This week, on Maker Update: getting your projects off the ground,
The Maker Music Festival.
Robots with sucky handwriting, bullet time, joystick drift,
and rare magnets and where to find them.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you enjoyed last week's show with Jen Schachter guest hosting.
I've just added an SLA printer to my pile of tools,
so I'm looking forward to adding that to my skill tree.
I hope you've got plenty of skills to learn or projects to use them on.
In the meantime, we've got a great show for you, so let's
check out the project of the week.
We all have different levels of confidence in our own projects.
Most of the time we feel pretty safe using them ourselves
since we're aware of all the quirks.
But staking your own life and safety on them is a different beast entirely.
Xyla Foxlin recently teamed up with Elena of Culver Props
to learn how to make her own wooden propeller
and then fly with it.
The process begins with planing down all the boards that will be used
to form the prop, marking out any imperfections like knots or cracks,
and then trimming them into a rough shape on the band saw.
And if you ever want to see some master bandsaw work,
check out how Elena maneuvers this 12 foot board through the cut.
after a glue up using urea resin,
it spends the night in this massive press while the glue hardens.
This next part blew my mind a little.
After getting the hole pattern drilled into the center so it can be attached to the plane,
it gets chucked up into this lathe, the likes of which
I've never seen before.
this lathe uses a saw blade to shape the propeller
using a preexisting template as a guide.
If you're wondering how propellers get their ideal shape, pitch and profile,
this is how it's done.
the surface is still fairly rough when it comes off the lathe.
So next up, it gets a ton of sanding.
Sanding is also how the propeller gets balanced,
and this process is surprisingly lo-fi.
Xyla marks out which side is heavier,
then sands a little bit of material off of that side
and then repeats until it's perfectly balanced.
After installing the propeller, Xyla takes a moment
to explain the function and technique of safety wiring.
This is a specialized form of wiring that prevents the bolts
from backing out under load or vibration.
With the safety checks done, she's ready for takeoff.
A quick test flight shows the prop is truly airworthy.
There's a ton of cool tools and techniques that goes into making something
like this.
And I'm glad I got to see it.
Time for some news
The Maker Music Festival for 2023 is officially open.
This is an online exhibit
for different creative musical works from all over the world.
Check out instruments like the Pandemic Box hearing hands,
Object Clock, and the Cravat-o-Matic Necktie.
And of course, plenty more.
This online festival has been going for several years now,
and you can learn how to participate in future events.
More projects.
Shane from Stuff Made Here is no stranger to using robots as complex solutions
to mundane non-problems.
This time around, he's trying to prevent some wrist strain
by getting the robot to write some note cards for him.
Of course, robots that can do handwriting already exist.
They're called pen plotters.
You can buy them pretty cheaply.
But Shane wants the robot to vary up the writing
So it looks more like a human wrote it and less like a font.
He begins by randomizing
a few different letter shapes, plus their spacing and rotation.
But it still looks a little too robotic.
Instead, he ended up unwrapping the entire problem
and going back to the basics of handwriting.
He uses machine learning and tons of samples of his handwriting
to create a model
that will turn just about any text into naturally flowing handwriting.
And it's even
good enough to fool a forensic handwriting analyst.
speaking of solving meaningful problems,
Marius Heier is attempting to solve a $20 billion problem:
Joystick drift.
This is the name of the phenomenon where a well used game controller
will never quite find its dead zone and slowly wander in a specific direction.
The reason this happens is because of frictional wear on the potentiometers.
Marius brings hall effect sensors to the rescue.
This is similar to the solution used by motor encoders.
The amazing thing is that he was able
to keep his 3D printed add ons, PCBs and magnets small enough
that he was able to install it in his failing PlayStation controller.
Marius plans to release this project to the general public.
So if you don't mind hacking your controllers a bit, maybe follow this one.
And from the Adafruit blog, I learned about this bullet time photobooth
There Oughta Be.
Similar to how they filmed the special effects scenes in The Matrix,
This is an array of cameras on a curved path.
The first camera in the series records for a little bit,
and then they all capture a frame simultaneously
And then the final camera records a little bit more.
There's a big friendly button for a simple operation,
and a monitor that shows the captured output.
That's a cool enough
start, but there's a ton more cleverness going on here.
There's a Python script responsible for triggering all the cameras,
And it also sends all the images through ffmpeg
to stabilize the image.
The array also makes use of this wall
to seamlessly blend all the bullet time captures into a single video.
I also love the use of audio splitters to trigger
all of the cameras using a single GPIO pin.
There are a ton of elements that they wish they did better,
but if you want to build
something like this for your next party, this is a great document to start from.
Time for some tools and tips.
Becky Stern has a video on how to salvage LiPo batteries
from disposable vape devices.
These are intended to be used once and then thrown away,
but they still have perfectly good LiPo batteries
that are ideal for wearables projects.
Plus, these batteries have no business in the landfill.
Becky gives you a ton of great tips on getting the cases open,
dealing with the mess And harvesting the battery safely.
Check it out.
Angus from Maker's Muse shares his tips on how to print bores without support.
These are prints that have unsupported features around a hole,
such as a hex pattern to trap a nut.
Angus shares a few techniques that he's found over the years.
Sacrificial bridging, chamfering the bore,
plus a technique he recently discovered by analyzing prints by Prusa Research:
Sequential bridging.
These are all techniques you'll have to apply
when designing your part, so you'll need some CAD skills.
But these are really good to know about.
And finally, I found this guide by Yonatan24
on the best places to find magnets.
Most of us know you can find magnets for your projects in old
speakers and in hard drives.
But Yonatan goes further by sharing their tips
for quickly extracting them from their previous function.
Plus, you can find magnets in just about any kind of closure.
from laptop lids to purses and personal organizers.
And who would have thought that old exercise bikes are a goldmine for magnets?
This is a great guide and resource for scavengers.
For this week's Digi-Key spotlight, we're checking out a recent video
in Adafruit’s The Great Search series.
And it's all about RP2040 chips and dev boards.
Since the start of the chip shortage, this has been
one of the most broadly available chips out there.
So instead of trying to find a chip that's in short supply,
Rather, this is a guide to sorting through the embarrassment of chip riches
Your search is likely to return.
from chips to dev boards.
This guide will help you find exactly what you're looking for.
All right.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
I hope you enjoyed it
and maybe found some great tips on scavenging parts for your next project.
If you did, please tell us about it down in the comments.
Gives us a thumbs up
and hit Subscribe with the bell so you don't miss the next episode.
Big thanks, as always to Dickey for making this show possible
and to you for watching.
Take care. We'll see you soon.