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 fluorescents for your futuristic figures.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 251]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Giant Tippi Tree by Make Anything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hacd4_WVI8Q

-=News=-

Remembering Clive Sinclair
https://hackaday.com/2021/09/16/farewell-sir-clive-sinclair-inspired-a-generation-of-engineers/

-=More Projects=-

Finger Forks by Kids Invent Stuff and Geeky Faye Art
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEIReAWRJ3A

Scrap Boat Challenge by Xyla Foxlin / Narwahl Labs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MCeMq2ybqM

Flat Tire Detector by Bob Hammell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeV3R5yhwjo

-=Tips & Tools=-

Neon LED Lighting Effects by Norm from Tested
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew084i7Vmdc

Large Stepper Motors with Jeremy Fielding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMgckRoRy38

Goliath CNC review by Caleb Kraft
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjzR1uRH7MQ

G10 Print Surface by Maker’s Muse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0PK4oXbJT8

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Intro to Embedded Linux by Shawn Hymel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vsu67uMcko

-=Transcript=-

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 Fluorescents for your Futuristic Figures

Hello and Welcome Back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner, 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 multi-colored micarta layup and having a real headache of a time getting 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, in reverse. Each player adds these oddly shaped, interlocking leaves to the tree, building its 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 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% – 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 2×2 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. He began with this jig to help align all the pieces the same way, but because not all of the lumber is cut to the exact same dimensions, that also means the gaps between his pieces weren’t consistent either. Though 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 Tippie Tree was ready for party testing – and I gotta say, this thing looks like a blast. It’s a fun casual game to play with some friends at 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 just one joint can end up carrying the load of 30 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 files for the tabletop version down in the description.

Time for some news, this past week 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 80’s, 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 had ever seen. Sinclair’s creations and life were a huge inspiration to makers and technologists all over the world – there’s a great tribute to him 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 its 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 till 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 this 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 all 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 Hammell 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 will light up the LED on top to let you know the status of the wheel – simple but effective. This is a great design, but the board is little bit pricey -I’d 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 Norm Chan’s Neon LED Sign. A little while later he dropped this great video about these addons that will help add that telltale flicker and pulse of genuine neon lighting. These plug right in line with the power source of your neon strip, and provide a ton of different effects like flickering flames, random brightness, strobe effects, and a few others. He then uses them to photograph this cyberpunk miniature setpiece featuring the TDK sign from Bladerunner, Kaneda’s motorcycle from Akira, and Nebula from Guardians of the Galaxy.

If you’ve ever wanted to use a stepper motor in a project, but walked away crosseyed and disheartened, Jeremy Fielding has you covered. In his latest video 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 the 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 Jeremy, 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 toolpaths, 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 feedrate 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 3d printer – Glass, painter’s tape, PEI, and plenty more. But Angus form Maker’s Muse has a suggestion for using G10 as your favorite new build surface. You’ve surely encountered this material before even if you don’t realize it. Also called Garolite or FR4, this is made of multiple sheets of fiberglass and stabilized by resin under pressure – its used as the structure of printed circuit boards. It’s lightweight and incredibly stiff, and fairly cheap – and the way parts just pull away after the bed has cooled looks really satisfying. Check out the video for his experiences using it to print a handful of different materials and see if its 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 using an embedded OS vs. bare-metal programming, and what their best use cases are. This series is more than just installing Raspbian onto your pi, wiring it into your project and connecting to it headlessly 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.

Alright, and that is going to do it for this weeks show – thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed it or, just got something out of it. If you did, hit subscribe, give us a thumbs up, leave a comment. As always, big thanks to the folks over at Digikey for making this show possible. Take care, and we’ll see you soon.