzzle is using the right type of aluminum.
6061 is easy to mill, but tended to break instead of bending
3000 series alloys bent beautifully, but tended to gum up the milling bits.
But 5000 series alloys was the sweet spot, easy to mill,
but remain flexible enough to be bent.
For this week's Digikey spotlight, I found this slightly older video
in their Another Teaching Moment series, and it's all about fans.
axial fans, centrifugal fans, tangential fans, blower fans.
There's a lot of different ways to move some air around.
This video covers the considerations of fan shape, the amount of air it can move,
and also touches on a few other considerations, like ducting.
If you want to keep your projects cool in the summer months,
give this one a look.
All right, and that is going to do it for this week's show.
I feel like this is a really strong week for creative outside of the box
types of projects.
I really enjoy putting it together and I hope you enjoyed watching it.
If he did leave us a comment, hit subscribe and give us a thumbs up.
It'd be super cool to see more people doing that thing from Sam March's video,
where folks dare one another to make different kinds of projects.
Maybe leave it there
for someone down in the comments, just maybe not rocket powered skates.
It's been done, as always, huge thanks to the folks at Digikey