This week on Maker Update, a split-flap clock for one-eyed jacks, a rotisserie for your car, Jimmy Diresta’s return to television, puzzle boxes, sugar printers, and a leg-mounted dual-shock for accessible gaming.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 269]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Casino Clock by Shinsaku Hiura
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRZh4gPptd4

-=News=-

Making Fun on Netflix March 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUkKSYcWvxI

-=More Projects=-

Puzzle Box by Progress
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ewb5g7V3EM

Car Rotisserie by I Like to Make Stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUVFici8lpY

One-Handed PlayStation Controllers by Akaki Kuumeri
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIqHEktjqu4

-=Tips & Tools=-

Five Failed 3d Printing Concepts by Maker’s Muse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQQg1uz-wI

A Better Method for Soldering Wires by Richard Wagner
https://www.instructables.com/Soldering-Wires-Heres-a-Better-Way/

Boxes.py by Florian Festi
https://www.festi.info/boxes.py/

Portable Laser Cutter Review by Tested
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHCxslQoWQQ

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

First Look: PTC Resettable Fuses
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzaogCsF-Ow

-=Transcript=-

This week on maker update: A split-flap for one-eyed jacks, a rotisserie for your car, Jimmy Diresta’s return to television, puzzle boxes, sugar printers, and a leg-mounted dualshock for accessible gaming.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner, I hope you’ve been doing great. We’ve got another great show for you so let’s check out the project of the week.

Clocks seem to be one of the one of the most commonly tackled projects by all walks of makers, from mechanical to electronic, and nearly every kind of design in between. It’s one of those creative exercises where you don’t need to worry about the function of the project, which frees up your creativity to express how you want to show the passage of time. Split flap displays have been used in clock displays since the 70’s but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that uses playing cards.

That’s exactly the idea behind the Casino’Clock by Shinsaku Hiura. It displays the current time on an array of three playing cards. Each digit of the clock is represented by the value of the card – with Jacks for 11, Queens for 12 and the Joker is zero. I guess because only the top part of the flap is needed for the display, its technically not a split flap display, just a flap display?

Anyhow, the rotors and hinges are all 3d printed, and the cards are held in place by this wavy friction fit clamp. The motor for each rotor is one of these small 5 volt stepper motors. When the clock updates, the sound made by the flaps advancing is a really soothing mechanical sound. Any wifi-connected microcontroller should work as long as it has at least 12 GPIO pins, but Shinsaku used the m5stamp c3, which is a risc-v microcontroller featuring an esp-32 wireless chip.

Shinsaku provides all the 3d printing files for the design on his thingiverse page as well as the arduino code and the complete bill of materials for you to build your own. If you drill down onto his youtube channel, you’ll find that this isn’t his first clock, either. There’s a ton of other great designs for timekeeping projects, if you’re looking for more inspiration.

Time for some news, a few days ago Netflix dropped the trailer for Making Fun. This is a reality-style TV show hitting the streaming service in March, and its starring a number of familiar faces. Jimmy Diresta is leading a team of makers including Paul Jackman, Izzy Swan, Pat Lap and John Graziano, and their challenge is to build inventions dreamed up by shark-tank-style panel of kids. It sounds a little bit like the YouTube channel Kids Invent Stuff, but it sounds like they’re using the crazy ideas as a blank hall pass to make stuff that has no practical use, other than to be awesome and deliver a laugh. It looks like a great watch, and its cool to see all of these folks end up on a show like this.

More projects, this one is from a little over a year ago, but I was blown away by the design of this wooden puzzle box by Progress. This small box is made of ¾” baltic birch plywood. What’s unique about it is the channels that have been drilled into the walls of the box that allow a tiny neodymium magnet to slide around. That magnet is what disengages the latch of the box’s lid, and only when its in a particular position. You solve the puzzle by rolling the box in a particular sequence of rotations to move the magnet into its unlocked position. Its a really clever design, and it forces me to think of plywood as a 3 dimensional material instead of just a sheet good.

