This week on Maker Update, a coin-op pat on the back, self-driving germicide, coffee table control, a DIY thermometer, golf cart conversion, missing cheese, and Hot Wheels for the apocalypse.

++Show Notes [Maker Update #172]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Simone Giertz built herself a proud parent
https://youtu.be/M1B3gATS0GE

-=News=-

Degerminator
https://youtu.be/jwyz0nGfGN0

VK-01 Offworld Bartender Updates
https://www.facebook.com/vk01robot/

-=More Projects=-

Coffee Table by Love Hulten
http://www.lovehulten.com/coffeetable.html

No-contact IR Thermometer by Tyler Winegarner
https://www.instructables.com/id/No-contact-IR-Thermometer/

EZGO Sport Golf Cart Conversion By rtkerth
https://www.instructables.com/id/EZGO-Sport/

Mac N’ Cheese By gzumwalt
https://www.instructables.com/id/Mac-N-Cheese/

-=Tips=-

DIY Post-Apocalyptic HOT WHEELS by The CrafsMan
https://youtu.be/Nm7SIpaaU24

Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales – Issue #43
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/garethbranwyn/issues/gareth-s-tips-tools-and-shop-tales-issue-43-238810

Jamie’s Toolkit
https://youtu.be/Xq7HtTmUMS0

Adam Savage’s One Day Builds: How To Build a Box!
https://www.tested.com/art/makers/906205-adam-savages-one-day-builds-how-build-box/

Drop-in Auto-darkening Welding Helmet Lens by Sean Michael Ragan
https://youtu.be/-oI7OtaX9bY

Colin Furze’s workshop tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqTDfpIpub4

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

What is an Amp Hour?
https://youtu.be/6dbz7a85RoM

Battery Life Online Calculator
https://www.digikey.com/en/resources/conversion-calculators/conversion-calculator-battery-life

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, a pat on the back, self-driving germicide, coffee table control, a DIY thermometer, golf cart conversion, missing cheese, and Hot Wheels for the apocalypse.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome to another Maker Update. I hope you’re all doing as well as you can. For me, making this show is a great distraction. I hope you have some useful distractions too. There are some cool projects for me to catch you up on, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

Simone Giertz has been sheltering in place, feeling the need for a little parental affection and approval. So, of course, she built a robot.

This coin-operated, laser-cut plywood torso has an arm that extends out for a gentle pat on the shoulder. A speaker inside says, “I’m proud of you son”, which for me puts this on the level of interactive artwork.

Making the whole thing work is an Arduino with an Adafruit Music Maker shield on top to handle the audio playback. A coin-acceptor triggers the Arduino, plays the audio, and runs a servo back and forth to make the arm drop.

The real master stroke here is that she enlisted Adam Savage to record the voice of the robot. For me 25 cents is a small price to pay for the virtual approval of everyone’s maker mentor.

Now for some news. I saw an interesting video out of the University of Nevada’s Autonomous robot Lab. It’s a self-driving robot with a UV germicidal lamp attached to it.

The idea is that a hospital or school could have something like this roam the hallways at night and provide an extra layer of disinfection.

The guidance is helped by an onboard Lidar sensor. It moves super slow. This video is sped up double speed. But I like it. It’s like a viral roomba.

Some news from me. Sometimes you like hearing about the projects I’m working on. I’ve been making some great progress on my cocktail robot. It’s become way more involved than I ever thought it would be.

There are three Arduino circuits and two Raspberry Pi boards. This week I finally moved all the breadboard designs over to Perma-Proto boards. I’m also using my cardboard enclosure mockup as a template for a plywood prototype. It feels like progress, but I still can’t see the end of the tunnel. If your curious to see more updates, you can keep up with things over on the Facebook page I made for it.

If you want to see what a beautiful project enclosure looks like, check out this arcade controller coffee table by Love Hulten.

Crafted out of American walnut and brass hardware, the coffee table alone is a thing of beauty. But then you pull on the handles to reveal a 2-player arcade controller — only it’s missing the joysticks. Oh wait, the drawer handles are the joysticks!

It’s too much, I can’t handle how cool this is. And if you’re new to Love’s work, you owe it yourself to spend the next hour drooling over all his other builds. It’s just unrelenting design genius.

