This week on Maker Update, touching things that aren’t there, old lenses for new cameras, the value of reading the data sheet, slicer settings, exposure settings, tool settings, and 50 tips for stepping up your CAD game.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 265]++

-=Project of the Week=-

$60 haptic feedback VR gloves by Lucas VRTech
https://youtu.be/ZTzn37Usa-U

-=More Projects=-

Modular PingPong display by David Vogt
https://hackaday.io/project/183328-modular-3d-printed-led-ping-pong-ball-display/details

Action Camera with Vintge Lens by W&M Levsha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gLIizIJeUk

Passive Mixer by Blitz City DIY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiyIrjOXLjM

-=Tips & Tools=-

Printable USB-> Dupont Power adapter by PROSCH
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/05/usb-power-has-never-been-easier/

Settings Guide plugin for Cura
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrvkJOPoWMc

50 CAD tips by Jeremy Fielding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5fvqiFhMg0

Gareth’s Tips Tools and Shop Tales newsletter
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/garethbranwyn/issues/gareth-s-tips-tools-and-shop-tales-issue-107-944353

I Got a Probe Macro lens by Crafsman Steady Craftin
https://youtu.be/tfQfCCHJGYw

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Calculating PCB Trace Width
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay_-QSouxa8

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update Touching things that aren’t there, old lenses for new cameras, the value of reading the data sheet, slicer settings, exposure settings, tool settings, and 50 tips for stepping up your CAD game.

Hello, and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner and I hope your new year is getting off to a great start. We’re finally getting some proper winter weather around here so its a great time to get stuck in on a new project – we’ve got another great show for you so lets kick it off with the project of the week.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were talking about how Lucas VRtech’s DIY glove controllers for virtual reality was one of our favorite projects from 2021, so I wasn’t quite ready for him to come right out of the gate of 2022 with a massive improvement on the project. But here we are – and by adding a servo motor to each finger sensor, he’s added haptic feedback to the gloves.

Fundamentally, haptic feedback is all about creating artificial tactile feedback from simulated experiences. There’s handful of different technologies to express haptic feedback, but Lucas is going for force feedback – he wants to be able to feel virtual objects in his hands. To achieve this he only needed to make a small modification to his original design – there’s now a screw protruding from the rotor that senses the position of each finger, and a servo horn pivots to restrict the movement range of that rotor.

We saw him beginning to experiment with this idea back when he initially published the $22 VR gloves, but the hardware was only one part of the challenge of getting the haptics to function – the software was the other hurdle, since he needed to get feedback from each game to know when to restrict the movement of the finger. So far, he has it working in Half-Life: Alyx and some Steam VR Unity Demos – and some members of the community that has formed around this project have adapted it to other games.

At this point, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Lucas and his community aren’t stopping here. He’s working to get the design of the haptic gloves to be more compact and streamlined. He’s also working on some other forms of haptic feedback using temperature simulation. The next big step for him is allowing players to move using their own feet with a omnidirectional treadmill. In the meantime, its just infectious to hear people experience haptics in VR for the first time. If you’re interested building your own, you can find all of the code and bill of materials on his github page, and you can also join his discord server if you want to become part of the community.

Time for more projects, on hackaday I learned about this modular LED Pingpong ball display by David Vogt. This is a relatively easy to build and easy to expand matrix display of addressable RGB LEDs that are then diffused using ping-pong balls. The execution might not be the most original but the responsiveness of this display is like nothing I’ve ever seen – from the video it looks like a big, blurry TV. Or course with any project like this, there’s a ton of grunt work in trimming, stripping and soldering all the wires needed to connect everything together. To make some of the work a little more automated, he attached several strands of 30 gauge wire to a piece of cardboard, and then used a laser engraver to remove the insulation with accurate spacing. If you ever need to strip a ton of wires, keep this trick in your back pocket.

Machinist channel W&M Levsha found this vintage zoom lens for a classic 16mm film camcorder and wanted to see how it would look on a modern action camera. They begin by disassembling the camera, removing the old lens and then putting together a plan for how to mount the camera to the lens at the proper focus distance. You could probably just get this done with 3d printing, but this video goes a little crazy with the custom machined parts – and the result is gorgeous – with regard to both the parts they made, and the resulting image from the lens. It’s probably not a very good action camera anymore, but who cares? It should be suitable for a whole lot more filming applications now.

And Liz Clark from Blitz City DIY recently released a video about her process of making a 3d printed passive mixer for her eurorack setup. A passive mixer is a pretty uncomplicated piece of music hardware that you can make for yourself, and therein lies the danger – this video is less about the build process, and more about the hazards of approaching the project with an abundance of hubris. Every detail she took for granted in the build came back to haunt her – 3d printer settings, TRS jack pinouts, the whole lot. Its a great lesson in not turning your back on even simple projects. Doing a little bit of homework will save you a ton of time in the end.

We’ve got a whole gaggle of tips and tools for you this week. From Hackaday I just learned about this quick 3d print by PROSCH that could make your life a little easier when supplying prototype circuits with 5v power. It’s a clip for a pair of dupont connectors that let you plug them into a USB Type-A plug. A little dab of CA glue will probably make the connection a little more secure, but this should spare you from having to hack apart a USB cable for the same purpose.

From Lost in Tech’s youtube channel I heard about the “Settings Guide” plugin for the 3d printer slicer Cura. There’s literally hundreds of settings in Cura and chances are that your understanding of each of their functions is…. Maybe a little hazy. This plugin replaces the standard tool tips with ones that describe each setting in greater detail, complete with pictures and diagrams to help you understand unfamiliar concepts. The plugin is available in the Cura marketplace, and it seems like a slam dunk if this is the slicer you use.

Jeremy Fielding just dropped a video with his 50 tips on improving your CAD game. I’m pretty much self taught when it comes to modern CAD software, so it goes without saying that I have a TON of bad habits to let go of. This video is a tremendous resource of advice for setting up your workspace for efficiency, finding uncommon tools effectively, making your designs easy to read when working on a team, and some of the best practices for placing features on your model. Jeremy demonstrates all of his tips using Solidworks, but they should be applicable to CAD package.

In the latest of Gareth’s Tips, Tools and shop tales newsletter, he’s got another great collection of tips like the easiest way to mount any device that uses hose keyhole mounts for screws, a review of the harbor freight airbrush and compressor, solder seal wire connectors, and the reason you should be bringing in your hand tools from the cold.

And finally, The Crafsman Steady Craftin’ has a video about his latest piece of camera kit: the Laowa Macro Probe lens. This is a really wild lens that I can’t wait to have the chance to play around with, but that’s not the reason you should check out this video. The craftsman also does a fantastic job of explaining all the different factors of exposing a camera shot, and how each setting impacts the resulting image – from how bright your shot is to what parts of the image are in focus, and which are not. If cameras aren’t your primary tool and all the settings are a bit of a moon language to you, give this one a watch.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight they’ve got a video on how to calculate the correct trace width for your PCB, accounting for both thermal performance and voltage drop. There’s a couple of handy formulas you can use to figure it out yourself, but they also have an easy-to-use trace width calculator if you don’t want to worry about it. If you’re just setting out on making your own PCBs, having the wrong trace width sounds like an easy way to have confusing or frustrating errors in your board. So don’t do that!

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show! I hope you enjoyed it, and if you did give us a thumbs up, leave us a comment, or sign up for the Maker Update email list so you don’t miss out on the next one. Huge thanks, as always to the folks at Digikey for having all the cool parts and making this show possible. Take care, and we’ll see you soon.