This week on Maker Update: building a bass guitar from scratch,
A DIY SawStop, taking the fun out of jigsaw puzzles,
Zip Tie Channels, 3d Scanners,
and better living through electrolysis.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're all doing great.
I've got to be honest, I've been feeling a little bit
like my home computer is cursed.
I've had to replace a bunch of different unrelated components in the past week.
That's been a pain.
I hope your work's been going a little bit more smoothly.
We've got an awesome show for you, so let's check out the project of the week.
Speaking of feeling a little bit cursed, Xyla Foxlin managed to build this
gorgeous custom bass guitar while going through a rough patch of her own.
She moved shops, got COVID, her house got burgled,
and a couple of other unfortunate things.
But that didn't stop her from making amazing projects like this bass.
As a first time making a musical instrument,
you would think she'd take it easy and make a solid body instrument.
But have you ever seen any of her other projects?
Keeping things simple just isn't what she does.
Instead, she came up with this open body design, with these hollow wings
made of bent lamentations, and it looks incredible.
She starts the video off by showing how to build a steam box to steam the wood
so it can be bent in the shapes she needed for the body.
Then she carved out the main body
of the guitar, which is made from a massive block of Purple Heart,
which afforded plenty of its own challenges.
I've never worked with it before.
And after hearing how much of a pain it is to work with,
I'm not sure I want to.
I've watched a handful of guitar builds, and at this point they typically bolt on
an off-the-shelf neck, wire in all the electronics, and call it good.
That's not what's happening here.
Even the neck, the fretboard, the headstock, every last bit is custom made,
and every part of the build is thoroughly documented.
Whether you're hoping to learn how to shape a guitar neck,
steam bending wood or just setting up elaborate clamping jigs,
this video is full of incredible references,
and the resulting instrument doesn't just look great.
It sounds amazing, too.
The other shock is that Xyla had never actually held
a bass guitar before designing and making this one.
There's a ton of work that went into this project,
but it's a great testament to sticking it out and building
something that only you can build.
Chances are you're not going to try and duplicate this one,
but maybe someone out there can.
Xyla is selling off the templates on eBay.
More projects!
Most people don't look at a SawStop and think “I could build that myself.”
But then again, most people aren't Ruth Amos.
She was recently gifted a table saw and after googling all the ways
you can easily injure yourself with one, she decided to take a shot of adding
a SawStop styled safety system to stop the blade
if her hand came into contact with it.
Like any great idea, she had a couple of different iterations on the design:
a bar that would jam into the spinning blade to stop it,
Another that would knock into it from the side.
But what really impressed me was how easy it was to design
the skin sensing mechanism.
It's basically a big capacitive touch sensor,
which is a pretty easy task for an Arduino.
The blade brake that actually worked was an electromagnetic clutch,
and while the genuine article can stop the blade a little bit faster, sparing more injury,
Ruth's creation looks pretty effective here.
Don't worry, though, she's still saving up for the brand name.
From the Facebook 3D printing group,
I found this handbag design by 3D Print and Design.
This entire bag is made of flexible panels printed in TPU,
but because the bag is much larger than most print volumes,
the entire surface of the bag is intended to be stitched together like fabric or leather.
The solvent used to do this is called Tetrahydrofuron, and it looks like
it bonds the TPU together by melting it into a single piece.
It's great to see 3D printing used in fashion design,
but I've never seen an approach quite like this.
It's a great watch and a fun video seeing the entire design process
and also learning how to make your own Voronoi panels.
Great stuff.
And finally, Shane from Stuff Made Here has another video
where he's building a complex robot to make the world a little less fun.
This time, he's making a robot that solves jigsaw puzzles.
This is one of those problems that just gets more complicated
the more you think about it.
In order to manipulate the pieces, he needs a high speed gantry with a suction grabber.
for the software to understand the shape of the pieces
it needs to capture images of them without any parallax.
And to store all of the scanned pieces,
It needs this elaborate magazine system to catalog the pieces.
In this two part video,
you'll see him wrestle with most of the mechanical issues with the project.
But before the robot can attempt its intended goal of a 5000 piece puzzle,
the software needs to become a lot more efficient.
Right now, it would need to compute for over 3000 years
before it's ready to start assembling the puzzle.
The second part will reveal just how he handles that.
But in the meantime, the project is already seriously impressive,
even just solving small puzzles.
Time for some tips and tools, on Alan Reiner's YouTube channel,
He shares his latest obsession with making zip tie channels in his 3D printed designs.
These are essentially just a curved path through the walls of the 3D print
that allow you to use zip ties as anchors.
These can be used for cable management, mounting electronics, securing batteries,
or even attaching two different 3D printed parts together.
They look like they'd be fairly simple to add into your modeling workflow,
so maybe give this a shot on your next design.
If you've gone shopping for a Raspberry Pi recently, you've probably realized
how difficult and expensive it can be, thanks to the global chip shortage.
Michael Klements has a helpful video on some of the alternative single board computers
you might be tempted to use instead.
He compares them on cost and features, quality of documentation,
GPIO, and compatibility with the rest of the PI's ecosystem of add-on boards.
Hopefully this can help you get your project back on the road,
If you've been waiting for affordable PI's to become available.
On the 3D Print Everything YouTube channel, they've got a video and various tips
and tricks in using 3D scanners.
They share what they know on the types of scanners they found to work best,
how to set up a good scanning environment,
the best ways to reduce reflections which can cause errors in your scan.
And there's also a good breakdown on how to clean up the resulting data
into something workable.
And finally, Becky Stern has a great tip on how to use electrolysis to etch brass.
Brass can easily be etched using a number of different processes,
but they normally involve a lot of nasty chemicals.
But with electrolysis, all you need is saltwater,
A low voltage power supply, and a piece of scrap steel.
You'll also need an aquarium pump to keep the water moving.
This seems like a fantastic method for anyone who's wanted to try etching brass,
but didn't want to bother with the acids needed for the traditional methods.
For this week's Digikey Spotlight, Shawn Hymel has an interesting experiment.
Just like me, Shawn claims to have a terrible sense of direction,
and he wants to use technology to try and improve it.
The idea is he'll create a wearable device with a magnetometer
and a haptic feedback motor that will buzz whenever he's facing North.
Hopefully with that confirmation feedback, he can also identify
other clues or landmarks to better learn which direction is north.
The angle of the sun, looking for certain landmarks and maybe even developing
a greater sensitivity to the planet's magnetic field.
I won't spoil the ending. But it's a fun watch.
All right.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
I hope you had a good time with it if you did.
Be sure to subscribe.
Give us a thumbs up and leave us a comment.
I'm curious to know what your favorite project or tip was.
Big thanks as always to
did you keep from making this whole thing possible and you for watching.
Take care. We'll see you soon.