[Sweeping synth music playing]
This week on Maker Update: a plastic excreting art bot,
Diresta's mini morbid mobile, glowing jewelry, invisible ink,
and 3D printed repairs.
Hey, I'm Donald Bell and welcome back to another Maker Update.
I hope you're all doing well and staying cool.
I've got a fun show for you filled with some pretty crazy ideas.
So let's get started with the Project of the Week.
Sometimes I reserve Project of the Week for feats of incredible technical achievement.
Sometimes, though, I just have to recognize projects
that show me something I've never seen before.
RE: PLACES is an art piece by Carolin Liebl and Nikolas Schmid-Pfähler
that really checks both boxes.
It's a robot measuring close to two meters high
that roams the exhibit space powered by a tethered connection from the ceiling.
At the core of the robot is a high temperature, plastic extruder
and various hoppers filled with pellets of shredded plastic waste
and at different intervals across the day, the robot finds
an open space and poops out a molten plastic free-form sculpture.
It's like a giant version of
the glob you get when you change out the filament in a 3D printer.
Some of the globs really do look like beautiful hand-blown glass sculpture.
It reminds me that sometimes the only difference between the ordinary
and the extraordinary is scale.
The extruder is made from open source plans
created by the precious plastic DIY recycling group.
As for the robot, it's an omni wheel design using three wheels
controlled by a teensy microcontroller,
a motor driver and ESP 32 board for wireless control.
I expect that combining the robot
with the extruder required a number of challenges to be overcome.
But at the end of the day you get your own upcycled plastic pooping art bot.
I think that's the kind of robot I would want to be.
More projects! On his YouTube channel,
Jimmy Diresta shows how he made this gas powered, coffin-shaped go kart
from start to finish.
As someone who's built a few go karts and is also a fan of George Barris's
custom monster cars like Dragula, this project is my peanut butter and jelly.
That said, I've never seen someone build a cart like this before.
First of all, Jimmy has this monster welding table
that allows him to lay out and clamp down the entire frame in one shot.
Like this table looks like it's the size of my entire workshop.
And usually with the build like this, there's some part that you ordered
in the wrong size or configuration, the wrong gear or hole pattern.
The build stops, you order more parts, and pick things up a week later.
But when you have the Diresta skills
and the Diresta shop, you just plow ahead.
You put it on the mill, chuck it in the lathe,
cut it from stock on the plasma cutter, whatever you need,
you can make or modify right there.
Once I could get past the envy, it was just a total
treat to see this seemingly unbroken flow of creativity.
Plus, the end result looks like a pretty sweet ride.
For a project that could be made an even the smallest workspace.
Check out this glowy circuit sculpture pendant by Charlyn Gonda.
Now this is a scale I can work with and the results are no less eye catching.
It's a handmade brass pendant with LED sequins
lit by a tastefully concealed CR2032 watch battery.
There's a lot to love about this.
First, just the design alone has this wonderful,
elegant art deco vibe, even when you see it as a drawing.
And really, her other concepts look great too, and I hope she makes them.
She then prints a reverse version of the drawing to use as a template
for cutting and soldering the bits of brass together.
And what I think is so clever is how she uses the brass circles to cover up
both the battery holder and the gap where the loop of wire meets up.
Because even perfect soldering technique can't make that joint disappear.
It's a great example of circuit art, and I hope that it inspires
a whole trend of wearable circuit designs.
Now for some tips and tools on Instagram, Federico from Wolfcat Workshop
shows an ingenious experiment in combining plotter art and watercolor.
By laying down lines with a friction erasable pen, he's able to plot a design to color in,
which he can then erase when he's done using a heat gun.
It looks like magic and definitely has me interested in playing around
with some combination of plotter and erasable pen.
To keep all those art supplies at the ready,
Maybe you need some crafty clothing.
On the core 77 blog.
I noticed that Fiskars, a company you may know for their scissors
and cutting tools, has launched their own line of designer workwear.
This isn't an endorsement, and honestly, it's all a bit out of my budget.
But, you know, I'm a guy who gets excited about utility clothing
and I thought you'd get a kick out of this too.
On Tested, Norm and Jen have a new video out
on how to give laser cut projects a hand-crafted look and feel.
Not only do they show different techniques for finishing the same design,
but they also go into some of the tricks and strategies
that go into making an organic feeling design out of laser cut parts.
And on his YouTube channel, Morley Kert invites you along on a day
he spent making free 3D printed repairs for broken things
that strangers brought in to get fixed.
Not only is it a feel good video,
just seeing people help one another out, but as a maker
you also get a vicarious thrill just from seeing things get fixed.
You probably do repairs like this around your own home,
but there's something about performing the same repairs for people
as quickly as possible that makes it feel more like a game.
Do you spend the extra time perfectly recreating the part and risk it not fitting,
or do you design a different solution that prints faster,
and can be made to work with enough epoxy?
How do you prototype solutions before committing to a design?
It's a fun watch.
For this week's Digikey spotlight, check out their latest video on how
hydraulic and pneumatic actuators work.
Big projects sometimes require more power than an electric motor
or servo can put out.
Hydraulic and pneumatic actuators can be a great solution,
but each has their own unique strengths and restrictions.
In just 4 minutes, the video provides an excellent overview
of what these types of systems can do.
And that does it for this week's show.
Leave thumbs up, leave a comment.
Big thanks to Digikey Electronics for making this whole show possible
and thank you for watching. I'll see you soon.