This week on Maker Udate: a Split-Flap for One-Eyed Jacks, a rotisserie for your car,
Jimmy Diresta's return to television, puzzle boxes, sugar printers
and a leg mounted Dualshock for Accessible Gaming.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you've been doing great.
We've got another great show for you.
So let's check out the project of the week.
Clocks seem to be one of the most
commonly tackled projects by all kinds of makers, from mechanical
to electronic and nearly every kind of design in between.
It's one of those creative exercises where you don't need
to worry about the function of the project,
which frees up your creativity to express how you want to show the passage of time.
Split flap displays have been used in clocks for decades,
but I don't think I've ever seen one that uses playing cards.
That's exactly the idea behind the Casino'clock by Shinsaku Hiura.
It displays the current time on an array of three playing cards.
Each digit of the clock is represented by the value of the card, with Jacks for 11,
Queens for 12, and the Joker is zero.
I guess because only the top part of the flap is needed for the display,
it's technically not a split flap, but just a flap display.
Anyhow, the rotors and the hinges are all 3D printed
and the cards are held in place by this wavy friction fit clamp.
The motor for each rotor is one of these small five volt stepper motors.
When the clock updates, the sound made by the flaps advancing
is a really soothing mechanical sound.
Any Wi-Fi connected microcontroller should work
as long as it has at least 12 GPIO pins.
But Shinsaku used the M5stamp C3, which is a Risc-V microcontroller
featuring an ESP 32 wireless chip.
Shinsaku provides all the 3D printing files for the design on his Thingiverse page
as well as the Arduino code
and the complete bill of materials you need to build your own.
If you drill down into his YouTube
channel, you'll find that this isn't his first clock either.
There's a ton of other great designs for timekeeping projects.
If you're looking for more inspiration.
Time for some news.
A few days ago, Netflix dropped the trailer for Making Fun.
This is a reality style TV show hitting the streaming service in March,
and it's starring a number of familiar faces. Jimmy Diresta is leading
a team of makers, including Paul Jackman, Pat Lap and John Graziano.
And their challenge is to build inventions as dreamed up
by a Shark Tank style panel of kids.
It sounds a little like the YouTube channel kids advanced stuff,
but it looks like they're using the crazy ideas as a blank hall pass
to make stuff that has no practical use,
Other than to be awesome and deliver a laugh.
It looks like a great watch and it's cool to see all these folks end
up on a show like this.
More projects.
This one is from a little over a year ago, but I was blown away
by the design of this wooden puzzle box by Progress.
This small box is made of three quarter inch Baltic birch plywood.
What's unique about it is all the channels that have been drilled
into the walls of the box that allow a tiny neodymium magnet to slide around.
That magnet is what disengages the latch of the box's lid
and only when it's in a particular position.
You solve the puzzle by rolling the box in a particular sequence of rotations
to move the magnet into its unlocked position.
It's a really clever design, and it forces me to think of plywood
as a three dimensional material instead of just a sheet good.
Bob Clagett of I Like to Make Stuff
has built a rotisserie for his car.
I'm not very familiar with the tools used in auto body
restoration, so to me that sounds like an insane sentence,
But these are actually pretty common. They're tools used to rotate the body of the car
to make it easier to work on the roof or the undercarriage.
The trick is to build them so they're strong enough
to support the weight of the car, but also be able to lift the car
as close as possible to the car's center of mass
so it can be rotated easily and without it becoming a hazard.
Bob: I'm legitimately surprised that it works
Bob: I mean I thought it might...
Bob: But I also know there are so many places along this thing that could fail.
It's great to see Bob working on a completely different scale
than what he's comfortable with and still end up with a great result
We featured a handful of Akaki Kuumeri's 3D printed
controller designs before, but this is something different.
This is a one handed adapter for the PlayStation 4 and 5 controllers
to make them more accessible.
The alternate analog stick is controlled by moving the entire controller
while this leg band secures it to your leg.
There's a set of buttons that work through linkages to press the buttons
on the opposite side, and the triggers work in a similar fashion.
He originally designed the adapter for the PlayStation 5 controller,
but since those are still fairly scarce, he was able to refine the design
for the Dualshock 4. There's versions of the adapter for both left and right
handed play, and I love these labels that he's made for the buttons.
Just using extra pieces of filament
Akaki shares all of his files on his Prusa Printers page,
but if you don't have access to a 3D printer, the controller project
charity can help connect you with someone to print one for you.
Time for some tips and tools.
Angus from Makers' Muse has a video of five designs along the
evolutionary path to modern 3D printing, but these ones were all dead ends.
There's a lot of designs in here that if you squint look like modern
3D printers, like the RepRap Darwin with a pint-sized RepRap Tantallus.
But then there's completely wild stuff like CandyFab from
Evil Mad Scientist which used a heat gun to melt sugar,
Similar to selective laser sintering. Or the kinematic designs
of Nicholas Seward, which is unlike anything out there today.
It's a great look at some of the ambitious designs
that didn't make the cut but still move 3D printing technology forward, all the same.
On Instructables, I found this tip from Richard Wagner
as an alternate way of soldering wires to perf board
that doesn't even require the use of a third hand tool.
The trick is to melt the length of solder to the solder pads, but leave a bit of
unmelted solder sticking out. When you're ready to solder the wires
touch the wire to the solder pool, heat it up with your iron,
and it should wick into the wire, creating your joint.
With a little bit of practice.
You can estimate how much solder you need for your joint,
but this looks like an easier way to make those connections.
We've been fans of MakerCase.com for a while for making parametric laser
cut box designs, but I just discovered
Boxes.py by Florian Festi.
This is a whole collection of parametric design generators, including
boxes, enclosures, hinge designs, tool
holders, shelves, and a whole lot more.
Each design has a number of settable parameters,
different allowances for material thickness and laser kerf.
If you have access to a laser cutter, check it out.
Speaking of laser cutters, on Tested,
Norm and Jen Schachter have a video sharing
their initial thoughts on the Rendyr Optic laser cutter.
This is a pretty new design for diode lasers attempting to make laser
cutting a little more accessible for casual users. When not in use,
The axes of the gantry fold and nest into one another for storage.
The laser head has a pair of diode lasers that are working together
to generate more power, and it even has its own
internal fume extraction and filtration system.
This is an early prototype of the laser cutter,
and the Rendyr Optic is presently running as a Kickstarter campaign.
So everything could still change.
But it's a great video to watch.
If you're looking into a machine like this, just to have an idea
of what kind of performance you can expect.
For this week's Digikey Spotlight,
We've got a video in their First Look series about
Low Profile, PTC resettable fuses.
Just like regular Fuses,
These can be used to protect
your circuits from conditions like overheating and short circuits
when the component gets too hot for many of these conditions, The carbon
matrix that's responsible for passing the current breaks, opening the circuit.
But when the fuse returns to room temperature,
the carbon matrix reforms and current can flow through it again.
It's a cool trick and might be a good feature
for a project you're working on.
Alright and that is going to do it for this week's show.
I hope you enjoyed it.
If you did, give us a thumbs up, leave us a comment.
Tell us about your weirdest idea for a timekeeping device.
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Big thanks as always to the folks at
Digikey Electronics for making this show possible and to you for watching it.
Take care. We'll see you soon.