Hey Tested, happy holidays.
It's the end of 2017 and
[singing] here are a few of my favorite things
Is that how it goes? I'm like second guessing the tones of it
You get the gist of it so one of my favorite additions to the tested office this year
It was the Universal laser cutter
I've used laser cutters before but this one just
Blows my mind 'cause you have a much better bed size than normal laser cutters,
or the ones I've used previously and also it's really fast. I just wanted to show you a project that I did
um for my dad. Don't tell him about it
This is my Christmas present for him, but I don't think he watches YouTube
So we're on the safe side we have this joke in my family that he's a disco turtle
I have no idea where it comes from I think it comes from how he dances
I'm not sure, but I wanted to do like an artistic rendering of a turtle shell and this is my attempt
so this is like laser cut acrylic and
Then I just put in these patches of laser cut wood and it's three layers, so you get a little keyhole
I just have masking tape on here now because I'm still painting the edge here, but yeah
It's just fun like there's so much fun
You can do with laser cutters
And it goes beyond I think what most people do is just like little cutouts the plywood and stuff like that and that's really nice
But there's also like a lot of really cool things
You can do with it, so I've been super excited about having access to it
I'm also really excited about that it has such a good filter because I love laser cutters, but boy do they stink
just like this video. Not true. My second favorite thing of 2017
It's something I've had for a few years now actually
I don't think they're for sale in the States so it's these two Swedish women who have designed an airbag bike helmet
it's called Hovding and basically it just goes around and you like zip it up
and then you turn it on by like plugging this thing in
[device beeps]
[Simone imitates beep]
And now if I would fall over or sneeze really hard it would kind of explode like an air bag around my head
The thing is I've never I mean I've had this for a couple of years. It has still not
Exploded what do you say deployed it is still not deployed so
I'm not sure that it works, but it seems like it's working really well for other people and that it actually
protects people better than a normal helmet
Unless it is that some item is falling on you from the top like if somebody drops a piano on your head
This is not going to do anything, but if you fall off your bike
It protects you really well, and I feel really comfortable wearing it
And I just think it's such a neat invention because nobody likes a bike helmet
Let's be honest. They're ugly. My third favorite thing. I actually got just today
I got to borrow one of these a couple of months back, but they finally started shipping to their backers
And I just got my Shaper Origin
I'm so stoked about this. So it's a handheld CNC
I think we did a Tested video of me using this before when I did a giant clothes hanger
It's like a handheld CNC so the way it works
Is you get this tape and you tape it down on the material that you want to cut and
this one has like a bunch of cameras and
And this tape lets it know exactly how it's positioned so you're just watching on the screen
And it's kind of like directing you how to go and you're doing the movements, but then it's Auto correcting the router
I think up to an inch so you can suck pretty bad, and it still will like cut pristinely for you
And it's just really nice because you're not limited
I mean you can CNC stuff
But you're also not limited to a bed size you can do it on like weird objects
You could even do it on a wall, so it just opens up like a whole new world of possibilities
I'm super stoked about it
And I think it takes up dust fairly well like you just connect it to your shop-vac, and it won't get too dusty
I'd probably still not do it like in my home environment, so that's why I'm just gonna use it here at the Tested office
So when I build projects I use a lot of servo motors and
Like my use case is a little bit niche where I don't care a lot about precision
But I care about the way that it looks like I really care about how
how a machine moves
Rather what it does and the method that works best for me is to do like a recorded sequence
So you like you move a machine around and you can kind of like you're almost like doing robot puppeteering
and then you can replay that and
This is a servo motor controller from servo city you can plug in up to 4 servo motors
And then you just twist these knobs and like record however you want it to
to move and then you can replay it and
This is like perfect for me. I feel like
It might not be the perfect product for a lot of people but for me it is
It also has a really weird bug where I have to slam it for it to work in the beginning
But it works really reliably after you do that
So here's a motor here's some batteries. I just, I just charged
Ok so
Yeah, it's just super simple. You just plug it in and then you can move it around and then I can record
a little sequence
So that's me recording, and I think
This should be it replaying it
Tada!
It's so good that you can decide if you want it to do within the loop or only once this is like I don't know
It's this is the perfect product
This blew my mind and changed my shitty robot game. Those are my favorite things for 2017
thank you so much for watching and Happy Holidays
Bye
[singing] Here are a few of my favorite things. [stops singing] You get the gist of it