This week on Maker Update: a 15 horsepower 3D print,
a solar powered art bot turning good ideas into great ones.
Flip top coffee tables and putting CAD into the Blender.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're doing great.
I hope this springtime weather
is bringing you up and the pollen and the allergies aren't bringing you down.
We've got another great show for you,
So let's check out the project of the week.
It could be that you've never considered
the possibility of telling a story using 3D printing.
I know I never have.
Or maybe you've thought about using 3D printing to make a Zoetrope
or a picture scroll or something similar.
But Caleb Kraft has done something completely different
and embedded an animation directly into the layer lines of his 3D prints.
You can't see them when the print is complete, and he can only see it
by watching the time lapse of the 3D print being made.
It's a completely wild and creative idea, and I love it.
To accomplish this, you need two models:
one that will be the exterior form of your print, and another
that contains all of the frames of your animation, stacked vertically.
The model with the animation frames forms a negative space within the outer print,
and when you make a time lapse of the 3D print being made,
you will see all of the animation frames played back in order.
You create your animation frames
by tracing them in vector design software like Inkscape.
You can then take all of those frames
and extrude them into a stack of thin, but solid layers.
There's some simple math to
be done to determine how thick each animation layer should be.
Since every layer of your print is a frame of video in the time lapse,
the extrusion should be as thick as double your layer height,
That way you get a new frame of animation
every other frame of video.
I'm probably making it sound more complex
than it actually is, but trust me, it's pretty simple.
From there, it's just a few tweaks in your slicer
to make sure you're getting the clearest image.
Caleb found it best to use an infill pattern
that was the same every layer so it wouldn't be distracting
and that if he could combine the models in Prusa slicer
he could avoid getting infill within the animation frames.
Maybe this isn't the most groundbreaking invention
any maker has ever made before, or even the wildest YouTube video.
But it's a clever idea for taking two separate methods
of creative expression and mashing them together.
More projects!
Maybe it's just me, but taking something really dangerous
and then giving control of it to a robot
is just one of those uniquely Makery things.
Cranktown City is doing something like that by making a solar
powered laser engraver using a CNC gantry and a magnifying glass.
It's best to think of the machine in two separate parts.
There's your standard X/Y gantry for the CNC, but there's also
a whole pan/tilt mechanism to make sure the machine stays aligned to the sun.
I love the clever and simple sun alignment sensor.
It's a disc of steel separated into four quadrants,
and each quadrant has a photo resistor.
If any of the photo resistors falls into shade, it knows it's
no longer in alignment with the sun and moves until it is.
The other thing I love about this project is just watching him
kludge together a CNC gantry.
You'd think you'd need more precision than this,
Or maybe he's being more precise than he's letting on.
But it's just so much fun to see the whole thing come together.
Stick around to the end, though, just to see the machine in action.
Cristiana from Get Hands Dirty
is making this super functional coffee table for her tiny apartment build.
The whole table top lifts up to something close to desk height,
which is perfect for doing computer work, or eating meals, or whatever else.
And when the table top is down,
the whole unit doubles as storage for the Murphy-style bed.
One detail I thought was really clever is this cork strip on the tabletop.
This will function as a bumper for the bed when it's folded down
to preserve the table surface and keep it from getting scratched.
Like with any of Cristiana's builds.
This video is just chock full of great little tips
for making super precise and really clean looking woodworking designs.
And on YouTube, I learned about this lock picking robot by Sparks and Code.
If you've ever learned to pick locks before, you know there's
some complicated movements for a robot to pull off.
You've got to apply torque
to the lock cylinder while aligning all the pins.
Both parts of the robot
Use load cells to determine how much torque to apply
and how much force the lock is giving back.
Luckily, he realized that for the locks he's trying to pick,
He can get away with a simple raking motion of the pins.
Maybe that's cheating,
But this armature is a fantastic piece of engineering,
and it should support more advanced code later on
to pick more complex locks.
Time for some tips and tools.
A few years ago, Bob from I Like to Make Stuff squadded up with
Evan and Katelyn to build this ping pong table with its own electronic scoring system.
These days, Bob has another commercial table
and he wants the same scoring system.
So he's taking this as an opportunity to revisit the project
and redesign it so it can work on any table.
And while he's at it, maybe he could also make it into a sellable product.
Not that building projects is easy, but it's so much easier
when you know that you're the only one who has to live with it.
Making a product
that can be easily installed by anyone, look tidy and professional,
and still be relatively easy to manufacture is not a simple task.
Bob talks about all the different considerations they came across, like
wiring connectors, and adhesives, the whole lot.
It's a completely different way of thinking about a project
and there's a lot of great lessons in here.
Over at Off Earth Cosplay, I found this great tip for making dirty,
muddy weathering for replica props and armor. There are plenty of ready
made products to help you get this done, but they're expensive.
His tip involves using these pastels.
You break them down, add a little bit of water,
and now you have a dirty,
muddy paste that you can brush on and wipe off the excess.
You can come back with a lighter color for a highlight pass for more details
and a heat gun will help speed up the drying process.
The finished result looks great
and it should help make your props look more worn and weathered.
Blender the free and open source 3D design software has been loved
by 3D printing enthusiasts and artists for a good long time now,
but it's never been that useful for folks
who use 3D printing for mechanical design... until now.
There's a new plug in that allows you to do sketch-based, constrained
mechanical drawings and then expand them into 3D shapes.
This video gives you just a taste of what you can do with this plug in,
and these new features are still in their early days.
I'm sure there's more to come later on.
The Crafsman Steady Craftin just released this video
about a tool used by animators called The Winder.
If you look at this thing, it's pretty simple,
but you might already be wondering how you ever lived without one.
There's a heavy base and a pair of toothed rails. and in the middle
there's a connector that lets you move an armature around on two individual axes.
He shows how this can be immediately useful for stop motion animation
but it seems like you could use this for all kinds of stuff: as a reference tool
or really precise third hand, or just using it the way the creators intended.
Of course, if you follow the links, you might be surprised - as I was -
on the price for one of these things,
but I imagine you could probably build something similar
with some 3D printed parts and robot components.
Speaking of robots, over in Make: Magazine, I found this article by David Calkins
with Ten Tips on how to win at Robot Combat.
There's some obvious stuff in here, like finishing your robot
before you get to the competition. Or at least it seems obvious
until you're crunching to finish it before packing up for the competition.
But there's lots of other great tough love tips here,
like making sure your robot can take a few heavy hits from a sledgehammer,
or making sure you know how to drive it after you've lost a wheel or two.
Or making sure you've tested your weapon on something.
So you know what happens when it hits something.
There's a lot of great advice in here from someone who has won -
and lost - plenty of matches.
For this week's DigiKeySpotlight.
We've got another one of those wonderful Web tools
that you can only find on the Digikey website.
This is the antenna builder presented by Taoglas.
If you've
got a wireless project and you want to get the best performance for it, you're
probably going to want a better antenna than what's on the board.
Not only does the tool make it easy to browse
all of the antennas sold by Digikey Key, but it quickly pares down
your search based on how the antenna is mounted,
The frequency it works with, connection type, even the color.
Check it out.
All right.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
I hope you enjoyed it.
I can't stop thinking about the amount of work
it takes to take a project and turn it into a product.
I try to do a little bit of that before publishing a project since someone else
might not want to forgive some of the shortcuts that I took.
But this is on a whole other level.
Anyway, give us a thumbs up if you like.
Leave a comment and sign up
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Big thanks to Digikey Electronics and to you for watching.
Take care. We'll see you soon.