This week on Maker Update: the perfect costume for a jet setter.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2.
A real PKE Meter, cleaner air, Plamps
and how to get toothpaste back in the tube.
Hello, and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and hope you've had a great Halloween
or just a great week since we last saw you.
We've got another great show for you, so let's check out
the project of the week.
Cory Lee is a travel blogger,
but not your typical sort of travel blogger.
Corey writes about his travels and reports on the accessibility
of various cities and attractions since the world isn't
necessarily made with wheelchair users in mind.
His recent travels brought him to the Hawthorne Hotel Halloween Ball
in Salem, Massachusetts, so he definitely needed a cool costume,
which is where the folks at Narwhal Labs stepped in.
Corey wanted a costume that would be ideal for his jet setting lifestyle.
So they created a model of a jetliner that would drop right over his wheelchair,
making it look like he was the flight captain at the steering yoke.
It turns out that making
the body of a jetliner is a little bit like making a kayak.
Or maybe it's just that when you know a lot about making kayaks,
you use the skills you have to make the stuff you've never made before.
The entire body is made from vinyl shrink wrap stretched over a lightweight
plywood frame. In order
to keep the frame from being visible when the shrink wrap was pulled taut,
they added a layer of poster board to smooth out the underlying structure.
With the body coming together, it still needed a few details
to sell the look.
Some custom vinyl graphics added the much needed windows and lettering, and there's
a fantastic tip here from Xyla Foxlin.
Draw an additional box around each letter.
It'll make weeding the vinyl a lot less nerve wracking
since you can weed each letter individually.
Fiberglass wings made for some lightweight, strong
attachment points for the 3D printed engine pods,
and the last thing that needed to be added were a few snakes.
Oh wait....
Did I forget to mention that this is a snakes on a plane costume?
The entire project
was created in part with Magic Wheelchair
Magic Wheelchair is a charity that helps create costumes for people in wheelchairs.
It gives folks a greater opportunity to participate in events like Halloween
parties, cosplay events,
or just gives them a chance to dress up like their favorite heroes.
And there's a ton of love and creativity that goes into each and every build.
You can learn more about them by checking the links down in the description.
Now for the news, last week the Raspberry Pi Foundation
finally announced the successor to the Raspberry Pi Zero.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.
This is a single board computer that has nearly the same form factor
as the original Raspberry Pi zero, but contains the same system on chip
as the original release of the Raspberry Pi three.
That SoC has been clocked down to one gigahertz to avoid thermal throttling.
But the architecture means that it can run up to five times
faster than the original PI zero on multi-threaded applications.
The other clever bit about the packaging of the system on chip
is the location of the 512 megabytes of SDRAM.
It's sitting directly on top of the CPU saving space on the overall board.
Otherwise, it's the same tiny single board computer you know and love.
The camera connector, USB OTG port and SD card reader are all here,
You can get your hands on the Pi Zero 2 W for $15.
And if you subscribe to the hard copy Edition of MagPi Magazine,
you should have one coming your way.
More projects.
Have you ever heard the phrase putting the toothpaste back in the tube?
Joel Creates has built a toothpaste tube pump that lets him do just that.
Or dispense toothpaste at ridiculous speeds.
or suck up stuff that isn't toothpaste back into the tube. Like beans.
*distant yelling* Why would you do that?
Anyhow, the pump is basically a pressure chamber attached to a vacuum pump.
when you apply positive pressure, it dispenses toothpaste with enough force
to coat 100 toothbrushes in three seconds.
But when you reverse the pressure, the toothpaste tube sucks up
whatever is in front of the nozzle, toothpaste, air or whatever else.
This is a fun, ridiculous build.
That's mostly good for a laugh, but there's some simple and clever use
of relays and valves to control everything without a microcontroller.
Glenn at DIY Creators has a video on how to build this
compact air filtration system for his shop.
This is actually a really simple build.
It's just a plywood enclosure for a 440 CFM duct fan
that passes through a twelve by twelve inch filter.
