This week on Maker Update, a tough nut to crack, handmade computers,
top tips for perfect prints, flextures, supersized switches
and making Tensegrity sculptures out of humans.
Hello, and welcome back to Maker Update.
I'm Tyler Winegarner and I hope you're doing great.
I hope you're finding all the time you need to finish up the gifts
you're making for people for the holiday season.
We've got another great show for you, so let's kick it off
with the project of the week.
Shane, from Stuff Made Here
has assembled a pretty incredible list
of insane projects over the course of the year.
Auto-aiming pool cues, chainsawing robots and walls that paint themselves.
So when I saw this latest video is about
a ridiculously overpowered nutcracker,
I was prepared to be, well, maybe a little underwhelmed.
I mean, how impressive can a Nutcracker be?
It turns out really, really impressive.
Shane's Nutcracker has a two inch diameter steel piston
that can crush, well, pretty much anything.
The piston is powered by four pistol blanks
that are normally used to drive nails into concrete.
In this application, it's delivering around
80,000 pounds of force.
That's about as much as a house weighs.
It has a special exhaust valve to allow the hot
gases to escape once the piston is fired.
It has a safety pin that prevents it from firing unexpectedly.
If you've ever wanted to see a master stroke of over engineering,
this is the project.
Shane spends a good chunk of the video
describing how he engineered The Nutcracker
so it doesn't blow itself apart whenever it's used.
If you ever took a calculus class and wondered
where you would actually use it, you use it when you need to figure out
how thick you need the walls of your steel nutcracker to be.
So it doesn't turn into a hand grenade when you use it.
Also, I didn't realize that I needed a fabrication
montage set to Tchaikovsky until I saw this video.
Of course, no project is
perfect right out of the gate, and that definitely applies here.
The tolerances of the breach weren't as tight as they could have been
so that some of the force from the blanks escape.
And there was nowhere for the explosive gases
to go after the charge, so that needed to be fixed as well.
But once it was working properly, it was able to crush just about anything
that went into its jaws: walnuts, Lego
minifigs, glass marbles, a steel nut.
Pretty much anything but a hardened ball bearing.
It's an impressive video and a great way to cap off a year
of amazing projects from Shane.
More projects.
Remember last year
when it seemed like everyone was obsessed with making Tensegrity structures?
In a recent video from Shang Ke, she asked the question No one else did:
Can you make a Tensegrity out of people?
The exercise actually does a really good job
of helping you understand how the structures work,
how they're held together and how they're supported by
what otherwise looks like floating pieces of string.
Of course, people are pretty poor material for Tensegrities,
since they'll eventually want to go do something else with their afternoon.
But it's a fun and educational video all the same.
When you hear somebody say, "I'm building a computer,"
you normally think of them buying a CPU,
some memory, a GPU and then jamming them all into a motherboard.
Normally.
but JDH had a completely different idea in his head,
and he built an entire computer from scratch.
It's all made of rudimentary ICs, a whole lot of jumper wires
and a lot of bread boards.
Of course, there's a massive amount of debugging in a project like this,
but he ends up with a computer that can output to a monitor,
He can write software for it,
The whole lot.
Do you have that one light fixture in your house that leaves
you wondering how on Earth you change the bulbs in it?
Instructables user Mattwach has one of those,
and when the bulbs started to go, he needed a solution.
His solution involves a painter's pole, a motor
and one of those light bulb changer grabby things.
Some 3D printed parts allow the motor and the grabber to be
at a right angle to the painter's pole so he can reach it from above,
and an analog stick lets him control the motor from the other end of the pole.
The crazy thing is that he doesn't use an off the shelf
microcontroller board like an Arduino or a trinket.
He just uses an ATTiny85 IC
and an H bridge and just makes his own.
The video goes into an incredible amount of depth,
and it's a long way to go just to change a light bulb.
But it's a great payoff.
A while back, we
introduced a flat flexture designs from Amy Makes Stuff.
One of her goals with that original project was to easily communicate
to the rest of the house whether or not the cat of the house has been fed.
The flaw in the design was that advancing the day didn't reset the two feeding toggles.
With a new sliding mechanism to the rescue,
It now handles both tasks at the same time.
Part of the video also involves
a review of the CNC machine she used to make the Flexture.
It's a fairly affordable machine, but it certainly has its limitations.
Time for some tips and tools.
Thomas Sanladerer took a break from talking about 3D printing
to give you his review of a collection of soldering irons and stations.
In the shoot out here reviews portable solutions like the Pinencil and the TS-80P,
as well as the popular Hakko FX-888D,
The Weller WE 1010 and the Ersa I-con Nano.
He reviews the ergonomics of each machine, the user interface,
as well as heating, performance and speed,
and you can also detect some review inspiration from Project Farm.
If you're paying close attention.
Speaking of 3D printing, Angus from makers Muse
has released his ultimate guide to perfect 3D prints.
Whether you're struggling with your first layer or stringing or part
size accuracy, Angus tackles each printing issue on its own
and gives you some great advice on how to improve each one.
His goal is to help get anyone who watches the video
to be able to print his clearance castle, which is his own torture test
that features a number of interlocking print in place moving parts.
From Hackaday, I found this guide to adding an external Wi-Fi antenna
to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W by Brian Dory.
If you're disappointed with
the pi's Wi-Fi performance, this might be what you need.
There's a few solder points on the board that enable you to install
a UFL antenna connector.
The first thing you'll need to do is cut the traces
on the PI to the existing Wi-Fi antenna, and then once
the UFL connector is soldered on, you can attach an antenna.
The soldering you need to do is all surface mount,
but the pads are large enough that with a steady hand, you should be able
to get the job done with a standard pencil style soldering iron.
Just when you were thinking
that the mechanical keyboard / macro pad craze was getting a little tired,
now you can supersize those projects.
Over on Adafruit, I found these giant mechanical switches from Keilh.
They're just like regular mechanical key
switches, but four times larger in every dimension.
There's three different colors with three different switch actuation styles.
They can make fantastic fidget toys or making
comically large macro pads or anything else you need
A super sized key for. Each one is $20,
so they're fairly inexpensive, too.
And finally, from Tested, as part of the year end Favorite Things videos,
Adam Savage talks about the media that got him through 2021:
his favorite YouTube channels, podcasts, movies,
television shows and books.
The whole series of videos is full of great recommendations,
but hearing him talk about his favorite machining channels
or his love of the Ologies podcast, or waxing about his love of Ghostbusters
Afterlife is a really nice way to close out the year.
For this week's Digikey spotlight, we have the latest video
from Adafruit in their Great Search series.
This one is all about USB to serial converters
that you might want to use in a project.
And of course, since we're still very much in the dark times of the chipocalypse,
Lady Ada gives you some great tips on how to find the components
you can actually get your hands on, as well as the ones that will perform
the task you need them to do.
All right, and that is going to do it for this week's show,
And for the normal episodes of Maker Update for 2021.
As I mentioned last week, we've got one more show for you
where Donald and I talk about our favorite projects, our best tips
and tools, and some of the maker trends we saw over the course of the year.
That will be coming to you right before the end of the year.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this episode,
and if you did give us a thumbs up, leave us a comment and sign up
for the Maker Update email list so you never miss a show.
Huge thanks, as always, to Digikey
for making this show possible and to you for watching.
Take care! We'll see you in the new year.