This week on Maker Update: a cocktail you can’t drink, robots that don’t dance, a cyberdeck in three parts, workbenches, cold casting and listening to satellites with a tape measure.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 228]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Electronic Epoxy Tap by Narwhal Labs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pefYJN5pV2Y

-=News=-

Stretch from Boston Dynamics
https://youtu.be/yYUuWWnfRsk

Funhouse from Adafruit
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4985

-=More Projects=-

Tape Measure Yagi Antenna by Becky Stern
https://www.instructables.com/Tape-Measure-Yagi-Antenna-With-3D-Printed-Couplers/

Benchtop Router Table by DIY Creators
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKUsfOAakEs

Making a log carving robot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix68oRfI5Gw

P7 Tactical Cyberdeck by Make n Modify
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdqot8xYeFM

-=Tips & Tools=-

Four Workbench Mistakes by Rex Kruger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CwIX6jE-qA

The tools you need for woodworking by 3×3 customs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_BEhdEvLUo

Soldering Tips from Twinkle Twinkie & The Tech Pod
https://techpod.content.town/

Cold Casting techniques by the CrafsMan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0a8wzhnOT0

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Getting Started with Raspberry Pi Pico
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCk9QaCH5QU

Transcript

This week on maker update: a cocktail you can’t drink, robots that don’t dance, a cyberdeck in three parts, workbenches, cold casting and listening to satellites with a tape measure.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update and I hope you’ve been doing great. It’s been a few weeks since I last presented this show, and I missed you guys, but it gave me a chance to catch up on a few projects – I finally got to take the machine tools class at my makerspace and I gotta say – cutting a part on on a metal lathe is just as satisfying as it looks in the youtube videos. Enough about that though, I’ve got a ton of great projects to share with you, so let’ s check out the project of the week.

Those crazy folks at Narhwhal Labs are at it again, and this time they’ve teamed up with Umit Erol To build this arduino-powered electronic tap for resin. With a pair of tap handles, this thing looks like a dispenser for your favorite adult beverage – assuming your favorite adult beverage turns into a clear hard plastic 24 hours after being properly mixed.

Of course, the key to nailing any resin project is to get the correct ratio of resin to hardener. Some want a 1:1 ratio, some require a 1:5 ratio, or somewhere in between. In addition to being a convenient dispenser for the resin, this project also measures out the perfect ratio of hardener for your volume, so you get the ideal mix every time. The ratio is measured and maintained through use of a load cell, which measures the change in weight over time. The weight of the resin and hardener bottles deform the load cell, and the load cell expresses the amount of deformation as an electrical signal.

The frame of the dispenser is all made from cnc cut baltic birch, with tap handles made from skateboard decks and resin that were turned down on a lathe. An arduino provides the brains and interprets the signal from the load cell, and fires off the relays to trigger the solenoids that dispense the resin and hardener. This thing is like a bar bot, but for cocktails you can’t drink.

You’d probably need to be doing a whole lot of resin projects for this dispenser to be practical, but there’s no denying how fun this thing is. It looked like it was an interesting challenge to build. If nothing else, it introduced me to load cells as a component I might use in some project in the future. You can get the design files for the enclosure, arduino code and more by following the links down in the description.

Now for the news, a few weeks ago Boston Dynamics unveiled the newest robot in their bot lineup, called Stretch. Stretch might be their most conventional robot to date, resembling your traditional six-axis industrial robot arm, but on a mobile base. Stretch is primarily designed to manipulate shipping boxes in warehouse settings – and it’s their first robot intended for commercial release. There’s a pretty palpable sense of discomfort in this video for anyone who works in a warehouse, but at least they softened the blow by imbuing Stretch with Boston Dynamics characteristic charm for their robots.

Adafruit just added a new board to their lineup, and it’s all about home automation – the Fun House. Based around the ESP32-S2 processor, this is a wifi-capable dev board with 240×240 tft display, sensors for temperature, humidity, light and barometric pressure, capacitive touch pads and a few buttons added on for good measure. Like with most Adafruit boards it supports circuit python and the stemma interface for additional modules – or you can also program it using the traditional arduno IDE. But I think the best part of this board is the silkscreen art on the PCB. You can get your hands on the Fun House for just $34.95

More Projects! Last week Becky Stern hosted this show and talked about some of her favorite projects, but she neglected to mention her own Yagi antenna that she built from segments of Tape Measure and 3d printed parts. A Yagi antenna resembles the classic rooftop antenna used to receive over the air television signals – It consists of a central mast with branching dipole antennas extending off of it. For the mast, Becky used a length of PVC pipe and used lengths of metal tape measure as the antennas. She connected the antenna to a Software-Defined Radio USb dongle on her computer to interpret the signals. From here I’d probably be totally happy to just stare at the waterfall display of signals captured by the antenna, but Becky has a different goal: capturing radio signals from satellites in orbit around the globe. Its a really cool project, go check it out.

