This week on Maker Update, the perfect costume for a jet-setter, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2, a real PKE Meter, cleaner air, plamps, and how to get the toothpaste back in the tube.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.257]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Cory Lee’s Magic Wheelchair by Narwhal Labs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7QtpbrdpuI

-=News=-

Raspberry Pi Zero 2
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/new-raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-2/

-=More Projects=-

Toothpaste Rewind by Joel Creates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3MGYbrN0nM

Air Filtration System by DIY Creators
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N7xCF-uuDA

Plant Lamp by Simone Giertz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIUybAxuCMQ

Real Ghostbusters PKE Meter by MoonMakers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caczGmSFxmU

-=Tips & Tools=-

Foam Cutting Tips from the Stan Winston School
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c97-a41J9t8

Getting More from your Cutting Discs by Fireball Tool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hid9bDnSeok

I’m Done by William Osman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVCpKfedfok

Molds for Cardboard Pulp by Flowalistik
https://www.instructables.com/Pulp-It/

Digi-Key Spotlight

Potentially Genius: Bottle Cap Sorter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Vkil38Qsc

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, the perfect costume for a Jetsetter, The Raspberry Pi Zero 2, a Real PKE Meter, Cleaner Air, plamps, and how to get the toothpaste back in the tube.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner, and I hope you’ve had a great halloween – or just a great week since we last saw you. We’ve got another great show for you so let’s check out the Project of the Week.

Cory Lee is a travel blogger – but not your typical sort of travel blogger. Cory writes about his travels and reports on the accessibility of various cities and attractions since the world isn’t necessarily made with wheelchair users in mind. His recent travels brought him to the Hawthorne Hotel Halloween Ball in Salem, Massachusetts, so he definitely needed a cool costume.

Which is where the folks at Narwhal Labs stepped in. Cory wanted a costume that would be ideal for his jet-setting lifestyle, so they created a model of a jetliner that would drop right over his wheelchair, making it look like he was the flight captain at the steering yoke.

It turns out that making the body of a jet liner is a little bit like making a kayak – or maybe its just that when you know a lot about making kayaks, you use the skills you have to make the stuff you’ve never made before. The entire body is made from vinyl shrink wrap stretched over a lightweight plywood frame. In order to keep the frame from being visible when the shrinkwrap was pulled taut, they added a layer of posterboard to smooth out the underlying structure.

With the body coming together, it still needed a few details to sell the look. Some custom vinyl graphics added the much needed windows and lettering, and there’s a fantastic tip here from Xyla Foxlin – draw an additional box around each letter – it’ll make weeding the vinyl a lot less nerve wracking since you can weed each letter individually. Fiberglass wings made for some lightweight strong attachment points for the 3d printed engine pods. The last thing that needed to be added were a few snakes.

Oh wait, did I forget to mention this was a “Snakes on a Plane” costume?

The entire project was created in part with magic Wheelchair. Magic Wheelchair is a charity that helps create costumes for people in wheelchairs. It gives folks a greater opportunity to participate in events like halloween parties, cosplay events, or just gives them the chance to dress up like their favorite heroes – and there is a ton of love and creativity that goes into each and every build. You can learn more about them by checking the links down in the description.

Now for the news, last week the Raspberry Pi foundation finally announced the successor to the Raspberry Pi Zero, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. This single board computer has nearly the same form factor as the original Raspberri Pi Zero, but contains the same SoC as the original release of the Raspberry Pi 3. That SoC has been clocked down to 1ghz to avoid thermal throttling, but the architecture means that it can run up to 5x faster on multithreaded applications.

The other clever bit about the packaging of the System on chip is the location of the 512mb of SD Ram – it’s sitting directly on top of the CPU, saving space on the overall board. Otherwise it’s the same tiny single board computer you know and love – the camera connector, USB OTG port and sd card reader are all here – though it does seem to be missing the solder points for mono audio and composite video, and the Micro HDMI port has been upgraded to a Mini HDMI. You can get your hands on the Pi Zero 2 W for $15, and if you subscribe to the hardcopy edition of MagPi magazine, you should have one coming your way.

More Projects! Have you ever heard the phrase “putting the toothpaste back in the tube?” Joel Creates has built a toothpaste tube pump that lets him do just that – or, dispense toothpaste at ridiculous speeds. Or suck up stuff that isn’t toothpaste back into the tube, like beans.

(distant yell) why would you do that?

