This week on Maker Update:
Sticking the landing after seven years,
The Zen of Robotics,
A cardboard house for cats,
Cordless heat guns, measuring radiuses.
And go big or stay home for your 3d printer.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner back with you again and I hope you're all doing great.
I think, knock on wood, I've got the cursed technology back under control
and here's hoping I can get back to solving some more interesting problems.
Speaking of interesting problems, we've got a wonderful show that's chock
full of them, so let's kick it off the project of the week.
Do you ever look at a problem and just think to yourself, "how hard can it be?"
Well, I don't think that's how Joe Barnard of BPS.Space approached his attempt
to get a model rocket to perform a propulsive landing.
That's essentially the same way that SpaceX lands their rockets.
This is a huge engineering problem.
And that's probably why it took Joe over seven years to pull it off.
It's tough to know where to begin with this one.
Over the course of seven years, he developed his own flight computer.
He completely re-engineered the model rocket's flight systems several times.
He engineered countless mechanical parts to control the rocket in flight.
This thing is insane.
And yet, you don't need
to be a rocket scientist to appreciate even the nerdiest of details
because he does a pretty fantastic job of explaining what's happening
at every step of the process.
You don't even need to care about rockets to learn some good lessons from this project.
After years of effort, iteration and failure,
you're bound to get discouraged and want to give up.
We've all been there at one point or another
where it's really easy to slip into a burnout mind frame.
Joe even talks through this process
and how he was able to get out of that rut and keep going with his work.
The video I'm linking to down in the description
is where he finally celebrates his success.
But really, there's countless videos across the entire BPS.Space channel
that documents this journey.
Whether you're interested in rocketry or avionics or engineering,
or just watching someone solve a really tough
problem, there's a lot to appreciate here.
But don't worry, now that he's done, he's not giving up.
He has plenty more interesting rocketry projects for the future.
More projects!
You know that old phrase?
"When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
I guess if you're Peng Faizhang, if you have a robot arm,
it all looks like a Zen garden.
I saw this project on Instructables
and I just fell in love with how ridiculous it is.
And I don't mean that to be insulting when I say that.
She writes out the Bill of Materials and it's all normal DIY Zen garden stuff
until you get to the end.
Oh, by the way, you're going to need a multi-thousand dollar robot arm.
Regardless, she still documents the whole project in painstaking detail.
There are some adapter plates for the end effector of the robot
that you can 3D print or manufacture in plywood, and all the code is there.
Maybe it's just a dedication to documenting your work,
just for the sake of it,
That's inspiring here.
Fortunately, you could probably adapt this to more
accessible gantry-style CNC machines or plotters.
Still, I can't get over how fun this one looks.
Glenn from DIY Creators
is reviving an old table project by putting a new spin on a classic idea.
He wants to create a resin poured penny table,
but instead of just covering the entire table with pennies,
he's laying them down in a geometric pattern,
but then letting them break up and fade as it gets close to the edge
and against the stark white of the original table finish,
the effect is really striking.
You'll also get to learn a lot about resin table pours.
How you do your first coat,
How to get a good coat on all the sides,
And how to bring it to a perfect glossy finish.
On Instructables, I found this wonderful guide by Cardboard
Ninja to building a modernist cat house out of cardboard.
I use cardboard for a lot of prototyping parts,
but I'm guilty of overlooking it as a building material.
And after watching this video and following this guide,
I need to try and do that less.
There's a ton of great tips peppered all throughout this video
for making clean looking, strong structures out of this material
that we probably all have too much of.
Tips like taking the entire box and turning it inside out
so you get the completely unlabeled surface facing outwards
and then trimming and folding over the top flaps to create a really strong base.
The walls are all made from double thick cardboard,
and you could probably make your own panels
if you don't have any on hand.
The video finishes off by cutting another box down to half height
and nesting the two sides into each other
and adding some LED fairy lights for accents.
It's a fun video with plenty to learn from,
and most importantly, it looks like the cats like it too.
Speaking of tips and tools, we've got a handful of those for you this week.
A while back, Thomas Sanladerer released this video about
0.4 millimeter nozzles now being obsolete.
I've been trying out this technique and I think he's really on to something here.
The idea is that with the newer versions of slicers
like Cura and Prusa Slicer that feature the Arachne engine,
they can lay down lines of filament thinner than the diameter of the nozzle.
And because of this feature, you can get all the speed and strength
gains from a 0.6 millimeter nozzle without sacrificing any detail.
Tom offers lots of comparisons between the traditional
0.4 millimeter prints and Arachne 0.6 millimeter.
And honestly, it's tough to tell the difference.
Give this a shot.
On Tested, Adam Savage has a video where he talks about his boundless love for heat guns.
Not just the high power ones you can use for bending plastics and rapidly curing
finishes, but also shares some of his uses for the common blow dryer,
like combining them with a cardboard box to make a gentle heat oven for curing.
He then introduces his new cordless heat gun.
Power wise, it's a half step between the blow dryer and the corded heat gun.
That sounds like a step back,
but allows him to do the same work he could do with a corded heat gun,
but he can sneak up on the margins a lot more slowly, since that's normally
where you can get into trouble and ruin your project.
On Printables I found this 3D printed radius caliper by sorrenavaria.
This is a V-shaped 3D print that just fits over the end of your digital calipers
and it uses the depth probe to determine the radius of round objects.
It has a functioning measuring range of 14 to 115 millimeters,
and it could likely handle larger diameters if you have a larger print bed.
Seems like a useful tool to add to your print queue
And courtesy of Gareth Branwyn's Tips, Tools and Shop Tales newsletter,
I found this great tip for a hardware kit for 1-2-3 blocks.
1-2-3 block have alternating threaded holes
so you can attach them together to make jigs.
But unless you have the expensive ones that machinists buy,
the threaded holes are kind of useless- unless you use them with this kit.
This includes screws of various lengths and a couple of barrel nuts
and allows you to bolt even the super affordable blocks together.
All the hardware sits below
the surface of the block, so it will still be flush with your tool surface
and you can pick up one of these kits for just a couple bucks.
For this week's Digi-Key Spotlight, we've got an older video
that outlines the different safety ratings for multi meters
and understanding what they all mean.
Multimeters can be one of the most helpful tools in your diagnostic arsenal, but I wouldn't
blame you for not knowing the upper limits of what you can safely test with yours.
You can usually find these ratings
printed on the multimeter itself or on the provided data sheet,
and this video will help you understand what situations you can use the meter in.
It's a helpful video.
Check it out.
All right.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
Hope you enjoyed it.
I sure had fun putting that together.
Be sure to subscribe.
Give us a thumbs up and leave us a comment.
I'd love to hear what crazy long term project you'd like to take on.
As always, huge thanks to Digi-Key for giving this show a home
and to you for watching.
Take care. We'll see you soon.