hey everyone it's norm from tested here and it's that time of the year the end of 2021 i can hardly
believe it but as is tradition untested as we enter the holiday season the whole tested team
is me sharing some of their favorite stuff tools techniques products that they've learned about
and used this past year hopefully uh to inform some of your holiday purchases or things that you
might be interested in and the first thing i have to share well it it's not even on the table it's
my favorite 3d printer of the year i didn't couldn't bring it actually in but i do have
some prints from that printer it's the elegu saturn and it's been my workhorse this year if
you've watched some of my 3d printing videos the resin printing videos the resin time lapse videos
i've been able to do i've been able to get some really amazing prints um from some of the patreons
that i back in some of the three modelers i've been following on places like instagram
or even kickstarter and here are just a few examples of some of the prints that i've been
getting out of the elegance saturn from this is probably the largest one this one's from lord of
the print it's their kaiju inspired by godzilla printed in a clear resin and it just shows you
how far we've come in and how accessible modern resin printers are yes there's a whole
process you have to go through a whole cleaning process a whole workflow once you've got it down
it becomes incredibly enjoyable and these two in particular are from our friend johnny frazier
allen over at what a workshop uh he launched a kickstarter earlier this year and actually has
a new one going on right now with more of his creations i'm such a big fan of his artwork i
have links to those in the description below and related to some of that resin printing and model
making work i've been having fun with at home is this small little tabletop vise i actually learned
about this from the gunplug community this one's from dispay i think it's pronounced d-s-p-i-a-e
and it's just a small sturdy tabletop vise on a ball head here so you can move it around
and lock it in and then i have it actually clamping a 3d print just to show you the size of
object that you can have but it comes with a bunch of pins of course if you have a print that doesn't
stand on its own and you do some work on it that's where a vise like this becomes very useful even
though this is made for uh like snap fit model kits if you want to do some decal applications
or do some fine detail work having a vise like this that clamps tightly you can put pins in
to change the grip arrangement and also comes with these little plastic sleeves so you can protect
the pins and protect the models that you're working with so it doesn't actually damage them
it's a price a little bit on the high end i think about fifty dollars and there are some jeweler
vises that you can get from the 20 to 30 range but i like how sturdy it is i like how small this is
just kind of sits on my desk super compact and when i'm not using it to hold up a 3d print or
a piece of model making you can actually just use it as a little bit of a display stand as well you
know hold up your business cards or something but a small tabletop vise i'm really enjoying that
next up i have a little bit of lighting products that i've really become enamored with this year
if you follow some of my projects i've been obsessed with different types of led strips
for miniatures and there are three types of led strips or led products that i learned about this
year that are untraditional uh the unconventional not your standard sticky back led strip that you
would use to you know line your display cases or put in your computer case the first is this
fake neon diffuse led strips actually a piece of silicone tinted silicone here it's blue and you
would think that if you lay down your led strip the lights would be pointed upward but in this
case the clever thing they've done to make these fo neon strips for side display work is actually
have the led strips laid sideways which means that you can actually curve them and bend them in a way
that you wouldn't be able to normally do with your standard led strip so plugging this into a 12 volt
power supply and it shows you how bright these get they get you know they get pretty bright they come
in a bunch of different colors you can absolutely uh adapt them to a dimmer this one runs off of
12 volts and they come with all sorts of different colors actually a whole industry that makes these
specifically for those fake neon led signs you might have seen on etsy
and they are cuttable so if you look on the side you can actually cut them
and solder the connectors there are also different plugs you can plug in to tie the ends or
ways to connect to the led strip here so you can kind of wire a bunch of these in series um
and really fun to work with if you have a router a laser cutter to make your own neon fake neon signs
another form of more traditional led strips that i learned about this year are cob led strips chip
on board so this looks more like a traditional sticky back led strip but instead of having the
leds spaced apart very discreetly that you can see uh they're actually very tightly connected
and then also additionally diffused with a piece of silicone on top and so this one is green
if i plug it in again to our 12 volt power supply you can see that creates at least to my eye
a continuous bright light adam actually introduced me to these he used them in his spacesuits
that he built this past summer in lining the interior of the helmet to illuminate his face
and you can now see these uh all over the very very uh affordable and you can get
them in both five volt and 12-volt varieties and they can of course be attached to dimmers
so you can dim them as well but i love that continuous look of the leds you can also cut them
to length and solder them as well and there are accessories you can buy to clip them together if
you don't want to do the uh the manual soldering cob led strips that's the key word you want to
search when finding these and lastly this year was also introduced to silicone led strands these are
a little less accessible in terms of where you can find them uh you may have to find them overseas i
got them via aliexpress but they're also like cob led strips very tightly packed leds and in this
case encased in a flexible silicone wire they are fixed length you can't cut them the size i believe
these are 100 and these are about a foot long they come in like 130 millimeter 2 inches foot long 3
feet long this one's about 30 centimeters and to run these because these are three volts i actually
have another one my favorite things this year a lot of people have asked about this this is a usb
power supply so you might have a desktop benchtop power supply highly recommended if you're gonna do
a lot of electronics work but if you're going to the office and you want to run something
that's 3 volts 5 volts 12 volts and i believe up to uh 30 volts here this one goes as low as
0.5 volts up to 30 volt output you can actually run this off of a traditional usb battery pack
