This week on Maker Update, a 15 horsepower 3d print, a solar powered art bot, turning good ideas into great ones, flip top coffee tables, and putting CAD into the Blender.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.282]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Embed Animations in Your 3d Print by Caleb Kraft
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5ix8-bwDS4

-=More Projects=-

CNC Machine for a Magnifying Glass Burner by Cranktown City
https://makezine.com/2022/04/27/this-sun-tracking-cnc-machine-uses-the-sun-instead-of-a-laser/

Lift-up Coffee Table by Get Hands Dirty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W054UOrutYM

I Made a Robot That Picks Locks by Sparks and Code
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLKxT6O0RQk

-=Tips & Tools=-

Turning a Good Idea Into a Product by ILTMS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-uZKGlFZ70

Faux Mud Weathering by Off Earth Cosplay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwZDLBHPi80

CAD in Blender by the CG Essentials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u2mLh9ZmxU

The Winder by Crafsman Steady Craftin’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKx4A6LU3-s

10 Tips to Help You Win at Robot Combat by David Calkins
https://makezine.com/2022/04/30/10-rules-to-win-at-robot-combat/

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Antenna Builder by Taoglas
https://www.digikey.com/en/configurator/taoglas/antenna-builder/

-=Transcript=-

This week on maker update, a 15 horsepower 3d print, A solar powered art bot, Turning good ideas into great ones, flip top coffee tables, and putting CAD into the Blender.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner and I hope you’re doing great. I hope the springtime weather is bringing you up, and the pollen and the allergies aren’t bringing you down. We’ve got a great show for you, so let’s check out the project of the week.

It could be that you have never considered the possibility of telling a story using 3d printing – I know I never have. Or maybe you’ve thought about using 3d printing to make a zoetrope, or a picture scroll, or something similar. But Caleb Kraft has done something completely different, and embedded an animation directly into the layer lines of his 3d prints. You can’t see it when the print is complete, you can only see it by watching the timelapse of the 3d print being made. Its a completely wild and creative idea, and I love it.

To accomplish this, you need 2 models – one that will be the exterior form of your print, and another that contains all of the frames of your animation, stacked vertically. The model with the animation frames forms a negative space within the outer print, and when you make a time lapse of the 3d print being made, you will see all of the animation frames played back in order.

You create your animation frames by tracing them in vector design software like Inkscape. You can then take all of those frames and extrude them into a stack of thin but solid layers. There’s some simple math to be done to determine how thick each animation layer should be. Since every layer in your print is a frame of video in the time lapse, the extrusion should be as thick as double your layer height – that way you get a new frame of animation every other frame of video. I’m probably making it sound more complex than it actually is – trust me, its pretty simple.

From there its just a few tweaks in your slicer to make sure you’re getting the clearest image. Caleb found it best to use an infill pattern that was the same every layer so it wouldn’t be distracting – and that if he could combine the models in Prusa Slicer, he could avoid getting infill within the animation frames. Maybe this isn’t the most groundbreaking invention any maker has made before, or even the wildest youtube video, but its a clever idea for taking two separate methods of creative expression and mashing them together.

More projects! Maybe it’s just me but taking something really dangerous, and then giving control of it to a robot is just one of those uniquely makery things. Cranktown City is doing…. Something like that by making a solar powered laser engraver using a cnc gantry and a magnifying glass.

Its best to think of the machine in two separate parts – there’s your standard X/Y gantry for the CNC, but there’s also a whole pan / tilt mechanism to make sure the machine stays aligned to the sun. I love the clever and simple sun alignment sensor – its a disc of steel separated into four quadrants – and each quadrant has a photo resistor. If any of the photo resistors falls into shade, it knows its no longer in alignment with the sun, and then moves until it is. The other thing I love about this project is just watching him kludge together a CNC Gantry. You would think you’d need more precision than this – or maybe he’s being more precise than he’s letting on, but its just fun to see the whole thing come together – Stick around to the end though, just to see the machine in action.

Cristiana from Get Hands Dirty is making this super functional coffee table for her Tiny Apartment build. The whole table top lifts up to something close to desk height, which is perfect for doing computer work, or eating meals, or whatever else, and when the tabletop is down, the whole unit doubles as storage for the murphy style bed. One detail I thought was really clever is this cork strip on the table top. This will function as a bumper for for the bed when its folded down, to reserve the table surface. Like with any of Cristiana’s builds, this video is just full of great little tips for making super precise, really clean looking woodworking designs.

