This week on Maker Update: cutting your lawn with lasers, a cyberpunk PC case, making 3d prints look like metal, a kumiko canoe paddle, cross infill, and getting n00ds from Adafruit.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 299]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Cutting Grass with a Laser by rctestflight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTPHsouuGq4

-=More Projects=-

Cyberpunk PC Case by Nerdforge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42MO6Sj210g

Kumiko Canoe Paddle by Make With Miles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik-D7uMC3fQ

Halloween Prop Makeover by Wicked Makers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIxv03FK0AU

-=Tips & Tools=-

NOODS by Adafruit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzVV738YoCw

T-Display S3 by Volos Projects
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8THAc1sMww

Make 3d prints look like metal by ILTMS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5VvQHERWlI

Cross Infill in Cura by Lost In Tech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA4p_H0xl3A

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

How to calculate 555 timer duration & frequency
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPJqQACKNS0

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: Cutting your lawn with lasers, a cyberpunk PC case, making 3d prints that look like metal, a kumiko canoe paddle, cross infill, and getting n00ds from Adafruit.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update – the show we keep you up to date on all the cool stuff people are making. I’m Tyler Winegarner, and I hope you’re all doing great. We’ve got a fantastic show for you that’s full of great projects, so let’s check out the project of the week.

Having a yard is great – but taking care of them is a lot of hard work – and it would be so much easier if a machine did it for you. And I know you can get a roomba-style robot mower, and those are great, but you know what they don’t have? Lasers.

Which is why Daniel from rctestflight built a laser powered mower. By attaching a 40 watt diode laser to a 3d printed panning mechanism, he’s able to very slowly, but very precisely cut his lawn down to an impossibly uniform height. A camera makes the focal point considerably longer, so it can cut over a broader range of distances. As the laser sweeps back and forth, it trims down every single blade of grass in its path to the exact same height.

If one laser can work this well, then it stands to reason that twenty four lasers would work even better, right? Daniel swapped out the 40 watt laser for this laser array and focused it using these massive lenses – incredibly dangerous, but also incredibly cool looking. The biggest problem with the laser mower is that the cut grass tends to fall down into the area that was already cut, creating more work for the laser.

Since the light falloff decreases the power of the laser over distance, the last step is to attach the laser to a mobile rover – so it can drive around his yard, maximizing its cut efficiency. This whole thing is really dangerous, and not very practical. But it’s also incredibly satisfying to see the grass cut all perfectly level. Fun stuff.

Martina from The Nerd Forge shares with us a recent commission of hers – building a cyberpunk cityscape PC case to be completed in just two weeks. And that’s not the only challenge – it needs to survive the trip to its recipient, and it still needs to be a functional PC case. It starts with a sidewalk along the base made from EVA foam, and then her lasercutter comes in handy to make all the elements and details for the buildings and storefronts from cardboard. She’s using the full arsenal of crafting tricks, like harvesting greeblies, adding pipe and wire details, and reusing materials like food containers.

One of my favorite techniques she shows is how she made these posters and advertisements. To build up an appropriate richness of color that doesn’t get washed out when illuminated from behind, she’s stacked three layers of printed transparency on top of a diffusion layer, and it looks fantastic. She’s able to use the power directly from the computer’s power supply to power all of the different lights she’s using to make the cityscape look genuinely cyberpunk. Its an incredible build that’s full of tiny details to get lost in, and it looks gorgeous.

Miles of Make With Miles wants to build a gift for one of his oldest friends – a canoe paddle. But not just any paddle, but one with a kumiko pattern set into the blade. It starts straightforward enough – well, aside from the blade of the paddle being hollow. And you also get to see a variety of jigs used to cut all of the kumiko infill pieces the same size. I also appreciated Miles using one of my favorite tips for the epoxy pour – making the mold box out of corrugated plastic signs. He also shares some great tips on how you can rescue an epoxy pour that’s full of bubbles. After all the work, the paddle is definitely seaworthy, and doesn’t look like anything else out there.

With halloween less than two months away, its a great time to start working on some spooky decorations. Wicked Makers have a tutorial on how to turn an old book into a creepy spellbook with an animated eye. The eye animation comes from a retired smartphone with a circular lens over the front to add more depth – they cut a hole in the cover of the book, and a cavity in the pages to accommodate the phone, and its already turning into a good look. Some air-dry clay is used to shape the eyelid details and some veins are made using beads of hot glue. Modpodge and crepe paper are used to give the book a worn, leathery texture before it gets painted – then they add some finishing details and hardware.

Time for some tips and tools, in Martina’s PC build, you might have caught this super bright, super flexible lighting element. These are a new product sold by adafruit called n00ds. These are strings of LED lighting and covered in silicone. They only require 3v of power, and it looks like they can be bent as much as you like as long as you’re not pinching them, and they can be had in a handful of different colors. These look like a super fun and versatile way to add more glow to your projects.

From Volos projects we have a demo of the Lily GO T-Display S3. This is an ESP-32 based board with a 1.9 inch color LCD bolted right onto it. There’s connection points for an antenna to increase the wireless performance, and a terminal to connect a lipo battery. There’s even a connector for the grove ecosystem of sensors and accessories. If you’re looking for a wireless dev board with all the bells and whistles, this one looks like it might be the perfect fit. He includes a link to purchase the board for around $20.

Bob from I Like to Make Stuff has a guide on how to make 3d prints look like metal. He’s trying three different approaches here – the first is just to print the part in a metallic filament. For the next one he’s doing the standard print finishing techniques – sanding the part smooth, then priming it, and painting it with a chrome spray paint. The last, and most expensive one gets a glossy black undercoat before being painted with all-clad chrome lacquer. He finishes with a comparison of all three props – there’s definitely a clear winner, so you are getting what you paid for, but its also great to see all the different tradeoffs from various techniques.

And finally, Lost in Tech offers an explainer to one of cura’s weirdest infill patterns – cross infill. It looks like just another infill pattern, but where things get weird is this field down in the experimental settings – Cross infill density image. You can use an image to determine the density of your infill – white pixels create a higher density, while black pixels offer a lower density. And there’s a couple of cool things you can do with this. First off, you can use this to write secret messages in your infill pattern, if you like. Or, you can vary the density on flexible materials to create deliberate hinge points in your model – or predictable breakaway points in rigid materials. There’s a lot of cool things you can do with this.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight they’ve got a quick tip about how to calculate the frequency and duration of a 555 timer circuit. If you’ve ever wanted to make an LED blink without a microcontroller, chances are you’re going to be using a 555 timer. By changing the capacitor and resistor values, you get different output timing. They show the formulas for both monostable and astable modes, and there’s also a helpful online calculator on the Digikey website. Check it out.

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show! I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, give us a thumbs up, hit subscribe, leave us a comment and let us know what your favorite project was. Big thanks as always to Digi-Key for making this show possible and you for watching it! Take care, and we’ll see you soon.