Bob Clagett of I Like to Make Stuff has built a rotisserie, for his car. I’m not very familiar with the tools used in auto body restoration, so to me that sounds like an insane sentence, but these are actually pretty common. They’re tools used to rotate the body of the car to make it easier to work on the roof or undercarriage. The trick is to build them so they’re strong enough to support the weight of the car, but also be able to lift the car as close as possible to the car body’s center of mass so it can be rotated easily and without becoming a hazard. Its great to see Bob working on a completely different scale than what he’s comfortable with, and still end up with a great result.

We’ve featured a handful of Akaki Kuumeri’s 3d printed controller designs before, but this is something different. This is a one-handed adapter for Playstation 4 and 5 controllers to make them more accessible. The alternate analog stick is controlled by moving the entire controller while this leg band secures it to your leg. There’s a set of buttons that work through linkages to press the buttons on the opposite side, and the triggers work in a similar fashion.

He originally designed the adapter for the Playstation 5 controller, but since those are still fairly scarce, he was able to refine the design for the dualshock 4. There’s versions of the adapter for both left-and right handed play, and I love these labels he made for the buttons, just using extra pieces of filament. Akaki shares all of his files on his Prusa Printers page, or if you don’t have access to a 3d printer, The Controller Project charity can help connect you with someone to print one for you.

Time for some tips and tools, Angus from Makers Muse has a video of five designs along the evolutionary path to modern 3d printing that were all dead ends. There’s a lot of designs in here that if you squint, look like modern 3d printers like the RepRap Darwin, or the pint-sized Reprap Tantillus. But then there’s completely wild stuff like CandyFab from Evil Mad Scientist, which uses a heat gun to melt sugar, similar to Selective Laser Sintering. Or the kinematic designs of Nicholas Seward, which is unlike anything out there today. It’s a great look at some of the ambitious designs that didn’t make the cut, but still moved 3d printing technology forward all the same.

On Instructables I found this tip from Richard Wagner as an alternative way of soldering wires to perfboard that doesn’t even require the use of a third hand tool. The trick is to melt a length of solder to the solder pabs, but leave a length of unmelted solder sticking out of it. When you’re ready to solder the wires, you touch the wire to the solder pool, heat it up with your iron, and it should wick into the wire, creating your joint. With a little bit of practice you can estimate how much solder you’ll need for your joint, but this looks like an easier way to make these connections.

We’ve been fans of makercase.com for a while for making parametric, laser cut box designs, but I just discovered Boxes.py by Florian Festi. This is a whole collection of parametric design generators including boxes, enclosures, hinged designs, tool holders, shelves, and a whole lot more. Each design has a number of settable parameters, different allowances for material thickness, and laser kerf. If you have access to a laser cutter, check it out.

Speaking of laser cutters, on Tested, Norm and Jen Schachter have a video up sharing their initial thoughts on the Rendyr Optic laser cutter. This is a pretty new design for diode lasers, attempting to make laser cutting a little more accessible for casual users. When not in use the axes of the gantry fold and nest into one another for storage, the laser head has a pair of diode lasers that are working together for more power, and it even has its own internal fume extraction and filtration system. This is an early prototype of the laser cutter and the Rendyr Optic is presently running as a kickstarter campaign, so everything could still change, but its a great video to watch if you’re looking into a machine like this – just to have an idea of what kind of performance you can expect.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight, we’ve got a video in their First Look series about Low Profile, PTC Resettable Fuses. Just like regular fuses, these can be used to protect your circuits from conditions like overheating and short circuits. When the component gets too hot from any of these conditions, the carbon matrix responsible for passing the current breaks, opening the circuit. But when the fuse returns to room temperature, the carbon matrix re-forms and current can flow through it again. Its a cool trick and might be a good feature for a project you’re working on.

Alright and that is going to do it for his week’s show! I hope you enjoyed it – if you did give us a thumbs up, leave us a comment, tell us about your weirdest idea for a timekeeping device. As always you can sign up for the Maker Update email list to get the show delivered hot and fresh every single week. Big thanks as always to DigiKey electronics for making this show possible, and to you for watching. Take care, and I’ll see you soon.