Over on YouTube I found this video from DIY Creators on making a simple and compact router table out of some scrap plywood. This is one of those projects that, once you build one, you’ll wonder why you lived so long without it. There’s a ton of clever design considerations here, from this under table bit storage system, the fence slide, and dust collection system. As a designer, I’m really guilty of always thinking of sheet goods as flat shapes, and not something that can be used to create dimensionality. Glenn certainly doesn’t have that problem, and I learn something every time I watch him work.

There’s no getting around it: industrial robot arms are cool – but they’re also really dangerous. And Shane from Stuff Made Here decided to make his even more dangerous by giving it a chainsaw. His goal was to use the arm to carve a wooden bear out of a log – and most of the video is focused on designing the algorithm to generate a viable toolpath to achieve this.

If you’ve taken the time to learn CNC machining, you’ve likely seen each and every one of these mistakes before – wrong feed rate, forgetting to turn the spindle on, machine crashes, all of it. He wasn’t successful in carving a bear from wood, but he was able to cut a dog from insulation foam – and that’s pretty close, right?

Also on youtube, I saw the P7 tactical cyberdeck by Make & Modify. This project began its life as a split mechanical keyboard project made from these aluminum cases originally used by the german military in the 80’s. As the keyboard took shape, Max realized the project wasn’t complete until he turned his spare case into a field computer. Like any cyberdeck project, the beauty really is in the details – like these keycaps that were harvested from an electronic typewriter. The metal cases also proved problematic for raspberry pi’s wifi radio – He shows you how to add an external antenna to the pi so it could connect to networks without trouble. It’s a great build, and a testament to the benefits of being a material hoarder.

Time for some Tips and Tools, I found this fantastic video by Rex Krueger about the design and construction of work benches for woodworking. When you’re looking for designs for a bench, its really easy to become parylized with indecision. This video will help you build a stable, versatile and extremely functional bench for everyday use. The focus here is on using hand tools instead of power tools, but he offers plenty of considerations for folks that prefer to use power tools too.

And if you are just getting started with woodworking, don’t miss out on this video from Tamir of 3×3 customs on the first tools you should buy. Of course, the tools you actually need will be heavily dependent on what kind of projects you’ll be building, but she covers the bare basics right from the start – you’re going to need a drill, a sander and a saw. From there she talks about how investing in a tablesaw transformed how she worked. Then she goes on to talk about the rest of the tools in her shop and what projects they help with, to give you a sense if what you may or may not need.

I’d normally hesitate to recommend a patreon-only podcast episode here, but the recent patreon-only episode of Brad & Will Made a Techpod features a lengthy interview with Twinkle Twinkie, and it’s all about soldering – how to get your very first start in soldering, desoldering techniques, through hole, surface mount, its all there. He also talks about some high end industrial processes, like wave soldering – which just looks insane. Whether you’re looking to get started or you’re fairly seasoned, give this one a listen, you’re bound to pick up a few tips.

And the Crafsman Steady Craftin has a new video out about Cold Casting. This is the process where you can make a resin cast look like metal by adding metal filings to the resin mixture. There’s a lot of great tips covered throughout this whole video – how to create a 2 part mold, adding the appropriate channels to your mold to pour the resin, and he also shows some finishing techniques to make your cast look like metal and not just grey plastic. One of my favorite tips here is using Lego bricks to make the walls of your mold box – the build up easily, but don’t bond to the silicone when it cures.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight, Shawn Hymel is kicking off a new series on getting started with the Raspberry Pi Pico. If you missed it, the Pico is a microcontroller from the raspberry pi foundation. The guide begins with setting up Micro Python on the Pico, which is similar to circuit python, but different enough to be significant. This is just the start of an ongoing series for the raspberry Pi Mico, so keep an eye out for more if you’re keen to learn more about this board.

And that is going to do it for this week’s show! Thank you so much for watching and I hope it was useful for you. What skills are you looking to learn this year? Tell us about it down in the comments below – and if you enjoyed the show, give us a thumbs up and sign up for the maker update newsletter so you don’t miss a show. Big thanks to our pals at Digikey for making this show possible, having all the parts and teaching us how to get the most out of them. Take care out there, and we’ll see you soon.