But watching the way he works is just full of little tips for how he measures,
marks and plans out his projects.
And I also really enjoyed this
graphic that lets you know where he is in the overall build progress.
I recently worked with some old dirty pallet wood, and I can tell you
I really could have used one of these in my shop.
There's two things that can make any space more pleasant to be in.
Light and plants.
So Simone Giertz decided to combine them into a lamp
that is also a new home for her plant.
A Plamp? A Plamp.
A ton of interlocking arcs of plywood form the bucket for the potted plant,
and this out of frame gives the vines tons of anchors to grab onto
and hopefully keep them from blocking the light.
Most of the light comes from this big LED fixture,
but there's also a ring of RGB LEDs as an accent.
There's also this tiny
bit of great advice about not getting hung up on your build
and subjecting yourself to analysis paralysis.
Just remind yourself that you're building a prototype that will help
you build the final item. And who knows?
Maybe you'll love the prototype just fine and it'll be the one you keep.
And finally, Diego and Camila of Moon Makers
have made a delightful replica of the PKE Meter from Ghostbusters.
No, not those Ghostbusters.
The Real Ghostbusters.
Look at this thing, this thing looks like it just fell out of a cartoon.
The display is made from a WIO terminal, the multi-sensor
programable IoT appliance from Seeed Studios.
Meanwhile, a Raspberry Pi and camera uses computer vision
to detect ghosts and controls the reaction on the meter.
The body is all
3D printed and painted to look like distressed metal.
It's great.
This video is a little light on details if you want to build your own,
but they're releasing a second video in a few days
that should answer all the questions.
Time for some tips and tools.
Fred Fraleigh from the Stan Winston School has some quick tips on how to use
bevel cuts to attain more complex shapes in your foam sculptures.
This is the sort of stuff that always amazes me in skills like
sewing, turning simple two dimensional forms into 3D shapes. He changes
the angle was cut to create this convex shape
that folds over into a concave form.
I know this tip comes a little late for Halloween,
but it's never too early to start thinking about next year's costume.
I found this great video from Fireball tool
and how to get more life out of your angle grinder cutting discs.
If you're like me, you just plunge the disc right through the material
and then work your way through the metal until your cut is complete.
This method is a lot faster,
but it exposes more surfaces of the cutting disc to wear.
Instead, take smaller bites,
use the disc to lightly score the metal and keep working back
and forth over your line until you're through the material.
This method is a lot slower, but the technique allowed them
to make ten times as many cuts before the disc wore out.
Give it a try the next time you're in your shop.
I don't really know how to introduce this new video from William Osman.
In the video, he's talking about how the fairly
tiny percentage of negative comments on his videos
has completely ruined the joy he gets in making the videos in the first place.
This is a tough but touching video to get through.
I don't think you need to be a popular
YouTuber to be able to relate to this experience.
How many projects have you abandoned before you started them?
Because that negative voice in your head told you to quit.
I know for me it's plenty.
There's no real advice here, but it's worth watching.
Maybe just to feel like we're all struggling and we don't need
to feel so lonely in that struggle.
And finally, on Instructables, I found this great guide from Flowalistik
on making household objects out of cardboard pulp
with downloadable 3D printable molds and tons of photos,
This guide walks you
through the whole process of making the pulp, extracting the water
and forming tons of desktop tools like pencil holders,
organizers and more.
For this week's Digikey Spotlight,
Check out the latest episode in the Potentially Genius series.
This time around, they're building a recycling sorter for plastic bottle caps.
This is a two part process that first involves removing the cap
from the bottle
since they're two different types of plastic and then sorts the cap by color.
It's helpful to sort them by color, since the plastic for the caps
HDPE, can be easily shredded, melted
and reformed into building materials or craft items.
It's a great video and satisfying just to see the sorter in action.
in action.
All right, and that is going to do it for this week's show,
we had a bunch of different types of stuff in here, and I hope you enjoyed it.
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As always, huge thanks to the folks at Diggy for making this show possible.
Thanks for watching. We'll see you soon.