This week on Maker Update: Welding at a comfortable height, label everything incorrectly, a YouTube boombox, screen printing and a Big Mac photo hack.

++Show Notes [Maker Update #219]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Standing Desk Welding Table by Jeremy Fielding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1b0we6HfUo

-=News=-

Fabricating fully functional drones
https://news.mit.edu/2021/fabricating-fully-functional-drones-0208

-=More Projects=-

AI Label Maker by 8 Bits and a Byte
https://www.instructables.com/The-AI-Label-Maker/

Youtube Boombox by the Ruiz Brothers
https://learn.adafruit.com/youtube-radio

Collapsible wooden bowl by 3×3 Customs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-8IpJCV8LU

Small Dust Collection for Small Shops by See Jane Drill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLSD861EisA

Lego CVT by Sariel’s Bricks and Pets
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/05/building-a-continuously-variable-transmission-with-lego/#more-456764

-=Tips & Tools=-

Big Mac Photo Hack by Philippe Echaroux
https://mymodernmet.com/mcdonalds-big-mac-box-photography-hack/?fbclid=IwAR0GfmhEGWcocDCilv2AQklVVQX1ZA–SN1e2Cqn92v6Jj41FhYSmvF4qBk

DIY Copper Plating using a tampon by Laura Kampf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iThTSojG7QA

Screen Printing Basics by Get Hands Dirty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vicNkwvuE80

Argon Case for Raspberry Pi 4 by Jeff Geerling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLBdi8B5Wgk

Top Ten Tools in 2020 by Project Farm
https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/02/06/top-ten-tools-tested-on-project-farm-in-2020/

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

The Great Search: JST Connectors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5XYd0Z0HFw

Transcript

This week on Maker Update: Welding at a comfortable height, label everything incorrectly, A youtube boombox, screen printing and a big mac photo hack.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update! I’m Tyler Winegarner and, lately, I’ve been getting back into one of my longstanding bugbear projects, a motion controlled camera slider. I’m starting to finish up the design and starting to make the parts, and I’m still deciding how I want to program it – but enough about what I’m working on, we’ve got a great show for you, so let’s check out the project of the week.

Sometimes you just want to finish a project, and sometimes, you just need to go full ham on it. Jeremy Fielding tends to do the latter. In his latest project, he’s making a better welding table for his shop. Not only is it bigger and sturdier than his last welding table, but he’s incorporating the advice of his welding teacher, that you’ll weld better when you’re comfortable.

To do this, he’s making the entire table height adjustable. Aluminum extrusion uppers slide into lowers made from steel pipe, while some 3d printed bumpers keep the extrusion from getting jammed up. Linear actuators handle the actual lifting, and its controlled by a 3 position switch. For good measure, there’s casters on the bottom of the legs so he can move it where he needs it. And don’t miss his son’s reaction when he considers leaving the steel unfinished. It’s priceless.

He’s also adding a rotary table to make welds around pipes more consistent. The tricky part here is making  sure that part of the table is grounded when he’s working on it. He uses a sleeve of copper that presses against the base of the rotary table courtesy of a spring. Once he clamps the grounding cable to the sleeve, he’s got a good ground.

Okay I know, Jeremy is a brilliant engineer and a lot of his builds are way out of the reach of a lot of us. But it’s great inspiration when you’re planning out a project to let the featureset creep out a little bit. Don’t just build the thing you need, but build the thing you’ll be excited to use.

There’s a little bit of maker news this week, over at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, they’ve hacked a laser cutter into a machine that can pretty much do it all – and without changing toolheads. It’s still a laser cutter, but it can also perform FDM 3d printing, pick and place components, lay out traces of silver solder and then sinter the solder paste. It’s not much of a looker right now, but as the design progresses, it should look less like a mess of wires. The fact that it fabricates a functional drone reminds me of this old video of the voxel 8 circuit printer.

More projects! Over on Instructables I found this hilarious home organization project by 8 Bits and a Byte. They built an AI and computer vision-powered automatic labeler that uses the raspberry pi camera to snap a photo of the object that needs labeling. 

It then sends the photo off to be identified by DeepAI’s DenseCap API. Now if you’ve ever worked with any computer vision software, you know the accuracy isn’t always great. But the DenseCap API returns a phrase that describes the object, instead of identifying it, and then the most confident phrase is sent off to a thermal printer. The result is an absurdist, abstract descriptor that’s bound to give you a chuckle. It helps that 8 Bits and a Byte has plenty of weird things around that need labeling.

