This week on Maker Update: a 56 K warning, a mangle rack clock movement
telegram notifications for your home, measuring tape tips,
metal engraving techniques, and getting random numbers from bananas.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're doing great. Lately I've been tackling a ton
of shop maintenance and organization and a handful of tool upgrades.
I hope your projects are on the up and up.
We've got another great show for you, so let's check out the project of the week.
Have you ever wanted to go back to the bawdy old
days of Netscape Navigator, of AltaVista...
Maybe you're just yearning to ask Jeeves a burning question.
Well, now you can.
Courtesy of the Internet time machine by the Science Elf.
All you need to do is plug it into your favorite computer,
spin the dial and surf the web like it's 1998.
The project operates
as a black box - literally and figuratively.
Inside the stylish ABS project box is a Raspberry Pi 4.
The Raspberry Pi handles two significant tasks:
First, it acts as a Wi-Fi bridge, which makes it easy for this
classic iMac to access modern networks.
Secondly, and more interestingly, it acts as a web proxy.
A web proxy can handle a lot of different functions,
but simply explained it acts as a middle person,
Between the web requester and the web server.
In this case, it will happily hijack your web request
and send it over to the Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine is a service provided by the Internet Archive
that maintains a history of Web sites
and allows you to shift forward and back in time
via its interactive calendar to see how they've evolved over their history.
There's a wonderful web interface, but this project swaps
that out for a physical dial that lets you dial in a specific date.
There's even a helpful LCD to let
you know where you are in the time stream.
As someone who's been very online
for a very long time, I love this project.
It's weird to feel nostalgia for the ugly websites of the late nineties, but I do.
And it's tremendous to see snapshots of the internet frozen in time forever.
Not that the internet was necessarily better back
then, but it's certainly felt wilder.
This device might help you capture some of that nostalgia.
If you want to build your own,
there's a full GitHub repo down in the description.
Time for more projects,
There's a lot of different clock projects out there, even Lego clocks.
But I don't think I've ever heard of a mangle clock.
This clock by the Akiyuki Brick Channel
uses a mangle rack mechanism
which uses this oblong gear pattern to enable this pointer
to walk itself around a clock face full of pins.
You get to see them solve
for the proper number of pins needed for a clock movement.
They create the second hand, minute hand and the hour hand.
As a clock movement, it might be a little distracting,
and by distracting, I really mean mesmerizing.
It's also worth mentioning that every single part of this clock is made of Lego.
Even the display numbers.
It's incredible.
YouTuber Great Scott has a project that could be useful
for anyone who lives in an apartment complex.
He wants to create a telegram notifier for his doorbell.
Since his doorbell is integrated into the building's intercom system.
He can't just replace it with a smart doorbell,
so it's hardware hacking to the rescue!
Through a bit of reverse engineering,
he was able to identify the ring signal pins on the intercom PCB.
From there, it was finding the right combination of services
that can receive a signal from an ESP 8266 and pass that onto his phone.
If you're not interested in this particular application,
you can use it for fast, responsive phone notifications for any hardware input,
ultrasonic sensors, reed switches, button presses,
whatever you need.
And finally, Valerio Nappi
is generating random numbers from bananas.
Getting true random numbers is actually pretty difficult for computer systems,
which is why most systems look to some sort of
outside source for seed values.
The most famous of these is the wall of lava lamps at Cloudflare.
But Valerio has a different idea.
And no, they're not deriving entropy from banana spots.
Instead, they're exploiting the phenomenon that a small percentage
of the potassium in bananas is radioactive.
He designed a custom PCB with a sensor for that radiation and a microcontroller
that will happily generate random numbers from delicious fruit.
There's a lot of nerdy number theory in the blog post and hopefully
he'll have a Git repo up with his code and designs in the future.
Time for some tools and tips.
There's likely dozens of measuring tape tips on YouTube,
but this recent one from Stumpy Nubs had a bunch of new ones for me.
He shows off the very basics, like learning
to throw out the tape to save you some extra walking steps.
He introduces some nonstandard tapes, like flat back tapes,
which help measuring around curves.
But the real gold in this video is showing the ways the tape can help you do math,
like angling it to easily divide a work piece into equal parts
or folding it over to make division and subtraction easier.
And even using the Pythagorean theorem to check for Square.
There's a bunch of good stuff in here.
Check it out.
Caleb Kraft has a great video
comparing the hand engraving versus laser engraving.
Caleb has been hand engraving for a few years now.
And working with the Monport Fiber Laser for a few weeks.
He covers all the tools you'll need for each.
The costs involved, the process and all the aspects you need to consider.
He closes the video with what you probably came to it for:
The comparison of the work output.
You'll need to take the info and decide what's going to work best for you.
He doesn't lead you to any easy conclusions.
If you're fascinated by
the bi-metal window coverings that Donald was talking about a few weeks ago
and wanted to play with this concept, it turns out it also works in wood.
On Instructables, I found this humidity gauge project by gardeningjanrichard.
They've cut two thin pieces of the same species of wood,
one cut with the grain and one on the end grain
and then glued them together using epoxy.
As the wood draws in moisture from ambient humidity,
The board bends in one direction.
And as it dries out,
It curves the other way. It's pretty cool.
And finally, we have another fantastic
machining tutorial with Quinn from Blondiehacks.
In this video, she's making a holder for her dial indicator.
Even just the layout process immediately reminds me of a CAD workflow.
And seeing the order of operations and making a simple part
like this is really wonderful to take in.
There's so much here that's so far beyond my machining skill level,
but it's nice to think I can take in some of it through osmosis.
For this week's Digikey spotlight they have a helpful guide
and how to Test fuses without a Multimeter.
They cover methods like visual inspection,
replacing the fuse, and using a test lamp. Each one has their individual pros
and cons, like missing faults in the circuit, to giving yourself a shock.
It turns out there's really no good replacement for using the right tools,
but they provide a list of meters that should fit into just about any budget.
All right, and that is going to do it for this week's show.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Be sure to give us a thumbs up or leave us a comment; and sign up
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Big thanks to Digikey
for making the whole thing possible and to you for watching it.
Take care. We'll see you soon.