This week on Maker Update: gift-giving for Direstas,
a table with a hole in it,
a 3D space mushroom, huffing fumes,
elder gods, and teaching robots to build robots.
Happy new year, and welcome back to Maker Update.
I’m Tyler Winegarner, and I hope you’ve had a great holiday,
and you’re easily getting back into the swing of things.
I’ve got a handful of projects that I’m excited to tackle this year
And if you’re looking for some inspiration,
We’ve got a bunch of great stuff coming up in the show.
So, let’s get right into it with the Project of the Week.
It's no picnic trying to find the perfect gift
for the person who seems to already have everything.
So try and imagine the difficulty of making a gift
for the person who can make anything.
Xyla Foxlin participated in the annual Maker’s Secret Santa this year and felt like
she'd come up snake eyes when she pulled Jimmy Diresta’s name.
I mean, the guy has been making a project video every week for over a decade,
making everything from wooden canoes to stained glass windows.
It's tough to feel clever when you're up against that legacy.
But then Xyla remembered that Jimmy tends to put his name on
just about anything he makes, as well as plenty of things he doesn't.
What better way to expand on that
than to introduce a bit of your own cultural heritage?
This same sort of thing has been part of Chinese tradition for a very long time.
A craftsperson would have a “chop” or a stamp of their name
that they can use to stamp onto their creations.
And significant buyers would do this as well,
establishing the history of ownership.
And while normally these chops would be carved from jade or other precious stones,
Xyla’s chop for Diresta would be made from a live edge piece of Osage Orange
with the stamp made from laser engraved wood.
Since Diresta doesn't exactly translate to Chinese, she needed to call in
some expert help for finding the right characters to represent his name:
Her mother.
Of course, it just doesn't seem like a proper Diresta gift
unless you also make a super sized version of it.
So she put her brand new CNC
through its paces to make a wall sized version of the chop,
but not before putting the small version into this gorgeous gift presentation.
There's definitely something to be said
about making gifts for others to open up your sense of creativity.
But when you're stuck, this project goes to show that it doesn't hurt
to make a gift that tells the recipient a little about yourself as well.
Telling your own story in the things you make is
one of the most important parts of making things,
and it's wonderful to see that remembered here.
More projects!
I don't normally get too invested in really elaborate fine woodworking projects,
but I was blown away by this reality bending coffee table
by Olivier Gomis.
His is a segmented table in the shape
of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, or a wormhole.
Come for the gorgeous geometry, but stick around to see
some really impressive lathe work and an incredible number of jigs
required to help shape and flatten this thing into reality.
He finishes the table off by adding an infinity mirror
at the bottom of the table's gravity well, so that when you're
looking down into it, it looks like it just goes on forever.
I think, though, my favorite part was his choice to use
pieces of maple laminate in between the segments of walnut.
They form a sort of grid of lines that really show off the shape of this thing.
It's incredible.
Chris Borge has a problem with most commercial fume extractors:
They're just too big for most of the work that he does.
Sure, they're fine if you're working on a big circuit board
or you don't want to move it around much.
But if your space is limited,
a big chonker or like this just gets in the way as much as it is helpful.
There's a lot of designs out there for DIY extractors
using 40 millimeter cooling fans, and that's the direction he's headed.
But not before making a custom multi-part housing
that looks like Nintendo's Kirby character.
Perfect for sucking up all the garbage that you shouldn't be breathing.
He also came up with a few other variations on the design,
including one that can be mounted over his work.
This is a great design for space-limited setups.
I could see myself building this one in the future.
And finally, some people ring in the New Year with food, some with music,
But the Rust Monster is kicking off another trip around the sun
with the Elder God, Cthulhu.
It really wouldn't
be fair to describe this as your basic clay sculpt,
because there's so much to learn from this video
about where to pull inspiration for your design details.
Just this tip alone for how to work the details
into the thin membrane of the wings is a treasure.
Plus all the additional work of making the stop motion segments.
Just make this so much fun to watch.
Check it out.
Time for some Tips & Tools, on Instructables,
I found this guide for a 3D printed, six Degree of Freedom
Space Mouse by Shiura.
These are user input peripherals that are specifically loved by CAD users
to navigate 3D space, and they're typically pretty expensive.
This one is 3D printed and uses three analog joysticks to encode
the user's input into translation and rotation movements.
So it should be fairly cheap, too.
Shiura’s code is tuned for Blender,
so it might be a little too aggressive for other applications.
But he also offers some more conservative code, and notes
for making your own custom tunings.
2022 was a pretty wild year in general, but also saw
a lot of really exciting developments in the world of 3D printing.
Angus from Maker's Muse released a video that recaps the highlights,
but more importantly,
offers his predictions for what we might see in the coming year.
Will we see fierce competition in the prosumer market space?
Will 3D design software become easier and more accessible?
Maybe we'll see manufacturers embrace 3D printing as part of their supply chain,
since it's easier to send digital files than physical parts.
It's hard to know for sure, but it's a fun speculation.
It's been pretty impossible to ignore the conversations around AI generated....
Well, everything really - from art to essays, and even code.
On his channel, Hanqaqa released a video with a series of experiments of asking
ChatGPT to write Arduino sketches and then testing them.
Sure, a lot of these are some pretty basic examples,
so there's a ton of reference material that it can pull from.
But if using these sorts of tools help make it easier to write simple functions
that let you bolt various bits of code together in your project,
it could be really helpful.
And finally, Ultimaker left us one final gift in 2022,
and that's a complete rework of the tree support system.
The tree supports in previous versions,
did a great job of supporting the prints, but they were often impossible to remove
or left a lot of ugly artifacts on your print surface.
Lost in Tech has a fantastic video detailing this new feature.
These new supports should not only be easier to remove,
but also use less material and work better overall.
What's more, there are a lot more tunable for your particular needs.
These new supports are still only in the alpha release of Cura,
but hopefully should arrive in the main release in the near future.
For this week's Digi-Key spotlight,
Becky Stern has a new entry into her electronics series,
and this one is all about getting the hang of the basics of Arduino.
If you've never done any programing or wired up a circuit,
there's a lot to get intimidated by when embarking
on your first steps into physical programing.
Becky builds on the knowledge she's already established
to give you the confidence you need to get started.
Check it out.
Alright, and that is going to do it for this week’s show.
I hope you enjoyed it, and if you did,
give us a thumbs up, hit subscribe
or maybe tell a friend about the show if you think they would enjoy it.
I really want to know what kind of projects you’ve got lined up for 2023.
Tell us about it down in the comments.
As always, huge thanks to Digi-Key for making this whole show possible,
and to you for watching.
Take care, we’ll see you soon.