Over on Adafruit I saw this YouTube boombox from the Ruiz brothers. This uses the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Adafruit Brain CraftHat to connect to a handful of Youtube Music streams of your choosing. The Brain Craft Hat is a solderless add-on for the Pi that gives it the perfect array of inputs and outputs for building machine learning  projects, and also the ideal interface for this project. The small IPS display is always right-side-up regardless of what orientation the Pi is in, as is the joystick. And there’s a JST connector for the speaker mounted on the back. Besides being a cool project there’s a ton of useful tips in this that I never knew about, like running your Pi in read-only mode, so your SD Card won’t get corrupted.

Over on youtube I found this video from 3×3 customs on how to make these collapsible wooden bowls. This is kind of like those collapsible camping cups you can find at REI. She’s setting her bandsaw at a slight angle and using it to cut a continuous spiral into a wooden panel. It took a few tries to find the right angle before making some laminate panels for a prettier looking cross section.The design of these bowls is cool enough, but I love the look of the look of the spiralized forms moving about – it’s mesmerizing.

And if you have a small shop and don’t have space for a full dust collection unit, check out this mini dust collector from Leah Bolden of See Jane Drill. If you’re just using a shop vac for cleanup this will save you the headache of needing to constantly replace the filters. The cyclone and bucket collects the sawdust so it doesn’t go into your shop vac. It can be a little inconvenient to have both together, but you can build a cart so they stay together as you move it from tool to tool.

And from Hackaday I found this lego model of a Continuously Variable Transmission by Sariel’s Bricks and Pets. CVTs are found in some smaller vehicles like snowmobiles. I’ve had them described to me, but I never really understood how they worked until watching this video. They work like the pulleys on a drill press that let you adjust the speed. The output cone is tapered one way, and the input cone is tapered the opposite. As the connecting belt slides between them, the mechanical advantage changes. Its a satisfying and educational watch.

Let’s check out some tips and tools before we go. Over on MyModernMet I learned about this photo hack by Phillippe Echaroux (etch a roo). Phillippe was challenged by a friend to make professional looking portraits using his iphone and…  a big mac box. A straw holds the box open and the inside of the box acts as a reflector for a powerful flashlight – and the results are really striking. This isn’t exactly my favorite style of portraiture, but it’s great to be reminded that you can get beautiful results from stuff you were going to throw in the trash.

Over on her channel, Laura Kampf released a video where she’s copper plating the gas tank of her motorcycle with the unlikeliest of tools – a tampon. After stripping off the original paint and polishing the bare metal to a mirror shine, she began electroplating. She uses the tampon, along with a short piece of pipe and some scrap copper, to make a sort of electroplating stylus. It allows her to get into some of the tight crevices and contours of the gas tank. The results speak for themselves.

Cristiana from Get Hands Dirty just released this video on her screen printing technique, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one so thorough. She begins by assembling a screen printing jig. These aren’t necessary, but they make the process a lot easier and more consistent. From there she covers everything you need ot know – preparing your screen, making your artwork, exposing the photo emulsion, screen resolution, it’s all here. Two years ago I used screen printing to make our holiday cards and I think I made every mistake you can possibly make. If I’d seen this video before, it would have saved me a lot of headaches.

There’s a lot of Raspberry Pi cases that you can print, or laser cut, but none of them have the features of the Argon One M2 for the raspberry Pi 4. This video by Jeff Geerling covers all the features – Not only does the aluminum case provide passive cooling by acting like one massive heat spreader, but there’s a daughter card that routs all of the ports to the back of the unit, while also converting the HDMI Micro ports to full size HDMI-A ports. There’s a removable hatch that gives you access to the GPIO pins, and there’s even a power switch on the back. There’s also this USB3 dongle that connects the Pi to an M2 connector at the bottom of the unit – which lets you connect to additional storage that uses this connector. Not every type of M2 storage is supported, Jeff breaks down what works and what doesn’t. 

And The Project Farm youtube channel released this video of the top ten tools they reviewed in 2020. It’s not a collection of the best track saws or drill presses, but the basic stuff you’ll use every day in your shop: Impact driver bits, socket adapters, safety glasses, stuff like that, and they’re all rigorously tested and abused to figure out which is the best. It’s not the sexiest collection of tools, but if you’re looking for basic stuff that’s not gonna let you down, check this video out before shopping.

For his week’s Digikey Spotlight, check out this video from Adafruit about JST connectors. If you work with electronics long enough, you’re bound to encounter JST connectors sooner or later. They’re used to connect batteries, sensors, peripherals, all kinds of stuff. But if you just go looking for JST connectors on Digikey, you’re bound to be overwhelmed with different connector types, pitches, pin counts. This video will help you get your head around it.

And that is gonna do it for this week’s show! Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed it, let us know down in the comments and tell us what kind of projects you’re working on. Hit subscribe, give us a thumbs up, and check out the Maker Update newsletter so you never miss a show. Huge thanks to everyone at DigiKey for giving this show a home, and having all the parts. Take care, and we’ll see you soon.