This week on Maker Update: wood that you can see through, 3d printing at warp speed, doorbells that shout at your neighbors, plastic milkshakes, camp tables and maybe the world’s worst drawbot.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 239]++

-=Project of the Week=-

The Science of Making Clear Wood by Xyla Foxlin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qS9AKzXYOY

-=News=-

Ender 7 250 mm/s Printing
https://youtu.be/pEKbWEABop0

-=More Projects=-

Frightening Doorbell by Esser50K
https://youtu.be/hId3HtBwPKo

Collapsible Table by Laura Kampf
https://youtu.be/XXSwTssXQ-c

Pen Wiggler by Scanlime
https://youtu.be/3a4-ZxISiRM

Low Cost DIY Spectrometer by Technovation
https://www.instructables.com/DIY-Low-Cost-Spectrometer/

-=Tips & Tools=-

Easy Upcycling of Failed Prints by Blorgggg
https://www.instructables.com/Plastic-to-Pride-Flag-Easy-Upcycling/

6 Jigs to Improve Your Electric Hand Planer by JSK-Koubou
https://youtu.be/8XC2WYFhlvE

Scoppy, Pico Based Oscilloscope by fhdm-dev
https://github.com/fhdm-dev/scoppy

How to Make Apple Boxes by Tyler Winegarner
https://youtu.be/7r0ebHiU1OM

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Hardware Design for the RasPi Pico
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcwvuwetgEQ

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: wood that you can see through, 3d printing at warp speed, Doorbells that shout at your neighbors, Plastic milkshakes, camp tables and maybe the world’s worst drawbot.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update, I’m Tyler Winegarner and I hope you’re all doing well, and staying cool! Lately the weather has been perfect for spending time down in my basement workshop as a way to stay out of the heat. We’ve got another great show for you so let’s check out the project of the week.

As humans, one of our primary senses is the sense of sight. So it makes sense that we love to to make things transparent, so we can see through them: Monitors, Power tools, Face Masks, Aluminum, and now, Wood. In Xyla Foxlin’s latest video, she’s going through the process of making wood transparent – it sounds like mad science, and let’s be clear, it kinda is.

There have already been a few videos about this process already, but in Xyla’s, you get to see the full trial and error process and learn all of the science behind how wood can become transparent. I’m no chemist but I’ll do my best to explain it: By soaking the wood in Sodium Peroxide, you can break all of the chemical bonds that attach the chromophore (which is what gives the wood its color) from the rest of the lignin molecule.

But you still need to get those chromophores out of the wood. To do that, she subjects the wood to a chemical bath of ethanol and solvents, and this is one of the places where she gets stuck – originally she uses Toluene, which just doesn’t get the job done. What she really needs to use is Xylene, which can no longer be purchased where she lives in California. Lucky for her she meets her neighbor who is a woodworker who has a vintage can of Xylene kicking around his shop.

The final step is to replace the chromophores that have been stripped out of the wood with resin, which stabilizes the wood and has a refractive index similar to cellulose. As you’d imagine this introduces even more frustrations related to curing, vacuum chambers and the excitement of implosions. This is a fun, frustrating and enlightening video with a great cast of guest characters, and a fun watch. As for the utility of transparent wood, I can see it being a beautiful material for making lighting fixtures, but its a heck of a journey to get there.

Now for the news, last week Donald mentioned the Prusa SL1S high-speed SLA printer. Hot on its heels comes the announcement of the Ender-7 FDM printer from Creality, that boasts print speeds of up to 250 mm/s. To do this, they’re using linear rails for higher accuracy, Along with a high-power hotend and high torque extruder motor so the material flow can keep up with print speeds. There’s also a couple of nice new details that refine the fit and finish of the machine. The Ender-7 is available now for $699.

More projects! Via the /r/maker subreddit I discovered this video from Esser50K about their quest to build a custom smart doorbell with heaping doses of unnecessary sass. Unsatisfied with the current offerings of commercial smart doorbells he set out to build his own powered by a raspberry pi – with an added camera, motion sensors, microphone and RGB lighting. He also discovered some interesting quirks about human nature through this project – like how humans just aren’t satisfied with a doorbell unless there’s a button – and they’ll press on anything that looks like one to activate it.

