This week on Maker Update, the most expensive rip surf ever made, some huge news from Raspberry Pi, thin floating shelves, clever mechanisms, making cut lists and foaming TPU.

++Show Notes [Maker Update #217]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Carbon Fiber RipSurf with Narwhal Labs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uKJHssExbk

Braille Skateboarding’s test of the CF Ripsurf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsSUyWYGYeA

-=News=-

Introducing the Raspberry Pi Pico
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-now-on-sale/

-=More Projects=-

Thin Floating Shelves by Alexandre Chappel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR-Fq9tO1-Q

Electronic Liar’s Dice by Alec Sunyecz
https://www.instructables.com/Pocket-Dice-Electronic-Dice-for-Liars-Dice-and-Mor/

Hoodie Arcade Emulator by Rafael Rubio
https://hackaday.com/2021/01/20/3d-printed-pi-arcade-is-an-emulation-horn-of-plenty/

3d printed Snake Automaton by Greg Zumwalt
https://www.instructables.com/A-3D-Printed-Snake-Automaton/

Bundled Bernie stl by Chaos Core Tech
https://thangs.com/model/10524

-=Tips & Tools=-

Cut List Optimizer
https://cutlistoptimizer.com/

Make Front Panels for your DIY project by Killawhat
https://www.instructables.com/Make-Professional-Looking-Front-Panels-for-Your-Ne/

Animated Mechanisms by Thang010146
https://www.youtube.com/user/thang010146/videos

Foaming TPU with CNC Kitchen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7LDY7EJKFU

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Introduction to RTOS with Shawn Hymel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F321087yYy4&ab_channel=Digi-Key

Transcript

This week on maker update, the most expensive rip surf ever made, Some huge news from Raspberry Pi,  thin floating shelves, clever mechanisms, Making cut lists and Foaming TPU.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner, I hope you’re doing well, and keeping warm wherever you are. We finally got our first big snow of the winter here in western new york, so it’s been a great time to get stuck in and finish a few projects or learn some new skills. For me, I’ve been trying to get better at sewing. Whatever you’re working on, we’ve got a great show for you, so lets check out the project of the week.

I’ll admit – I’d never heard of a ripsurf before watching this video. But the folks over at Narwhal Labs are tackling the process of making one in their shop. A rip surf is sort of a skateboard but with a pair of casters instead of four wheels and two trucks. They’re normally made of plastic and the shape of the board allows it to flex which lets you carve like a surfboard on pavement. The board made by Narwhal is closer to the construction of a traditional skate board – sort of. Instead of a laminate of multiple plys of maple, this board is made of alternating layers of maple and carbon fiber.

To get the shape of the board they used a technique called vacuum bagging. It’s sort of like vacuum forming, but instead the vacuum is used to compress the laminate layers together while conforming to the shape that’s needed. After finalizing the shape of the board on a bandsaw, they used a CNC router to cut grooves into the board to give it more opportunity to flex.

The team went through few iterations before discovering the right way to mount the casters. Their original plan was a shaped stack of plywood, but that would have made the board too heavy to ride properly. Eventually they landed on some bent pieces of steel. To bend the steel they used an angle grinder to score it, and once bent into the proper shape, backfilled the bends with some tig welding beads. 

When it was finished they sent the board off to the crew at Braille Skateboarding to be a part of their “you build it, we skate it” series – where they have a reputation for riding some of the most insane creations you can imagine. I won’t spoil how the Carbon Fiber ripsurf performed – if you’re curious, check out the link down in the show notes. If this was your introduction to Narwhal Labs, it’s the internal makerspace and content channel for Total Boat resins and Jamestown Distributors. It’s a fun channel with some cool projects. Go check them out.

Time for the news, last Thursday the Raspberry Pi Foundation dropped a huge piece of news with the announcement of the Raspberry Pi Pico and Raspberry Silicon. Instead of a single board computer, the Pico is a microcontroller – and it’s just four dollars! Powering it all is Raspberry Silicon, the foundation’s own chip for microcontrollers. Raspberry Silicon is based around a dual-core Arm m0 cortex with 264kb of ram. 

While the Pico is loaded with features, you can also find this same chip in a handful of other form factors. Adafruit has made dev boards with Raspberry Silicon that conform to booth the feather and itsy bitsy ecosystems. And Arduino added a bluetooth module and a 9-dof IMU and made it compatible with the Nano platform. This is a huge announcement and a lot to take in, but there’s also been a ton of coverage on it. You can get your hands on the Pico though one of the official distributors, or you can find it on the cover of the latest issue of Hackspace Magazine. No, really, it’s right on the cover.

More Projects! Over on his channel, Alexandre Chappel built some floating shelves to display some of his smaller projects. Instead of the traditional box floating shelves, which hide the hardware used to mount the shelf to the wall, he wanted shelves that were as thin as a single board. His solution is incredibly simple, but tricky to pull off. He’s drilling a slightly undersized hole into his wall studs, and then tapping a threaded rod into the hole. 