Anyhow, the pump is basically a pressure chamber attached to a vacuum pump. When you apply positive pressure, it dispenses toothpaste with enough force to coat 100 toothbrushes in 3 seconds. But when you reverse the pressure, the toothpaste tube sucks up whatever is in front of the nozzle – toothpaste, air, or whatever else. This is a fun, ridiculous build that’s mostly good for a laugh, but there’s some simple but clever use of relays and valves to control everything without a microcontroller

Glenn at DIY Creators has a video on how to build this compact air filtration system for his shop. This is actually a really simple build – its just a plywood enclosure for a 440 CFM duct fan that passes through a 12×12 filter. But watching the way he works is just full of little tips for how he measures, marks and plans out his projects. Also I really enjoy this graphic that lets you know where he is in the overall build progress. I just worked with some old dirty pallet wood, and I can tell you, I really could have used one of these in my shop.

There’s two things that can make any space more pleasant to be in – light, and plants. So Simone Giertz decided to combine them… into a lamp that also is the new home for her plant. A plamp? A plamp. A ton of interlocking arcs of plywood form the bucket for the potted plant, and this outer frame gives the vines tons of anchors to grab onto and hopefully keep them from blocking the light. Most of the light somes from this big LED fixture, but there’s also a ring of RGB LEDs as an accent.

There’s also a tiny bit of great advice about not getting hung up on your build and subjecting yourself to analysis paralysis. Just remind yourself that you’re building a prototype that will help you build the final item. And who knows? Maybe you’ll love your prototype just fine, and it will be the one you keep.

And finally, Diego and Camila of Moon makers have made a delightful replica of the PKE Meter from Ghostbusters. No, not those Ghostbusters, the REAL ghostbusters. Look at this thing! It looks like this thing just fell out of a cartoon. The display is made from a WIO Terminal, the multi-sensor, programmable IoT appliance from Seeed Studio. Meanwhile, a Raspberry Pi and camera uses computer vision to detect ghosts and controls the reaction on the meter. The body is all 3d printed and painted to look like distressed metal. It’s great! This video is a little light on details if you want to build your own, but they’re releasing a second video in a few days that should answer all the questions.

Time for some tips and tools, Fred Fraliegh from the Stan Winston school has some quick tips on how to use bevel cuts to attain more complex shapes in your foam sculptures. This is the sort of stuff that always amazes me in skills like sewing, turning simple two dimensional forms into 3d shapes. He changes the angle of his cut to create this convex shape that folds over into a concave form. I know this tip comes a little late for halloween, but it’s never too early to start thinking about next year’s costume.

I found this great video from Fireball Tool on how to get more life out of your angle grinder cutting discs. If you’re like me, you just plunge the disc right through your material and then work your way through the metal until your cut is complete. This method is a lot faster, but it exposes more surfaces of the cutting disc to wear. Instead, take smaller bites. Use the disc to lightly score the metal, and keep working back over your line until you’re through the material. This method is a lot slower, but this technique allowed them to make 10 times as many cuts before the disc wore out. Give it a try the next time you’re in your shop.

I don’t really know how to introduce this new video from William Osman. In the video he’s talking about how the fairly tiny percentage of negative comments on his videos has completely ruined the joy he gets in making them in the first place. This is a tough but touching video to get through, and I don;t think you even need to be a popular youtuber to be able to relate to this experience. How many projects have you abandoned before you started them, because that negative voice in your own head told you to quit? I know for me, its plenty. There’s no real advice here, but its worth watching, maybe just to feel we’re all struggling, and we don’t need to feel so lonely in that struggle.

And finally, on instructables I found this great guide from Flowalistik on making household objects out of cardboard pulp. With downloadable, 3d printable molds and tons of photos, this guide walks you through the whole process of making the pulp, extracting the water, and forming tons of desktop tools like pencil holders, organizers and more.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight, check out the latest episode in the Potentially Genius series. This time around, they’re building a recycling sorter for plastic bottle caps. This is a two-part process that first involves removing the cap from the bottle – since they’re two different types of plastic, and then sorts the cap by color. It’s helpful to sort them by color since the plastic for the caps, HDPE, can be easily shredded, melted and reformed into building materials or craft items. Its a great video, and satisfying just to see the sorter in action.

Alright and that’s going to do it for this week’s show. We had a bunch of different types of stuff in here, and I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, give us a thumbs up, hit subscribe, leave us a comment, and sign up for the Maker Update email list so you never miss a show. As always, big thanks to the folks at DigiKey for making this show possible. Thanks for watching, we’ll see you soon.