Over on YouTube I saw this new video from Laura Kampf where she’s trying again to crack a classic problem for her. Can you build a camping table that is collapsible, stable, and looks good? It seems like these three elements form an impossible triangle where you can achieve two of these goals, but never all three. This time around she’s designed this elegant slide-locking mechanism for detachable legs, that slide into the body of the table for storage. Its definitely collapsible, and it looks great. But the stability? Well lets just assume we’ll be seeing more videos from her on this subject. Still, it’s a great video about relentlessly tackling a problem.

Micah from ScanLime might have created what is one of the world’s worst drawbots, on purpose. Called the pen wiggler, this uses a carriage that holds the pen upright and moves it around using a trio of vibration motors. The surface of the drawbot is a digitizing tablet that sends data on the pen’s position back to the controlling Raspberry Pi. Over the course of the video there’s a ton of experimentation with different armatures and interfaces for the vibration motors, from flexible printed parts to paper to paper clips and toothbrush bristles – and a ton of satisfying audio feedback. In the end, I love the frenetic scribbling style that it produces.

Finally, on instructables I found this guide for making a super cheap Spectrometer. Spectrometers are used to break apart the component colors of a light source to better determine how the light is created – its a key component in astrophysics. The light is shined through a thin vertical slit, into a light-tight box and then diffracted though the surface of a compact disc before being recorded by the sensor of a webcam. The resulting spectrum is then analyzed by a piece of software written in python. This is the sort of project that could be a really valuable and low cost teaching tool in any physics classroom.

Time for some tips and tools, also on Instructables I found this guide for creatively reusing your failed 3d prints by Blorgggg. He begins by showing you how to shred your plastic parts using a household blender. The key here is to add a liquid – either water or alcohol – to the mix. It helps the blender do its job and prevents overheating. He then uses a panini press to flatten the plastic particles into flat sheets, which can then be cut on a laser cutter or machined on a CNC router into various designs. It’s a cool process with a colorful outcome.

On youtube I found this video from JSK-Koubou about six jigs you can use to improve your electric hand plane. These range from leveling jigs to turning the whole thing into a mini benchtop planer or jointer. All of the designs are made from plywood and can be made using hand tools, though I’m sure they’d be made fine on a CNC as well. For me this video makes me want to take a look at all of my hand tools and wonder if they could be turned into mini benchtop versions. The designs for these jigs aren’t free, but he sells them in his online shop for just a few bucks each.

From Hackaday I learned about Scoppy, a project on Github that uses the Raspberry Pi Pico and an Android app to make a pretty functional Oscilloscope. There’s really not much to do here – just download the firmware to your pico, connect the pico to your phone via a USB-OTG cable, and start scoping. As someone who has never been sure if I needed an oscilloscope, this is a miniscule barrier to entry, and this could also make for a great addition to your portable electronics kit.

And finally on the Cool Tools channel there’s a video from me about how to build apple boxes. Apple boxes are sturdy enclosed boxes from the world of filmmaking usually used to give actors a height boost, but they’re also great pieces of shop furniture. You can use them as a tool stand, a seat, or just to reach the top of a tall shelf. I know plywood is still expensive, but you can make a full sized apple box from a 2×4’ sheet of half inch plywood. Linked in the video is a full cut list and plans for the build.

For this week’s Digikey spotlight, Shawn Hymel has a lengthy video about how to design custom PCBs for the RP2040 chip from the Raspberry Pi Pico. If you’re not happy with the Picos form factor and would rather roll your own board for a project, this is the perfect guide. It’s not a complete step-by-step on how to use KiCad for board designs, but he has a whole other video series on that topic. He goes from board design to verifying, then placing the components by hand and soldering in his DIY reflow oven – and then reworking to fix any solder bridges.

And that is going to do it for this week’s show! I don’t know about you but I can’t stop thinking about those hand planer jigs. I’ve got a cheap handheld belt sander that I’ve always wanted to turn it into a mini benchtop version – maybe I’ll do that soon. In the meantime thank you so much for watching, if you dug the show give us a thumbs up, hit subscribe and sign up for the maker update email list so you never miss a show. Big thanks as always to Digikey for having all the parts, and making this show possible. Donald is taking a quick break so I’ll be back again with you next week, but don’t worry, he’ll be back soon. Take care.