This week, on Maker Update, a Tree built to Tumble, Forks for your Fingers.
A boat with a butt, finding flats, stronger steppers
and flickering florescencents for your futuristic figures.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're having a great week.
Have you ever tried to recreate a thing you made once?
I've been trying to recreate this multicolored micarta layup
and having a real headache, trying to get back to the same result.
Our Project of the Week deals specifically with consistent repetition.
So let's check it out.
Devin Montes of Make Anything is building a huge
lawn sized version of his own stacking game: Tippi Tree.
Tippi Tree is a little bit like Jenga, but in reverse.
Each player adds these oddly shaped interlocking leaves to the tree.
Building this canopy up and out,
the leaves can lock into each other in a bunch of interesting ways,
allowing you to build in ways to vex your fellow players.
Of course, the game is over when the tree becomes too unstable
and the whole thing comes crashing down.
It requires a decent grasp of physics and a steady hand,
and it looks like a lot of fun.
Devin's original design for Tippi Tree is intended
for tabletop play, and it can all be 3D printed.
But the design for this one calls for a little bit more than taking all the parts
and scaling up by 400 percent , even though that's exactly
what he did for the design.
But 3D printing pieces this large just isn't practical.
So he built the entire thing out of two by two lumber.
Which is where this video becomes
a fantastic lesson in learning from assembly line processes.
He needs to produce a lot of repeatable results from a material
that's anything but consistent.
But because not all the lumber is cut to the exact same dimensions,
that also means the gaps between his pieces weren't consistent either.
Fortunately, with some shims to the rescue.
He was able to produce some workable pieces after building the base
and applying a really satisfying autumn themed paint job.
The giant Tippi Tree was ready for party testing.
And I got to say, this thing looks like a blast.
It's a fun, casual game with some friends of the park,
but still makes your brain work a little.
Through testing, Devin learned that his glue and nail joint tended to fail.
But that makes sense, since one single joint can end up carrying
the load of thirty other leaves.
If you keep notes during this video, you could probably build your own Tippi Tree.
But if you don't feel like putting in all that work,
you can find links to the tabletop version.
Down in the description.
Time for some news.
This past week, we saw the passing of Sir Clive Sinclair. Sinclair
is likely best known for his creation of the
ZX Spectrum computer that was popular in the early 80s.
But his entire life was one of invention, experimentation,
engineering and sometimes failure.
Sinclair is also credited with creating some of the first pocket
calculators the world has ever known.
Sinclair's creations and life were a huge inspiration
to makers and technologists all over the world.
There's a great tribute to him over on Hackaday
If you'd like to learn more about him.
More projects. The duo at Kids Invent Stuff recently
teamed up with Allie from Geeky Faye Art to tackle an interesting problem.
What is the best way to attach forks to your fingers?
This video ends up being less collaboration
and more competition with three different strategies
to tackle the problem of making finger attachable cutlery.
Ruth is using Sugru to mold flexible finger cups, while Shawn uses polymorph,
a plastic that's moldable
after you soak it in boiling water, but becomes quite rigid once it's cooled.
Meanwhile, Allie does what they do best and turns to Fusion 360
to design some shapes that they'll print in flexible filament.
The video finishes with a fantastic field test of the finger cutlery.
So make sure you stick around until the end.
Speaking of collaborations, Narwhal Labs has challenged
Xyla Foxlin to build a boat entirely out of scrap.
I mean, literally stuff pulled out of the garbage.
This is sort of a TV style challenge since she gets to spin a wheel
to see what genuinely useful material she gets to build with.
And she nearly won the lottery with her spin of flotation foam.
There's a lot of hilarious lessons in this build, like thinking
ahead about your container when you're mixing up expanding foam.
Don't be put off by the reality show derived format.
There's a lot of great stuff going on in this build,
and we have a ton to learn from Xyla's approach to problem solving.
One of the things computers are really great
at is repeating the same task over and over without getting bored,
which is probably why Bob Hammel is using machine vision
to check his car for flat tires and other low air conditions.
He's using an OpenMV Cam M7
to capture an image of the wheels of any car that rolls past it,
and it will light up an LED on top to let you know the status of the wheel.
Simple but effective.
This is a great design, but the board is a little bit pricey.
I wonder if you could do something similar with a Raspberry Pi zero.
So then it could nag you with notifications that your tires are running low.
Time for some tips and tools.
A few weeks ago, we mentioned Norman Chan's neon led sign.
A little while later, he dropped this great video about these add ons
that will help add that telltale flicker and pulse of genuine neon lighting.
These plug right in line with a power source of your neon strip
and provide a ton of different effects like flickering flames
or random brightness and strobe effects and a few others.
He then uses them to photograph this cyberpunk miniature set piece
featuring the TDK sign from Blade Runner, Kaneda’s motorcycle
from Akira and Nebula from Guardians of the Galaxy.
If you've ever wanted to use stepper motors in a project
but walked away cross-eyed and disheartened, Jeremy
Fielding has you covered in one of his recent videos.
He talks you through everything you need
to get going with these complex, but very precise motors.
The title is maybe a little misleading.
Sure, he's doing this demonstration on NEMA 34 and 23 steppers.
But this knowledge can be used to control smaller motors as well,
as long as you're keeping them happy with proper voltage and current.
You can use this for just about any size motor.
This video is also the start of a new series
from Jeremey, all about demystifying robotics and automation.
Over on the Make magazine YouTube channel, Caleb Kraft
shares his review of the Goliath CNC.
This machine is a portable CNC router, similar to the Shaper Origin,
but with one significant difference this machine is self-driving.
It uses proprietary software to generate the tool paths,
and that makes sense. It needs to do some clever
planning to avoid dropping a wheel into a large pocket.
It can move in any direction thanks to these chunky
omniwheels, but they don't have much grip.
So the cutting feed rate is pretty slow as a result.
Still, a machine that can break down a full sheet at this price is a steal.
If you can live with the compromises, check this one out.
There's no shortage of
advice around the best build surface for your 3-D printer.
Glass, painter's tape, PEI and plenty more
Angus from Maker's Muse
has a suggestion for using g10 as your new favorite build surface.
You've likely encountered this material before, even if you don't realize it.
It's also called Garolite or FR4
and it's made from multiple sheets
of fiberglass and stabilized by resin under pressure.
It's used as the structure for printed circuit boards.
It's lightweight and incredibly stiff and fairly cheap.
And the way parts just pull away after the bed is cool looks really satisfying.
Check out the video for his experiences, using it to print
a handful of different materials and see if it's right for you.
For this week's Digikey spotlight, check out Shawn Hymel's latest video
about the use of Linux in embedded systems.
He begins by explaining the difference between an embedded
OS versus bare metal programing and what their best use cases are.
This series is more than just installing Raspbian onto your Pi,
wiring into your project and connecting to it head lessly to Hack it until it works.
He begins by showing you how to use a few popular tools
to build your own custom Linux image for your embedded application.
This is just the first video in a very deep subject. So buckle in
If this sounds like your jam.
All right. And that is going to do it for this week's show.
Thank you so much for watching.
I hope you enjoyed it or got something out of it.
And if you did hit subscribe, give us a thumbs up or leave us a comment.
As always, big thanks to the folks over at Disney for making this show possible.
Take care. We'll see you soon.