This week on Maker Update: sticking the landing after 7 years, the zen of robotics, a cardboard house for cats, cordless heat guns, measuring radiuses, and go big or stay home for your 3D printer.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 295]++

-=Project of the Week=-

I Landed a Rocket Like SpaceX by BPS.Space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH3lR2GLgT0

-=More Projects=-

Zenscape by pengfeizhang
https://www.instructables.com/Zenscape/

Penny Coffee Table by DIY Creators
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot7qPlpCdPM

Modern Cardboard House for Cats by Cardboard Ninja
https://www.instructables.com/Modern-Cardboard-Pet-House-for-Cats-/

-=Tips & Tools=-

.4mm Nozzles are Obsolete by Thomas Sanladerer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgXM2zPusXo

Cordless Heat Gun by Adam Savage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYaS2MeXQk0

3D Printed Radius Caliper by sorrenaveria
https://www.printables.com/model/236582-radius-caliper-no-computation-required

Hardware Kit for 1-2-3 Blocks by Stumpy Nubs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQezV-E1kMk

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

What do Multimeter Safety Ratings Mean?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSljFPO7mH0

-=Transcript=-

This Week on Maker Update: Sticking the landing after seven years, the zen of robotics, a cardboard house for cats, cordless heat guns, measuring radiuses, and go big or stay home for your 3d printer.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner, back with you again, and I hope you’re all doing great. I think, knock on wood, I’ve got the cursed technology back under control, and here’s hoping I can get back to solving more interesting problems. Speaking of interesting problems, we’ve got wonderful show that’s chock full of them – lets kick it off with the project of the week.

Do you ever look at a problem and just think to yourself “How hard can it be?” Well, I don’t think that’s how Joe Barnard of BPS.Space approached his attempt to get a model rocket to perform a propulsive landing – that’s essentially the same way that Space-X lands their rockets. This is a huge engineering problem – and that’s probably why it took Joe over Seven years to pull it off.

Its tough to know where to begin with this one. There’s just so much to this project. Over the course of the seven years, he developed his own flight computer. He completely reengineered the model rocket’s flight system several times. He engineered countless mechanical parts to control the rocket in flight. This thing is insane. And yet, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to appreciate even the nerdiest of details because he does a pretty fantastic job of explaining what’s happening at every step of the process.

You don’t even need to care about rocketsl to learn some good lessons from this project. After years of effort, iteration and failure, you’re bound to get discouraged and want to give up – we’ve all been there at one point or another – where its really easy to slip into a burnout mindframe. Joe even talks through this process and how he was able to get out of that rut and keep going with his work.

The video I’m linking to is where he finally celebrates his success, but really, there’s countless videos across the entire BPS.Space channel that documents the journey. Whether you’re interested in rocketry, or avionics, or engineering, or just watching someone solve a really tough problem, there’s a lot to appreciate here. But don’t worry, now that he’s done he’s not giving up, he has plenty more interesting rocketry projects for the future.

More Projects! There’s that old phrase, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And I guess if you’re Peng Faizhang, if you have a robot arm, it all looks like a zen garden. I saw this project on instructables, and I just fell in love with how ridiculous it is – and I don’t mean to be insulting when I say that. She writes out the bill of materials, and its all normal DIY zen garden stuff until you get to the end- Oh and by the way – you’re gonna need a multi-thousand dollar robot arm.

Regardless, she still documents the whole project in painstaking detail – there’s some adapter plates for the end effector of the robot that you can 3d print or manufacture in plywood, and all of the code is there. Maybe its just a dedication to documenting your work, just for the sake it that’s inspiring here. Fortunately you could probably adapt this to more accessible, gantry style CNC machines or plotters. Still, I can’t get over how fun this one looks

Glen from DIY Creators is reviving an old table project by putting a new spin on a classic idea – he wants to create a resin poured penny table, but instead of just covering the entire table with pennies, he’s laying them down in a geometric pattern, but then letting them break up and fade as it gets close to the edge – and against the stark white of the original table finish, the effect is really striking. You’ll also get to learn a lot about table resin pours – how to do your first coat, how to get a good coat on the sides, and how bring it all to a perfect glossy finish.

On Instructables I found this wonderful guide by Cardboard Ninja to building a modernist cat house out of cardboard. I use cardboard a lot for prototyping parts, but I’m guilty of overlooking it as a building material – and after watching this video and following this guide, I’m going to try and do that less.

There’s a ton of great tips peppered all throughout this video for making clean looking, strong structures out of this material that we probably all have too much of. Tips like taking the entire box and turning it inside out, so you get the completely unlabeled surface facing outwards – and then trimming and folding over the top flaps to create a really strong base. The walls are all made from double thick cardboard, and you could probably make some of your own panels if you don’t have any on hand.

The video finishes off by cutting another box down to half height and nesting the sides into each other and adding some LED fairy lights for accents. Its a fun video with plenty to learn from, and most importantly, it looks like the cats like it too.

Speaking of tips and tools, we’ve got a handful of those for you this week. A while back Thomas Sandladerer released this video about .4mm nozzles now being obsolete. I’ve been trying out this technique and, I think he’s really onto something here. The idea is that with the newer versions of slicers like Cura and Prusa Slider that feature the Arachne engine, they can lay down lines of filament thinner than the diameter of the nozzle – and because of this feature, you can get all the speed and strength gains from a .6mm nozzle, without sacrificing any detail. Thomas offers lots of comparisons between a traditional .4mm print and an arachne .6mm, and its honestly tough to tell the difference. Give this a shot.

On Tested, Adam Savage has a video where he talks about his boundless love for heat guns – not just the high power ones you can use for bending plastics and rapidly curing finishes, but also shares some of his uses for the common blowdryer – like combining them with a cardboard box to make a gentle heat oven for curing. He then introduces his new cordless heat gun. Power wise, it’s a half step between the blowdryer and a corded heat gun. That sounds like a step back, but it allows him to do the same work he could with a corded heatgun, but he can sneak up on the margins a lot more slowly Since that’s normally where you can get into trouble and ruin your project.

On printables, I found this 3d printed radius caliper by sorrenaveria. This is a V-shaped 3d print that just fits over the end of your digital calipers, and it uses the depth probe to determine the radius of round objects. It has a functioning measuring range of 14 to 115 millimeters, and it could likely handle larger diameters if you have a larger print bed. Seems like a useful tool to add to your print queue.

And courtesy of Gareth Branwin’s Tips, Tools and Shop Tales newsletter I found this great tip for a hardware kit for 1-2-3 blocks. 1-2-3 blocks have alternating threaded holes so you can attach them together to make jigs, but unless you have the expensive ones that machinists buy, the threaded holes are kind of useless – unless you use them with this kit. This includes screws of various lengths and a couple of barrel nuts, and allows you to bolt even the super affordable blocks together. All the hardware sits below the surface of the block so it will still be flush with your tool surface, and you can pick one of these kits up for just a couple of bucks.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight, we’ve got an older video that outlines the different safety ratings for multimeters and understanding what they all mean. Multimeters can be one of the most helpful tools in your diagnostic arsenal, but I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing the upper limits of what you can safely test with yours. You can usually find these ratings printed on the multimeter itself, or on the provided data sheet, and this video will help you understand what situations you can use the meter in. Its a helpful video – check it out.

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show! I hope you enjoyed it, I sure had fun putting it together. Be sure to subscribe, give us a thumbs up, leave us a comment. I’d love to hear what crazy long-term project you’d like to take on. As always, huge thanks to Digi-Key for giving this show a home, and to you for watching. Take care, and we’ll see you soon.