This week on Maker Update: a project that hits all the right notes, 3d printing with sawdust, ramen noodle knife scales, pizza factories, typesetting, and questionable angle grinder tips from Jimmy DiResta.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 237]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Cheap Expandable Floor Piano by FredTSL
https://www.instructables.com/Cheap-Expandable-Floor-Piano/

-=News=-

3d Printing Actual Wood by Desktop Metal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LwSdjzP65U

-=More Projects=-

Simple Animatronic with Micro:bit by CoHillway
https://www.instructables.com/Simple-Animatronic-With-Microbit/

Dynamo Dream Part 1 by Ian Hubert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsGZ_2RuJ2A

Ramen Noodle Knife Scales by Peter Brown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olCI-c7I5xE

Pizza Rube Goldberg Machine by Joseph’s Machines
https://youtu.be/I85afIyu0IU

-=Tips & Tools=-

Make Your Own Jumper Wires by Charles Platt
https://youtu.be/ver-Av8vr1Q

Angle Grinder Hack by Jimmy DiResta
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu1mLIRYyBg

Make Your Own Font by Crafsman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4edSwS_cIDU

Milling Keycaps by the Ruiz Brothers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBpIwxwFgG4

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

What is Back EMF?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s1FuXOwrWA

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: A project that hits all the right notes, 3d printing with sawdust, ramen noodle knife scales, pizza factories, typesetting, and questionable angle grinder tips from Jimmy Diresta.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner and it’s been a few weeks, and I missed you all! I’m hoping that your summer is getting off to a great start and maybe, just maybe you’re able to see some of your friends and maker pals again. We’ve got a great show lined up for you so let’s check out the project of the week.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the Tom Hanks movie Big – but if you’re going to build a project from the film, it’s gonna be one of two things – either its this guy, or the giant floor piano from the Toy Store scene. And clearly Frederic Tachet feels the same way. Over on Instructables he shares his plans for building a rugged, affordable and expandable floor piano, complete with light up keys.

The frame for each key is built from Baltic Birch plywood, and the keys are made from a solid piece of thick acrylic plastic. The contact circuit is made from conductive fabric on both the base and the underside of the keys. You step on a key, the circuit closes and a note is played. Pretty simple stuff – and what’s more, there’;s no moving parts, so there’s fewer things that can go wrong with it.

The real cleverness is in the software. There’s a master Arduino Mega managing the entire installation, and each octave in the set also has its own Arduino Mega to process all the keys. You can build this with as little as a single octave, or expand it up to eight octave pads. As you add more keys, the master Arduino assigns a new i2c address to the new pad, and adapts the notes accordingly.

Even with the price of lumber these days the project is still fairly affordable at $300 per octave. As the world begins to emerge from quarantine and the idea of celebrating in public with other people becomes less dangerous and weird, this is the perfect project for that sort of gathering. You can find circuit diagrams and Arduino code, and woodworking plans over on his Instructables page.

Now for the news, the 3d printing company Desktop Metal is creating a new process for 3d printing using sawdust. The project is called Forust, and unlike conventional 3d printed wood, which is really just sawdust particles embedded in PLA filament, this is similar to Selective Laser Sintering or other powder based printing processes. Each layer of sawdust is deposited, and then a binder is sprayed to join the particles into the object. The resulting prints can be sanded, stained and the sawdust can be dyed to simulate wood grain. Their goal is to provide a second hand use for sawdust left over from traditional wood manufacturing. This looks pretty promising, I hope there’s a future to it.

More projects! On Instructables I found this gorgeous animatronic Skeksis from The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance by C O Hillway. She calls it simple but there’s a lot of movement here giving life to this character – the entire head moves, the jaw opens and closes, and there’s some movement in the eye as well. The movements are controlled by a pair of micro-bit boards – one within the character to drive the servos, and the other is in a remote control box to control the animations using a couple of potentiometers. And it’s all made of recycled cardboard! This one’s gorgeous and a lot of fun – check it out.

