This week on Maker Update: a vacuum sorter for Lego, a pixel art oscilloscope,
a new home for printed parts, tiny guns, folding buildings,
and getting the most out of a low end table saw.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're doing pretty all right.
I've not been very productive in the past two weeks since I managed
to catch my first cold and flu that I've had in the past two years.
I hope your weeks have been better for working on fun projects.
Speaking of which, let's check out the project of the week.
There's no shortage of stories and memes about how
one of the most painful things you can do is step on a Lego brick.
So it's pretty important to do a thorough cleanup after a good build session.
But sorting out the bricks is a whole other tedious process.
But what if you could do both at once?
That's exactly what Matty
at Unnecessary Inventions is trying to accomplish.
And this is what he's come up with.
He's got this multi-tier sorting chamber attached to a shop vac.
So he can easily hoover up the bricks and get them sorted.
Each layer in the sorter has a set of holes that gradually decrease in size.
The idea is that the largest bricks get trapped at the top,
while smaller pieces tumble down into their appropriate sorting layer.
It's a fairly simple method of sorting
since it's not trying to sort by color or brick dimension.
But there's still plenty of clever design going on here.
Each tier of the sorter snaps together with magnets so you can lift off each one
separately and it becomes its own bin for storage or organizing.
He also used the
3D printing slicing trick for the filter layers
where you set the number of your top and bottom layers to zero.
So the vertical structure is just the infill pattern.
This increases the overall airflow through the sorter
so it doesn't reduce the suction for picking up bricks.
But the most important part of any creation is making sure it all works.
And by the looks of things, this one does exactly what it set out to accomplish.
Large bricks get trapped in the top chamber and successively
smaller ones find their way to the lower chambers.
I don't know if Matty is making the files available anywhere,
but the design shouldn't be too difficult to replicate.
If you want to build your own.
In the news this week, Prusa
Printers has a new home on the Internet: Printables.com.
For several years, PrusaPrinters has been a public repository for people to share
their 3D printed files. It's always been a fantastic site, but the URL...
Well, it just made the site sound like it was exclusive for Prusa’s
printers and their users.
Even though that was never the case.
The new domain should help its user base grow, and if you already had
an account on Prusa Printers, it'll already work over Printables
The site design is fast and responsive and they plan to do
lots of community activities like contests and spotlights.
If you're looking for a new place to find and share printed files, check it out.
More projects.
Bill Doran of Punished Props is taking on
one of my favorite film props ever:
The Noisy Cricket from Men in Black,
and apparently it's one of his favorites as well.
The build begins in a fairly straightforward manner
with a bunch of SLA printed parts. And then he assembles them
using epoxy and registration pins to help keep things aligned
but stick with the lengthy video because it's chock full of great tips
like using baking soda and CA glue to make a sort of filler paste for gaps
or bending an X-Acto blade so that when he uses it
to cut open a silicone mold, it forms a registration key.
Or how he added this lip to the interior cavity after it was assembled
so that the electronic sled would stay more securely in place.
Bill also has a new video course out on how to use Fusion 360
to design and model replica props.
It's also a beginner's guide to Fusion.
So if you haven't started down that skill tree,
this is an ideal place to begin.
Over on Instructables,
Lonesoulsurfer has published a guide to building this Lo-Fi oscilloscope
made from a matrix of 100 red LEDs
With the
proliferation of low cost, individually addressable RGB LEDs.
It's refreshing to see a project that leverages the use of classic
five millimeter LEDs.
But even still, I've never seen them before
With his cube shaped diffuser. Lonesoulsurfer has built a custom PCB
for the project and there's a handful of potentiometers to control the output.
There's an input for a probe and a microphone input,
so you can see the waveforms of sounds that it's picking up
It's probably not the best tool for refined electronics work,
but it's a fun, chunky, beautiful project all the same.
Also on Instructables Check out this Aliens Diorama Book Nook
by Mohamed FaysaD.
This features a split level design with Ripley
and Newt escaping the derelict station on LV426, and below
you see a pair of Xenomorphs stalking through the flooded sublevel.
There's also an additional sublevel for hiding the battery and the wiring
for the LED lighting.
Most of the
diorama was designed in Tinkercad and 3D printed with some flickering
LEDs scavenged from LED candles for some distressed lighting.
Muhammad shares all of his 3D printed files, or you can purchase
prints directly from him on his Etsy shop.
We've got some tips and tools for you
before you go, Tamar from 3x3Custom
has a video about how to do fine woodworking using a jobsite saw -
like the one she has in her own shop.
There's a lot of stuff in this video that's specific to her own saw,
but also a lot of generalized info - like how to work
with miter slots that aren't a consistent width
or how to deal with a table surface that isn't totally flat.
There's a great tip on how to get perfectly flush jointed cuts
for building panels on
a table saw that isn't at a perfect right angle.
and tons of other great tips on how to get precise reliable results
on a lower-end saw.
Caleb Craft from Make: Magazine
has a review of the Monport 20 Watt fiber laser.
This is a laser engraver whose primary function is to engrave onto metal
any kind of metal aluminum, steel,
brass, titanium and probably a few others.
Since there's no massive gantry to move about,
the engraving is able to happen really quickly
since there's just a pair of dynamic mirrors to redirect the laser beam.
These have been massively expensive in the past,
but the prices have been dropping pretty rapidly.
The one being tested here is a little under $3,000
still expensive, but a lot better than they used to be.
Also, I never realized they got the name fiber laser
because the laser gets to the Galvo head by way of a fiber optic cable.
Desktop makes released this video on how to design and print
these folding flat print building designs.
The walls all print out as a single piece and then fold to form
a box that's held in place by the base plate.
He shows how to create the basic design, the parametric
brick texture, and then adding features like doors and windows.
It's packed with a ton of great tips I've never seen before
in working with Fusion,
and I think you can pick up some great tools for working on other projects.
And if you loved the Aliens Book Nook and wanted
to design your own sci fi or fantasy diorama.
Jen and Norm from Tested have a video on how to light miniatures and dioramas.
Jen shows off
a ton of different lighting techniques for her spooky house model
using diffused lighting, creating hidden spotlights to cast colors on objects.
Several techniques of edge lighting to create different effects
and recessed lighting to create silhouettes in foreground elements.
If you've ever thought about creating lighting effects in models,
in here to pick up on.
For this week's Digikey Spotlight,
we've got another great video in their, Another Teaching Moment series,
and it's all about different kinds of diodes.
There's some different performance parameters in diodes from standard diodes
Schottky diodes, Silicon Carbide, super barrier.
There's a lot to consider here, and that's just for the standard
diode types. I’ll admit there's still a ton
I don't know about different types of electronics components, but
this is a great introduction to some of the options out there.
All right.
And that is going to deal for this week's show.
I hope you enjoyed it.
We had sort of an unintentional theme of sci fi props and dioramas
this time around.
And I'd love to know what sort of scene you would love to create in a book nook.
Let us know down in the comments and sign up for the May corrupted email list
so you get a show
sent straight to you with bonus links and all the other good stuff.
Big thanks to DigiKey for making the show possible and to you for watching it.
Take care. We'll see you soon.