This week on Maker Update: a 56K warning, a Mangle Rack Clock Movement, telegram notifications for your home, measuring tape tips, metal engraving techniques and getting random numbers from bananas.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.287]++

-=Project of the Week=-

The Internet Time Machine by The Science Elf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OB1g8CUdbA

-=More Projects=-

Lego Mangle Rack Clock by Akiyuki Brick Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUdlSYC1cCE

WhatsApp Notifier for Your Home by GreatScott!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrkAWSemDC8

Random Numbers from Bananas by Valerio Nappi
https://www.valerionappi.it/brng-en/

-=Tips & Tools=-

Measuring Tape Tips by Stumpy Nubs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udd2kcXlB2k

Laser Engraving vs Hand Engraving Metal by Caleb Kraft
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2W95xTFXAA

Humidity Gauge Made of Wood by gardeningjanrichard
https://www.instructables.com/Humidity-Gauge-Made-Out-of-Wood/

Milling Tips with Blondiehacks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8K21GmlPNA

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

How to Test Fuses Without a Multimeter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLnOKFAaJik

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: A 56K warning, A Mangle Rack Clock Movement, telegram notifications for your home, Measuring tape tips, metal engraving techniques and getting random numbers from bananas.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner and I hope you’re doing great. Lately, I’ve been tackling a ton of shop maintenance and organization, and handful of tool upgrades. I hope your projects are on the up & up – we;ve got another great show for you so let’s check out the project of the week.

Have you ever wanted to go back to the bawdy old days of Netscape Navigator, of Altavista… maybe you’re just yearning to Ask Jeeves a burning question. Well now you can courtesy of the Internet Time Machine, by The Science Elf. All you need to do is plug it into your favorite computer, spin the dial, and surf the web like it’s 1998.

The project operates as a black box – literally and figuratively. Inside the stylish ABS project box is a Raspberry Pi 4. The Raspberry Pi handles two significant tasks: first it works as a wifi bridge, which makes it easy for this classic iMac to access modern networks. Secondly, and more interestingly it acts as a web proxy. A web proxy can handle a lot of different functions but simply explained it acts as a middleperson between the web requester and the web server. In this case, it will happily hijack your web request and send it over to the wayback machine.

The wayback machine is a service provided by the Internet Archive that maintains a history of websites – and allows you to shift forward and back in time via its interactive calendar to see how they have evolved over their history. There’s a wonderful web interface, but this project swaps that out for a physical dial that lets you dial in a specific date – there’s even a helpful LCD to let you know where you are in the time stream.

As someone who has been very online for a very long time, I love this project. It’s weird to feel nostalgia for the ugly websites from the late 90’s, but I do. And its tremendous to see snapshots of the internet frozen in time, forever. Not that the internet was necessarily better back then , but it certainly felt wilder. This device might help you capture some of that nostalgia. If you want to build your own, there’s a full github repo down in the description.

Time for more projects, there’s a lot of different clock projects out there, even Lego clocks, but I don;t think I’ve ever heard of a Mangle Clock. This clock by the Akiyuki Brick Channel uses a mangle rack mechanism, which uses this oblong gear pattern to enable this pointer to walk itself around a clock face full of pins. You get to see them solve for the proper number of pins needed for a clock movement, creating the second hand, minute hand and hour hand. As a clock movement, it might be a little distracting, and by distracting, I really mean mesmerizing. Its also worth mentioning that every single part of this clock is made of lego – even the display numbers. Its incredible.

Youtuber Great Scott has a project that could be useful for anyone who lives in an apartment complex. He wants to create a Telegram notifier for his doorbell. Since his doorbell is integrated into the building’s intercom system, he can’t just replace it with a smart doorbell. So, it’s hardware hacking to the rescue! Through a bit of reverse engineering he was able to identify the ring signal pins on the intercom’s PCB. From there it was finding the right combination of services that can receive a signal from an ESP8266 and pass that on to his phone. If you’re not interested in this particular application, you can use it for fast, responsive phone notifications for any hardware input – Ultrasonic sensors, reed switches, button presses – whatever you need.

And finally, Valerio Nappi is generating random numbers from bananas. Getting true random numbers is actually pretty difficult for computer systems – which is why most systems look to some sort of outside source for seed values – the most famous of these is the wall of Lava Lamps at Cloudflare. But Valerio has a different idea – and no, they’re not deriving entropy from banana spots. Instead they’re exploiting the phenomenon that a small percentage of the potassium in bananas is radioactive. He designed a custom PCB with a sensor for that radiation, and a microcontroller that will happily generate random numbers from delicious fruit. There’s a lot of nerdy number theory in the blog post, and hopefully he’ll have a git repo up with his code and designs in the future.

Time for some tools and tips – there’s likely dozens of measuring tape tip videos on YouTube, but this recent one from Stumpy Nubs had a bunch of new ones for me. He shows off the very basics like learning to throw out the tape to save you some extra walking steps. He introduces some non standard tapes like flatback tapes, which help measuring around curves. But the real gold is showing ways the tape can help you do math – like angling it to easily divide a workpiece into equal parts. Or folding it over to make division or subtraction easier. And even using the pythagorean theorem to check for square. There’s a bunch of good stuff in here – check it out.

Caleb Kraft has a great video comparing hand engraving vs. laser engraving. Caleb has been hand engraving for a few years now and working with the Monport Fiber Laser for a few weeks. He covers all the tools you’ll need for each, the costs involved, the process, all the aspects you’ll need to consider. He closes the video with what you probably came to it for: the comparison of the work output. You’ll have to take the info and decide what’s going to work best for you – he doesn’t lead you to easy concussions.

If you were fascinated by the Bi-metal window coverings that Donald was talking about a few weeks ago and wanted to play with this concept, it turns out that it also works in wood. On instructables I found this humidity gauge project by gardeningjanrichard. They’ve cut two thin pieces of the same species of wood, one with the grain and one on the end grain, and then glued them together using epoxy. As the wood draws in moisture from the ambient humidity, the board bends one direction, and as it dries out, it curves the other way. Pretty cool.

And finally we have another fantastic machining tutorial with Qinn from Blondiehacks. In this video she’s making a holder for her dial indicator. Even just the layout process immediately reminds me of a CAD workflow, and seeing the order of operations in making a simple part like this is really wonderful to take in. There’s so much here thats so far beyond my machining skill level, but its nice to think I can take some of it in through osmosis.

For this week’s digikey spotlight, they have a helpful guide on how to test fuses without a multimeter. They cover methods like visual inspection, replacing the fuse, and using a test lamp. Each one has their individual pros and cons, like missing faults in the circuit to giving yourself a shock. It turns out there’s no really good replacement for using the right tools. But they have a list of meters that should fit into any budget.

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show. I hope you enjoyed it! Be sure to give us a thumbs up, leave a comment, and sign up for that maker update email list so you can get this sent straight to you every single week. Big thanks to Digikey for making the whole thing possible, and to you for watching. Take care, we’ll see you soon.