This makes a structure that’s plenty strong to support the shelves. The tricky part is drilling a perfectly aligned hole not only into the stud, but also into the shelf board so everything lines up. This isn’t a complex project but there’s a ton of clever tips throughout it.

On instructables I found this project by Alec Sunyecz (soon-yucks) where he built this pocket sized electronic dice roller for Liar’s Dice. Once you get over the hump of generating some quality random numbers, this project would be easy enough to pull off with any board that has a display and simple interface. But Alec went the extra mile and displayed the output on what looks like a set of dice. To do this he made a custom PCB to mount the ATTiny85 and the array of LEDs to show the die roll. If you’re not convinced of the power of custom PCB’s to shrink the footprint of your project, just look at his breadboard prototype. He doesn’t offer the gerber files, but the project walks you through the process of creating them using a free software called EasyEDA. If you’re eager to see what this process is like, give it a look.

On Hackaday I found this project by Rafael Rubio for this desktop arcade emulator called Hoodie. There’s not much to talk about here, since the electronics for a raspberry pi based arcade emulator have been covered a hundred times over. What we’re really talking about here is the 3d printed enclosure. If you’ve long lusted after weird retro-future displays that JVC made in the 70’s, this will speak to you like it does to me. It’s a great reminder that our creations can go beyond functional, and be genuinely beautiful. You can get the STLs over on thingiverse.

With the new year we have a new 3d printed Automata from Greg Zumwalt. This one features a snake whose head rises up , and then reverses and sinks back down. There’s two elements that make this really stand out: The first is that the body of the snake comes together like a zipper as the head rizes up. The other is this automated gearbox that flips around to reverse the direction of the zipper feeders to make the animation loop. If I had this on display, I’d be tempted to have it face the wrong way – the movement of the mechanism is arguably more fascinating than the animation of the character.

And if you haven’t had your fill of Bernie Sanders sitting on things memes, you can now print your own and have him sit on whatever you like around your house. Artist Chelsea Kearney of ChaosCoreTech modeled this digital sculpt of Bernie Sanders from the 2021 presidential inauguration. The model is released under a creative commons, non-commercial license, but it looks like you can get access to a commercial license through her Patreon.

Time for some tips and tools, when tackling a recent project I was introduced to this website called cut list optimizer.com. From the name you can probably guess what it does,. You just enter the dimensions of your stock, the size of the panels you need, and it will tell you how much stock you need and give you the best plan for breaking it down while minimizing waste. It’s intended to help you break down panels, but it can also help you create the best plan for cutting down long boards for a project – just enter a one for your second dimension. It even accounts for blade kerf.

On instructables I found this guide from Killawhat for making your own front panels for your electronics projects. Essentially what you want to do is work in two layers – one will help guide your fabrication, while the second will be the part that labels all your knobs and switches and make everything look tidy and professional. While you can use any cad or illustration software to make these, they recommend a free software package called Front panel Express. If you’re looking to step up the look of your next project, give this one a look.

If you love watching complex mechanisms at work, you owe it to yourself to subscribe to the youtube channel Thang010146. This is a huge collection of short videos of mechanisms and how they function. There’s no plans included, so if you’re looking to build one of these you’ll have to figure it out yourself. But its to just let these wash over you and understand what’s possible – from there I’m sure you can research how to engineer any of these mechanisms for yourself.

The CNC Kitchen Youtube Channel has a new video on multi-material printing with foaming TPU to make this coat hook with a cushy foam pad to protect the surface its attached to. Throughout the video he talks about how a printer with multiple toolheads is better for multi-material printing because different materials will be extruded through their own nozzle. There’s still more considerations to take in – the foaming TPU tends to ooze a lot, and there’s a of preplanning to determine the best printing strategy so you don’t end up with random blobs of foam dotted around your print. I know you could just as easily build something like this in a single material and then just stick on some EVA foam, but its great to tackle small projects like this to understand how the materials work before tackling something more complex.

For this week’s Digikey spotlight, check out this introduction to RTOS’s by Shawn Hymel. Not ROUS’s – I don’t think they exist. Real Time Operating Systems are similar to the Operating Systems running on your home computer or mobile device, but are optimized for executing tasks according to a rigid schedule – think of medical devices or firing the sparkplug in an engine. In this video series Shawn begins by breaking down the differences between RTOS’s and General Purpose Operating Systems, how to use FreeRTOS on an ESP32, as well as a look at how the scheduler works. If you have a project in mind that demands specific timing, don’t miss this one.

Alright, and that is gonna do it for this week’s show. I hope you’re enjoying the back and forth that Donald and I are doing every week as we present this show to you. If you do, let us know down in the comments, and make sure you hit subscribe or sign up for the maker update newsletter so you won’t miss the next one. As always, huge thanks to our pals at Digikey for making this show possible. Be good to yourselves, stay safe, and we’ll see you soon.