This week on Maker Update: a building brick to surpass Metal Gear
the return of Bay Area Maker Faire,
Dopp kits and progress bars for daily living.
Hello and welcome back to Maker Update,
the show where we update you with all the cool things that makers are making.
I'm Tyler Weingarten and I hope you're all doing great.
We've got another great show for you.
So let's check out the project of the week.
While looking around on Printables,
I came across this design for Print-a-Blok, a pretty remarkable
building brick by Joe Larson, the 3D printing professor.
This project has been around for a little while now,
so bear with me if this is old news for you.
But this is the first I've ever heard of it.
There's a few things that make these bricks really special.
First of all, they're 3D printable.
You probably already guessed that from the name,
but the design is also open source,
making it easy for people to create their own unique brick designs.
Another is that the bricks can be assembled in any direction.
Bricks are joined together by this snap-in peg,
and they can be assembled both horizontally and vertically.
Finally, the design is scalable.
The intended size is 16 millimeters, but the parts work perfectly well
If you scale it up to jumbo sizes.
Joe has several videos about the design of the bricks,
But my favorite is this one where he talks about
the design considerations that went into the joining peg.
The peg need to be square
so it can join any two bricks in any orthogonal direction,
but it also needs to be a tight fit so the bricks aren't wobbling around.
It seems simple enough starting out, but the problems compound really quickly.
Print-a-Blok block is fairly mature now
with tons of community created, specialty bricks and even new features
like this ball and socket joint for making poseable figures.
The Printables link in the show notes will get you in with tons of base blocks.
But if you search for Print-a-Blok on Thingiverse or Printables,
you should find plenty to start printing and building with.
Time for some news.
Maker Faire Bay Area is back.
The dust has barely settled after last weekend's Open Sauce,
but Make Magazine has just announced that Maker Faire Bay Area
will be returning this October after a four year hiatus.
No longer at the San Mateo Fairgrounds,
This is a reimagining of the event at a new venue on Mare Island.
The event will take place over two weekends with three days each:
October 13th through 15th and October 20th through 22nd.
The changes are intended to make the event less overwhelming, less crowded,
more intimate and easier for families.
For more information like tickets and the call for makers,
go to the MakerFaire.com.
More projects!
Becky Stern has a new video out on how to sew together a dopp kit bag.
This is a brick-shaped zippered bag,
ideal for carrying toiletries when you're traveling
or carrying a small tool kit or makeup
or anything else you can think of.
Becky's video has links for the pattern,
tons of great tips on sewing it together,
and a big revision on her waxed canvas process
that should make things a lot less tedious.
This is a good beginner to intermediate sewing project
and ideal for all kinds of upcycling, like making these out of reusable grocery bags.
Over on Hackaday, I saw this project by Taylor Hay on how to turn a Baofeng
handheld radio into the radio you see in the intro of Cyberpunk 2077.
After hacking apart the Baofeng UV-5R
He's driving the custom screen using an Arduino mini mega.
But he's getting some extra functionality out of it as well.
This isn't just cosplay for your walkie talkie
because he's also processing all the key inputs using the arduino,
He can program in macros for various radio functions,
making it easy to access functions that were originally buried deeply in menus.
You can follow Taylor's progress on the project
by checking the link down in the show notes.
And on Instructables,
I found this Workday Progress bar by Danion Escu and VEEB Projects.
This is a unique way of plotting out your workday.
It makes use of a linear array of addressable LEDs
that fill up as your day goes on.
You can also integrate it into your Google calendar
to show various meetings and appointments that you have throughout your schedule;
so you can get an at a glance look at how much time you have
instead of staring at your clock.
Given all the different options you have for addressable LEDs,
this could be a fun one for you to express in lots of different ways.
Time for some tips and tools, from How-toMechatronics,
I found this guide on Planetary Gears.
These are an increasingly popular gearing option for DIY mechanical devices
since they can deliver a ton of torque in an efficient design,
and they're pretty well suited to 3D printing, so they're easy to make too.
This video covers all the basics how to understand their gear ratios,
Building a two stage planetary gearbox,
and how to design your own gearboxes as well as some tips for 3D printing.
Check it out.
From MagPi magazine, I found this guide on how to turn your Raspberry Pi Zero W
into a USB thumb drive.
This is a simple project that
lets you Pi function as a storage device that's accessible over USB.
The secret sauce to this project is also setting it up as a samba server,
which means you can send files to it over your network.
I discovered this since I wanted a way to send files to my SLA printer
in my basement without having to shuttle USB thumb drives.
But you can also use this for smart TVs
or any other device you want to be able to send files to.
It's a quick tutorial and it's easy to follow.
And finally, we have a video from PlayStation.
Breaking down the features of their access controller.
Like the name says, this is a game controller
with accessibility features at the forefront of its design.
Each of the buttons can be swapped to a different shape and with
a different button label.
That's important because each
button input can be mapped to any controller function.
There's also a thumbstick that can extend from the main housing
and the Thumbstick interface can be swapped out entirely.
There's also four 3.5mm jacks for additional inputs.
It's unclear from this announcement if PlayStation plans to release CAD files
to help people design their own button shapes.
But I imagine the controller accessibility community will be quick
to reverse engineer their own if they don't.
Lots of cool interface ideas in this one.
And I'm excited to see
all the different ways that companies are embracing accessibility
and making games more accessible to more people.
For this week's Digi-Key Spotlight, We've got a double dose of Becky Stern
with the latest video in her teaching electronics series.
In this video, she wants to help
you get your first project connected to the Internet.
She starts you off with easy high reward projects like CheerLights
and controllable LEDs with software like WLED.
But she also takes you through the basics of making your own internet
reactive projects using backends like Arduino Cloud
And If This Then That (IFTTT). Check it out.
And that is going to do it for this week's show.
I hope you enjoyed it. If you did,
Give us a thumbs up, Leave us a comment,
and hit subscribe with the bell so you won't miss the next one.
I'd love to know what you think of the return of Maker Faire Bay Area.
And as always, great big thanks
to Digi-Key for making this show possible and to you for watching.
Take care. We'll see you soon.