This week on Maker Update: from garbage to Ghibli, Cyborg William Tell,
riding the last mile on your butt, book bundles, string art, and pool noodle robot whegs.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're doing great whether you're
getting ready to get back to school or just enjoying the midpoint of summer .
We've got another great show for you.
So let's check out the Project of the Week.
Making a model of Howl's Moving Castle from Howl's Moving Castle
is a daunting enough task on its own,
but making it entirely out of salvaged containers, scrap material
and anything else you happen to have lying around
takes a special kind of way of looking at garbage.
Good thing that Studson Studio
is showing us their lens on litter so we can learn their ways.
OK, so this is a really long video.
It clocks in at almost an hour,
but you'll be surprised at how compellingly it moves along.
The video begins by making the base structures for the castle.
And most of it is from discarded food containers.
The main base is from a gallon Kimchi jar.
And a lot of the other structures
are made from chopped up bits of plastic nut jars.
Just because they have a ton of complex, interesting curves.
From there, he just kind of gets stuck in on the details.
Overlapping metal sheets are made from sections of takeout containers.
Boards and shingles are made from coffee stirrers, pipes made from
plastic saxophones and custom buildings made from sculpting foam.
One of my favorites is all of the rivets that cover the structure,
which before the final paint job you can tell are made from tiny rhinestones.
This entire video is a king's ransom in crafting tips.
I love the look of these foam bricks after they've been distressed
by shaking them in a jar full of rocks
or getting inches of tubing
for pipes and handles from anything round and plastic.
I don't really want to encourage anyone to begin a hobby of hoarding garbage.
But this video is a masterclass in kit bashing,
and it's a compelling watch.
Time for some news, researchers in Singapore
and at Caltech have developed a 3D printed fabric with some properties
you wouldn't expect from a 3D printed form. Made from interlocking octahedrons,
It flows well enough on its own.
But when sealed up in a vacuum bag, it stiffens pretty significantly.
Once the air is drawn out using what's known as a "jamming transition"
Under vacuum, it's supposed to be able to support 50 times its own weight.
In the video, they show a few practical applications for this,
like building rigid structures or helping the wearer carry heavy loads.
There's definitely a couple of challenges to make this work, to protect
against impacts, like how you need to draw the air out fast enough.
But there's some cool exploration to be done here.
Through Tested, I learned about the Grant Imahara Steam Foundation.
That's not exactly new information, but what is news is the upcoming auction
of Mythbusters Memorabilia held by The Prop Store
and all the proceeds from the auction are going straight to the foundation.
You might have seen some of the stuff already in
a series of videos hosted by Adam Savage on the Tested channel.
And these alone are worth the price of admission just for the commentary.
But the opportunity to have any of these in your home
would be a rare treat, indeed.
The auction will be run online from August 20th through September 1st.
More projects! Shane from Stuff Made Here is continuing his transition
into some sort of Rube Goldberg Q from the James Bond series.
In a recent video, he's made an archery bow
that can automatically hit stationary and moving targets.
And it can also make him punch himself in the face... like, a lot.
The system is made of three components:
The bow is held by an armature
that can adjust its spacing to correct for his poor aim.
Instead of holding the bow string in his right hand,
he holds a mechanism that releases the string for him.
The last part of the recipe is a series of tracking cameras
that track the position of the target, the bow and the string puller.
This is a fun video about problem solving.
And with a problem this complex, there's a lot to solve for
on the /r/maker subreddit, I learned about the Boot Scoot 3004
by Ruby Zoom, which is sort of a cautionary tale
about what happens when you make a fiberglass
mold of your butt, and ask the Internet "What next?"
Apparently the "what next" is attaching the wheels from a motorized skateboard to it.
And she's either created the most unstable skateboard ever
or the only last mile vehicle that people actually want to talk to you about.
This is a really fun project
from an emerging channel, and it'll be fun to see where she goes with it.
And finally, Winston Moy, the master of the Hobbyist, CNC Router
is taking on a project that's a little outside of his wheelhouse: string art.
He admits up front that creating digital art is not his forte,
but he wanted to challenge himself to make a unique gift for his partner.
After struggling with the design for the artwork, he then used Fusion 360
to create tool paths
for all the drill holes for the nails and the outer shape of the board.
And then he laid out the string colors for the design.
It's great to see skilled
folks like Winston express himself a new and creative ways.
But the CNC Router also makes for a powerful tool
in creating consistent designs that make the final product really shine.
Time for some tips and tools a few months ago, Donald introduce us to Cuttle,
which is a Web based design tool
that can work with any kind of digital cutting machine.
Back then, it was in a closed beta, but now it seems like it's open
for everyone to use.
If you missed it, Cuttle is a shockingly powerful design tool,
allowing you to incorporate parametric elements, repeated designs,
Boolean tools and plenty more.
There's a handful of tutorial videos to get you started and a Discord Server
to help you find the community of other Cuttle users.
Over on Humble Bundle, Make: Magazine has organized a back-to-school-themed
collection of digital books for makers.
What's best is that you can name your own price to get access
to the entire collection.
There's some real bangers in here, too. to like Make Props and Costume Armor
By Shawn Thorsson.
Musical Inventions by Kathy Ceceri.
Fusion 360 for Makers, The Maker Magicians Handbook
by Mario Marchese and plenty more.
The bundle is running for another week and a half.
So don't sleep on this one.
On Instructables, I found this great tip
from Wadevag for building amphibious robots.
By making the wheels for your bot out of segments of the star shaped pool
noodles, they not only get great
traction on dry land, but they can also float on the water.
And the starship works like a paddle wheel.
Through this video, I also learned that the technical term for
this kind of wheel is a "Wheg", which is a portmanteau of wheel and leg.
It's cool stuff.
And finally, Delta variant be damned.
I hope folks are starting to think about Halloween decorations,
even just to make their homes and private gatherings a little more spooky.
I found this great tutorial by TheEscapeEffect
on how to turn a normal prop skeleton into a creepy decomposing one.
The technique looks simple enough.
Just take your skeleton and wrap it in plastic trash bags,
you then use a heat gun to melt the bags to the skeleton and blow holes in it,
and then you finish it with some wood stain.
It's a convincing effect and a great if gross looking result.
For this week's Digikey Spotlight,
We've got a great tutorial from Shawn Hymel on using a hot
air station for soldering QFN package components.
I'm sure you all know that with a steady hand and some clever
soldering techniques, you can do surface mount components with a soldering iron.
But what if your component has solder pads underneath the package?
QFN stands for Quad Flat / No Leads
and refers to a component with no exposed solder leads.
There's a great walkthrough here
on getting the right temperature and air velocity for your hot air nozzle,
as well as the best types of solder and flux to use.
He also shows the proper technique for getting your solder up to temperature.
I'm still cozy in my little world of through whole components.
But if you're ready to step up to the surface mount, this is a great resource.
All right, and that is gonna do it for this week's show.
Thank you so much for watching.
I don't know about you,
but I can't wait for my next trip to the thrift or the dollar store
just to see how many odd shapes can be transformed into new designs.
Hope you are looking forward to the same.
If you enjoyed this show, give us a thumbs up hit subscribe
and leave us a comment about your favorite piece of salvage.
Huge thanks, as always, to our pals at Digikey
for making this whole show possible. Take care.
I'll see you soon.