This week on Maker Update: Cutting your lawn with lasers,
a cyberpunk PC case, making 3D prints that look like metal.
A Kumiko canoe paddle, cross infill
and getting n00ds from Adafruit.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update,
the show where we keep you up to date on all the cool stuff people are making.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're all doing great.
We've got a fantastic show for you that's full of great projects.
So let's check out the project of the week.
Having a yard is great, but taking care of them is a lot of hard work
and it'll be so much easier if a machine could do it for you.
And I know you can get a Roomba-style robot mower and those are great.
But you know what they don't have?
Lasers.
which is why Daniel from rctestflight has built a laser powered mower
by attaching a 40 watt diode laser to a 3D printed panning mechanism.
He's able to very slowly but very precisely,
cut his lawn down to an impossibly uniform height.
A camera lens makes the focal point considerably longer,
so it can cut over a broader range of distances.
As the laser sweeps back and forth,
It trims down every single blade of grass in its
path to the exact same height.
And if one laser can work this well, it stands to reason
that 24 lasers could work even better.
Right!?
Daniel swapped out the 40 watt laser for this laser array
and focused it using these massive lenses.
Incredibly dangerous, but also incredibly cool looking.
The biggest problem with the laser mower is that the cut grass tends
to fall down into the area it was already cutting,
creating more work for the laser.
Since the light falloff decreases the power of the laser over distance,
The last step is to attach the laser to a mobile rover.
So it can drive around his yard maximizing its cut efficiency.
The whole thing is really dangerous and not very practical,
but it's also incredibly satisfying to see the grass cut all perfectly level.
Fun stuff.
Martina from The Nerd Forge
shares with us her recent commission of hers
building a cyberpunk cityscape PC case
to be completed in just two weeks.
And that's not the only challenge.
It needs to survive the trip to its recipient,
and it still needs to be a functional PC case.
It starts out with the sidewalk along the base, made from EVA foam,
and then her laser cutter comes in handy to make all the elements and details
for buildings and storefronts from cardboard.
She's using the full arsenal of crafting tricks like harvesting greeblies,
adding pipe and wire details, and reusing materials like food containers.
One of my favorite techniques she shows is how she made these posters and advertisements.
to build up an appropriate richness of color
that doesn't get washed out when illuminated from behind,
She's stacking three layers of printed transparency
on top of a diffusion layer, and it looks fantastic.
She's able to use the power directly from the computer's power supply
to power all the different lights she's using to make the cityscape
look genuinely cyberpunk.
It's an incredible build that's full of tiny details to get lost in.
It looks gorgeous.
Miles of Make With Miles wants to build a gift for one of his oldest friends.
A canoe paddle -
but not just any paddle, but one with a Kumiko pattern set into the blade.
It starts straightforward enough.
Well, aside from the blade of the paddle being hollow,
and you also get to see a variety of jigs used to cut
all of the Kumiko infill pieces to the same size.
I also appreciated Miles using one of my favorite tips
for the epoxy pour, making the mold box out of corrugated plastic signs.
He also shares some great tips on how
you can rescue an epoxy pour that's full of bubbles.
After all the work, the paddle is definitely seaworthy
and it doesn't look like anything else out there.
With Halloween less than two months away.
It's a great time to start working on some spooky decorations.
Wicked Makers have a tutorial on how to turn an old book
into a creepy spell book with an animated eye.
The animation comes from a
retired smartphone with a circular lens over the front to add more depth.
They cut a hole in the cover of the book and a cavity in the pages
to accommodate for the phone.
And it's already turning into a good look.
Some air dry clay is used to shape the eyelid details
and then some veins are added using beads of hot glue.
Mod Podge and crape paper are used to give the book a worn,
leathery texture before it all gets painted.
Then they add some finishing details with hardware.
Time for some tips and tools, in Martina's PC Build.
You might have caught this super bright, super flexible lighting element.
These are a new product sold by Adafruit fruit called n00ds.
These are strings of LED lighting that are covered in silicone.
They only require three volts of power and it looks like they can be bent
as much as you need to, as long as you're not pinching them.
And they can be had in a handful of different colors.
These look like a super fun and versatile way to add more glow to your projects.
From Volos Projects we have a demo of the Lily GO T-Display S3.
This is an ESP 32 based board
with a 1.9 inch color LCD bolted right onto it.
There's connection points for an antenna to increase the wireless performance,
and a terminal to connect a lipo battery.
There's even a connector for the Grove ecosystem of sensors and accessories.
If you're looking for a wireless dev board with all the bells and whistles,
this looks like it might be the perfect fit.
He includes a link to purchase the board for around $20.
Bob from I Like to Make Stuff.
Has a guide on how to make 3D prints look like metal.
He's trying three different approaches here.
The first is to just print the part in a metallic filament.
For the next one, he's doing the standard print finishing techniques,
sanding the part smooth, then priming it and painting it with a chrome spray paint.
The last and most expensive one gets a glossy black undercoat
before being painted with an All-Clad chrome lacquer.
He finishes with a comparison of all three props.
There's definitely a clear winner,
So you're getting what you paid for.
But it's also great to see the different trade offs from various techniques.
And finally, Lost in Tech
offers an explainer to one of Cura's weirdest infill patterns:
Cross infill.
It looks like just another infill pattern, but where things get weird
is this field down in the experimental settings:
Cross Infill Density Image.
You can use an image to determine the density of your infill.
There's a couple of cool things you can do with this.
First off,
you can use this to write secret messages in your infill pattern, if you like.
Or you can vary the density on flexible materials to create deliberate
hinge points in your model or predictable breakaway points in rigid materials.
There's a lot of cool things you can do with this.
For this week's Digi-Key spotlight.
They've got a quick tip on how to calculate the frequency and duration
of a 555 timer circuit.
If you've ever wanted to make an LED blink without a microcontroller,
chances are you're going to be reaching for a 555 timer
by changing the capacitor and resistor values,
You get different output timings.
They show the formulas for both monostable and astable modes.
And there's also a helpful online calculator on the Digi-Key website.
Check it out.
All right, 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, hit subscribe and leave us a comment
and let us know what your favorite project from this week was.
Big thanks, as always, to Digi-Key for making
this whole show possible and to you for watching.
Take care.
We'll see you soon.