this one just happens to look like a tape cassette which i like so you plug this into
usb press power on i have some alligator clips here and actually i have one with longer alligator
clips i have multiple of these because they're just that useful and i can connect them they are
indicated a positive and negative and then i press power on
there goes three volts into a flexible led light extremely bright i can
decrease the voltage here to dim it a little bit or you can attach it to a pwm controller
but very versatile in all sorts of projects and recently i made these little light stands which
are the same led strands encased in just like a straw and if i plug those in also 3 volts
i have a little bit of a standing led light lots of fun to tinker with
no need for coating very basic electronics work all you need is a power supply
and a soldering iron if you want to solder some of these together so you can have a lot
of fun with a variety of different led lights next up i have a few pieces of production gear
no cameras new cameras this year but things have really helped me in filming my own videos at home
the first of which i did a review of just earlier this past month and it's a slider i really
love this thing it's made from ifootage and it's a two axis motorized slider that gives you a
little bit of motion control computerized motion control to either your iphone or small mirrorless
camera as demonstrated it just moves across this one axis right here is linear axis on this rail
and you can without having to use a phone app or having to tap buttons you can actually manually
physically let it know where you want your start and end points to be so i can say if i want my
start point to be here i tap right there my end point right here and i confirm and then i can say
over an interval maybe 30 seconds a minute if i'm doing a time lapse maybe
over an hour two hours i can actually have this move across not only this one linear axis but also
do a rotation that secondary movement right there usually is a very expensive um addition if you
have a motorized slider from like edelkrone now this isn't cheap it's priced now i believe at 800
because of how expensive electronics are and and shipping uh for this stuff manufactured overseas
so definitely it's a bit of a luxury but when filming at home getting footage of miniatures of
models or even just having a second camera to run on on location going when we shot our short film
this past summer this was invaluable in just giving a little bit of movement to those shots
and it's a part of our travel kit uh moving on um some another thing that's added extra bit
of production value to some of the stuff i've been filming at home is a tiny fogging machine
so we've experimented with some of the compressed air you know hazing devices before which give a
nice haze in the background but i want more wispy smoke these are basically repurposed
vape machines in a in a form factor that uses vegetable glycerin as the consumable
and with a bunch of different hose accessories but allow you to generate
some nice wispy fog effects uh for photography for portrait work for miniaturist work um
and not necessarily powerful enough to fill up a large studio space but if you're doing
something that's more table top size you can have accessories that can really add to the scene and
different formulations of that fog juice allow for you know the fog to react differently to sit
and be more present and do more than just add a haze to the whole ambiance this one comes from
microfogger us-based company i also like the smoke genie i don't have that unit here because adam's
actually using it in some of his props that he made his ghost trap for example that he brought to
new york comic-con but both that smoke genie and the micro fogger have really fun devices to use
on set both at home and in the studio here and lastly i've talked about these lights before
these are the lume cube lights they're really powerful leds uh four miniatures work they have
accessories magnetically attached you know like a snoot here to give a little bit of beam but what
i like and what i bought from them this year are these tiny tripod stands i love how compact this
they are really easy to deploy i just turn this to lock it in place and they telescope up to about
30 inches or so which not necessarily high enough for you know big studio work but for tabletop work
you can maybe put a webcam on this they're just a quarter quarter inch screw mount or
small light on this really useful lightweight low profile what i like is that they don't have
a lot of presence on the desk i can just place it around here on an apple box and allows me to get
this light positioned into place without having to rig something complex up so if you have a small
light panel or one of these loom cubes i recommend looking into one of these small light stands
and lastly it wouldn't be a tested video without a piece of novel and cutting edge technology and
this is something i've been waiting for for a long time from looking glass factory this is
their looking glass portrait that they launched as a crowdfunding campaign uh gosh it must have
been almost a year ago now and i got a chance to preview it this is a shipping production unit that
i got from backing it and i love having this on my desk it's what they call a light field display
um colloquially it's like a multi-view display so as opposed to displaying one image like you get on
a standard picture frame uh or even two images for what you'd see on maybe a stereo 3d video
or image here it's displaying dozens of images all at the same time pass through their filter
even though your eye only sees two of those images so they process either like portrait photos from
an iphone or basically any photo with depth information and render it out in a way so it's
actually displaying all those views at the same time on some built-in hardware built-in storage
runs off usbc and i have the cycling on my desk with my iphone portrait photos as well as some
videos i've shot with the new cinematic mode as well as some light field videos that you can take
yourself with some some consumer gear it just feels like a little bit of that future that the
company looking glass always tried to make in their pursuit of the holograms been following
their company for a long time now and this feels like something finally that makes sense for
early adopters to really jump on into with uh regular updates on their software and also cameras
everywhere that take photos that work with this so i really love having this looking glass portrait
on my desk so those are a few of my favorite things i do have some coffee table books i want to
share with you but that will be in a future video because there's some that haven't quite arrived
they're shipping in december that i'm looking forward to checking out but i will have links to
everything that i mentioned in the description below and like i said uh the rest of the team
will be sharing their favorite things from this past year in the coming weeks uh happy holidays
thanks for supporting us thanks for watching our videos and we'll see you next time bye