And on Youtube I learned this lock picking robot by Sparks and Code. If you’ve ever learned to pick locks before, you know that there’s some complicated movements for a robot to pull off. You’ve got to apply torque to the lock cylinder while aligning the pins. Both parts of the robot use load cells to determine how much torque to apply, and how much force the lock is giving back. Luckily, he realized that for the locks he’s trying to pick, he can get away with a simple raking motion to set the pins. Maybe that’s cheating, but this armature is a fantastic piece of engineering, and should support more advanced code later to pick more complex locks.

Time for some Tips and Tools, a few years ago, Bob from I lIke to Make Stuff squadded up with Evan and Katelyn to build this ping pong table with its own electronic scoring system. These days Bob has another, commercial table, and he wants the same scoring system. So he’s taking this as an opportunity to revisit the project and re design it so it can work on any table, and while he’s at it, maybe he could also make it into a sellable product.

Not that building projects is easy, but its so much easier when you know that you’re the only one who has to live with it. Making a product that can be easily installed by anyone, look tidy and professional, and still be relatively easy to manufacture is not a simple task. Bob talks about all the considerations they came across, like wiring connectors, adhesives, the lot. Its a completely different way of thinking about a project, and there’s a lot of great lessons in here.

Over at Off-Earth Cosplay I found this great tip for making dirty, muddy weathering for replica props and armor. There are plenty of ready made products to help you get this done, but they’re expensive. His tip involves using these pastels. You break them down, add a little bit of water and now you have a dirty muddy paste that you can brush on, and wipe off the excess. You can come back with a lighter color for a highlight pass for more details, and a heat gun can help speed up the drying process. The finished result looks great, and should help make your props look more worn and weathered.

Blender, the free and open source 3d design software has been loved by 3d printing enthusiasts and artists for a good long time now, but its never been that useful for the folks who use 3d printing for mechanical design – until now. maybe. There’s a new plugin that allows you to do sketch-based, constrained mechanical drawings and then expand them into 3d shapes. This video gives you just a taste of what you can do in this plugin, and these new features are still in their early days. Surely there’s more to come later.

The Crafsman Steady Craftin just released this video about a tool used by animators called the Winder. If you look at this thing, its pretty simple, but you might already be wondering how you lived without one – there’s a heavy base and a pair of toothed rails – and in the middle is a connector that lets you move an armature around on two individual axes. He shows how this can be immediately useful for stop motion animation, but it seems like you can use this for all kinds of stuff – as a referencing tool, or a really precise third hand, or just using it the way the creators intended. Of course, if you follow the links you might be as surprised as I was on the price for one of these things, but I can imagine you could probably build something similar with some 3d printed parts and robot components.

Speaking of robots, over on Make: magazine I found this article by David Calkins with ten tips on how to win at Robot Combat. There’s some obvious stuff in here, like finishing your robot before you get to the competition – or at least it seems obvious until you’re crunching to finish it before packing up for the competition. But there’s lots of other great, tough love tips in here like making sure your robot can take a few heavy hits from a sledgehammer – or making sure you know how to drive it after you’ve lost a wheel or two, or making sure you’ve tested your weapon on something so you know what happens when it hits something. There’s a lot of great advice from someone who has won and lost plenty of matches.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight, we’ve got another one of those wonderful web tools that you can only find on the Digikey Website – this is the Antenna builder, presented by Taoglas. If you’ve got a wireless project and want to get the best performance for it, you’re probably going to want a better antenna than what’s on the board. Not only does the tool make it easy to browse all of the antennas sold by Digikey, but quickly pares down your search based on how the antenna is mounted, the frequencies it works with, connection type, even the color. Check it out.

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show! I hope you enjoyed it. I can’t stop thinking about the amount of work it takes to take a project and turn it into a product. I try to do some of that before publishing a project since someone else might not want to forgive some shortcuts that I took, but this is on a whole other level. Anyway give us a thumbs up if you like, leave a comment – sign up for the maker update email to make sure these keep coming to you, Big thanks to Digikey Electronics, and you for watching. Take care, we’ll see you soon.