A while back we mentioned Ian Hubert’s Lazy Tutorials series for Blender on this show. It turns out that each one of those tutorials was pulled from a massive CG film he’s been working on for the past few years called Dynamo Dream, and he’s just released the first chapter of it. I know this isn’t the sort of project we usually talk about here, but this film is an incredible testament to what can be accomplished using free, open source software. He makes heavy use of camera tracking to blend live actors with CG elements, and its easy to get lost in which parts are practical, and which are digital. OK, that’s probably a digital element. Meanwhile, Blender as a software package has a lot to offer for more traditional types of making – there’s really powerful digital sculpting tools for 3d printing or cnc design, a video editor, and more – and its getting easier to learn.

Peter Brown is always eager to answer questions you’ve never thought to ask – questions like “Can you dye ramen noodles?” Peter uses a stabilizing resin with dyes to saturate the noodles with resin, before casting them in clear casting resin to make knife scales from them. If you weren’t already familiar with the difference between stabilizing and casting resins and how to use them, there’s a lot of tips to pick up in this video – and maybe make some ridiculous knife scales for your own projects.

And also on YouTube I saw this video for a whimsical, rube-goldberg style pizza factory from Joseph’s Machines. This certainly isn’t a practical way to make pizza, but I love how each ingredient gets its own mechanism to deliver it, and they’re all powered by this toy train just driving in circles. Every phase of it gets more ridiculous, like this comb to spread the sauce, or the ferris wheel to deliver the olives. If we’re being honest though, this pizza needs way more cheese. But, it’s a fun video, and a great project.

Now for some tips and tools, last week Donald shared his cool tools video about solid core jumper wires – these are great, but they’ve got one problem – they’re color coded by length, and not by function. A while back I made this video for Make Magazine based on a tip by Charles Platt on how to make your own jumpers from solid core wire that are no only the right length, but also the right color – that way your positive voltage is on the red wires, grounds are on black, or whatever color code is going to help you make sense of your circuit.

Jimmy Diresta just released his video on how he uses angle grinders for cutting metal. The first thing you’ll notice is the way he grips the guard with his finger just a few millimeters from the cutting disc. It certainly looks dangerous but he claims that this gives him better control over the cut. But instead of keeping up this habit, he designs a finger loop for the grinder that he then welds onto the guard. It allows him to control the cut in the same way, but with his fingers safely away from the cutter – as a bonus, the finger loop also doubles as a tool hangar. It’s not a refined product, but just a reminder that these are your tools to modify to best work with your needs.

As makers, we’re often designers as well, and sometimes its tough to find just the right font for a project – but what if you could make your own? On the Crafsman Steady Craftin youtube channel he shows you a process I’d never heard of, using a free service called Calligraphr. It’s a delightfully simple process – select what letter sets you want in your font, print out the template sheets and then you write in your letters. You then scan or photograph your sheets and upload them to the service. He then shows a bunch of different ways of designing your letters – cutting and pasting from old fonts, designing in procreate, even photographing gummy letters. And the payoff of seeing his font at work, is just fantastic.

Finally we have a tip from Noe Ruiz and Adafruit on milling out mechanical keycaps out of wood. These keycaps will be for the lemon macro keypad he designed a while back.The tolerances needed to make these keycaps work are obviously very tight so precision is going to matter a lot. This video is mostly about his toolpath strategy in Fusion 360, and even though I’ve been working in this software a lot, there was still plenty for me to learn – and the result of having these wooden keycaps looks really fantastic.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight we’ve got an oldie but a goodie – a helpful explanation of both the right hand rule and left hand rule of electromotive forces in charged conductors. In reality, these tools are really just a setup for explaining the phenomena of Back EMF in DC Motors. This is a force created as a byproduct of the motor rotation is part of what limits the speed of the motor. The faster the motor spins, the more back emf is generated. There’s still a whole lot that I don’t know about DC motors, so this video was pretty revealing to me just how deceptively complex their design is.

And that is going to do it for this weeks show. Thank you so much for watching. Looking back, we really had a bunch of fun silly projects to showcase this week. I guess it just goes to show that not every project needs to be a super useful piece of shop furniture, and sometimes it’s just fun to make something that makes you smile. Big thanks to Digikey electronics for making this show possible. If you enjoyed the show, give us a thumbs up, hit subscribe, and sign up for the Maker Update email list. Take care, and I’ll see you soon.