Tyler Winegarner, Maker Project Lab’s in-house genius and video crew has a new Instructable up on how to make this laser cut no-contact IR thermometer.

With off-the-shelf thermometers in short supply now, an alternative like this can come in handy. It’s based around an Arduino Nano and a MLX90614 thermal sensor. You press a button to take a reading, and an OLED screen tells you what you’re dealing with.

I especially like that Tyler got the enclosure design down to a single sheet of 6×8 inch 3mm thick Baltic Birch. Great project.

Also on Instructables rtkerth shows off how he converted his old EZGO golf cart into a little sporty electric car.

A lot of it comes down to creating a new custom fiberglass hood that extends down in front for a more traditional car shape. But he also extended and created a custom fiberglass trunk, shortened the steering column, lowered the seats, and added lots of little touches like the windshields and side view mirrors. This thing looks sweet!

Greg Zumwalt is back with another 3D printed Automaton. This one is called Mac N’ Cheese.

A cheese inspector sits down and reveals the block of cheese he’s about to enjoy. But the next time he picks up the lid a mouse has consumed everything, his eye bulge out and his jaw drops.

Not only is it a clever trick, but the little detailed mechanical elements controlling his eye and jaw movements really take this thing to another level.

In typical Greg Zumwalt syle, nearly everything you need here is 3D printed, but you will need a button, a limit switch, a battery holder, a gear motor, and some magnets.

Now for some tips and tools. In his latest video The Crafsman demonstrates a number of techniques for transforming your Hot Wheels or Matchbox toy cars into miniature post-apocalyptic rides, perfect for playing Gaslands or just for admiring.

Even if you have no interest in giving toy cars the Mad Max treatment, this covers an incredible number of model making and weathering techniques in a short and entertaining video.

Also, as someone who doesn’t do yoga or meditation, 23 and a half minutes of listening to Crafsman is the closest I’ve come to spa retreat. This channel is my happy place.

Through Gareth Branwyn’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales newsletter, I found this throwback video of Mythbuster’s Jamie Hyneman showing off the tools that he keeps in his personal toolkit. It’s an impressively thorough kit, full of a lot of tools you’d expect, but plenty of unexpected gems too.

To pair it up for old time’s sake, check out this new One Day Build video by Adam Savage showing how he made a box for these replica Apollo astronaut gloves.

Adam confesses that most Tested videos aren’t really meant to be a How-To, so much as a “what happened?” But in this case Adam really goes step by step through his process of sketching, sizing, cutting and finishing a box.

As soon as I finished this, I was inspired to go out and work on my cocktail robot enclosure. So hopefully there’s some inspiring mojo in there for you too. It’s also just nice to see Adam work on something so fundamental, instead of some out-there cosplay or contraption that’s way beyond my skill set. Highly recommended.

On the Cool Tools channel, Sean Michael Ragan demonstrates a drop-in auto-darkening lens for welding helmets. If you have an old welding helmet you’re attached to, this is a quick and easy upgrade that should make it much easier to see what you’re doing.

Finally, hot on the heels of his Social Distance Bicycle, Colin Furze has a new video out that walks you through his tiny workshop. It’s an incredible example of making the most out of a small space. But it’s also a real bummer for anyone who feels like the only thing holding you back is a bigger garage.

Every one of it’s 26 minutes is a treat, and I learned about at least 10 different tools I’d never heard of before. Mostly metal fabrication stuff.

Also, hopefully by the time you see this Colin will have pulled past 10 million subscribers on YouTube, so be sure to give him a congratulations.

For this week’s Digi-Key Spotlight, check out a new video they have that breaks down what an amp-hour is and how it relates to battery life. It also showcases a handy online calculator tool from their website that I didn’t know they had. There’s all kinds of online conversion tools hosted on Digi-Key, hidden away up in the tools menu.

So check out the video, and next time you’re on the Digi-Key site, poke around in the tools menu and see if you find something useful.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up, and leave a comment. A lot of enclosure stuff in this episode, so maybe let know the last time you saw an enclosure that blew you away.

A big thanks to my patrons on Patreon and to Digi-Key electronics for making this show possible. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next week.