This week on Maker Update, an upside down 3D printer, a step’n’snack fanny pack, telling time with bubbles, paper cutters, Loki crowns, and making sacrifices to Leatherface.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 244]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Upside Down Printer by Krayln 3D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAPaOevoeX0

-=More Projects=-

SonicSurface by UpnaLab
https://www.instructables.com/SonicSurface-Phased-array-for-Levitation-Mid-air-T/

Glowing Bubble Clock by Shinoda Y
https://www.instructables.com/Glowing-Air-Bubble-Clock-in-Water/

Building a Book Plough with Darbin Orvar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9m8VxIYt4c

Loki Crown for Pets by TechnoChic
https://www.instructables.com/Loki-Variant-Inspired-Cosplay-for-Pets/

Step & Snack Fanny Pack by Sam March
https://hackaday.com/2021/07/30/step-n-snack-fanny-pack-motivates-with-mms/

-=Tips & Tools=-

10 Bullets by Tom Sachs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49p1JVLHUos

Printing in Air by Create Inc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QftTMX8RAXQ

ASUS Tinker Board 2 review by Liz Clark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYM3o0JRLHA

Bending Aluminum by Narwhal Labs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jyv2c60hRsw

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Fan Basics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4iA1hV7_U0

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: An upside down 3d printer, A step’n’snack fanny pack, telling time with bubbles, paper cutters, Loki crowns, and making sacrifices to Leatherface.

Hello and welcome back to another Maker Update! I’m Tyler Winegarner and I hope you’re doing great! I recently got to visit with a whole gang of makers here in upstate New York, and it was great to recharge the creative batteries. I’ve got a great show for you, so let’s check out the project of the week.

There’s a lot of different designs for FDM 3d printers, but pretty much every single one has the print head in the same orientation – with the nozzle pointing downwards and extruding plastic in vertical layers. But Kralyn 3d has a radical new design for a 3d printer that’s not only portable and compact but it turns the entire design for FDM printers on its head. It’s called the Positron.

It might not be obvious, but gravity has very little effect on FDM 3d printing – we know this because there’s a 3d printer on the ISS that can print in microgravity. But that doesn’t mean that designing a printer in this way is as easy as just flipping the Z axis. To make it easy to inspect the first layer for print problems, the heated build plate is a clear piece of borosilicate glass. To keep the gantry as compact as possible, its driven by a modified h-bot drive. To keep the extruder as compact as possible, the hot end makes a right angle bend so it doesn’t need to be as tall as a conventional print head.

And it’s not all clever design for clever design’s sake, either. Because of that right angle in the hot end, the heated part of the nozzle is larger and can push more plastic without under extrusion. And because the print head is lighter and the gantry more rigid, it can print faster and more accurately while maintaining a low center of gravity. And because the gantry is rotated 45 degrees, it increases the build volume without increasing the footprint of the machine.

Over the past few years we’ve seen good FDM 3d printers get cheaper, and 3d printers get better overall, largely due to advancements in software and firmware – but this is the most radically different printer design I’ve seen in a good long while. It may not turn into the next craze in printer design, but its exciting all the same. At the time of this video, Kralyn 3d has released a bill of materials, design files, PCB files and configuration settings for the Positron, and plans to do a full build video series so you can build your own and put it through the paces. Check it out down in the description.

More projects! We’ve seen ultrasonic levitators before, but not quite like this one. From Upna Lab comes what they’re calling the Sonic Surface – it’s a pair of jumbo-sized PCBs, each one carrying 256 ultrasonic emitters in a 16×16 grid. And what can you do with such an outlandish number of emitters? Well…. This. The whole thing is managed by a pair of FPGA Processors and a single arduino nano. One of my favorite parts of this project is the custom software for positioning and animating the foam pellets. Its a complex and expensive project to build, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this.

On Instructables, I found this project by ShinodaY where they’ve built a numerical display made entirely out of illuminated air bubbles. Currently functioning as a clock, when its time to display a new number, a row of solenoid valves introduces bubbles into these vertical tubes, which are flooded with glycerin. Similar to an old dot matrix printer, the number is made out of several rows and columns of bubbles – and then slowly drift up and out of sight. It takes a while for each number to form, and it gets deformed pretty quickly as the numbers float up and out of the display, but it makes a cool soothing sound as each digit is formed, and its incredibly cool to watch.

On Youtube, after a long hiatus, Lynn from Darbin Orvar is finally back to making videos – she’s already released two, and both of them are related to bookbinding. In this one she makes a type of paper cutter called a book plough. Instead of a traditional guillotine-style paper cutter, the pages of the book are held in a bookbinding vise while a blade is attached to this sliding carriage to cut the pages. The result is a clean and effortless method of cutting all the pages to size – also check out the build video for the bookbinding vise – just to see how she built these wooden lead screws.

If you’ve been watching the Loki series on Disney+, you’ve probably fallen in love with a certain character who appears towards the end of the series and thought “could my pet be a Loki variant?”. TechnoChic has an instructable to show you how to make a Loki crown for your pet. If you’ve never worked with craft EVA foam, this is a super accessible tutorial with a ton of great tips – like how to use your scissors to get a clean line, where to add sculpture wire, it’s good stuff.

And finally on the hackaday blog, I found this ridiculous project from Sam March who has built a fanny pack that dispenses a single M&M every time he walks 100 steps. The device is simple enough – data from the accelerometer is used to determine when a step is taken, and once 100 steps gets counted, an auger ejects a single M&M from the hopper. The decision to serve a single piece of candy every 100 steps is purposeful – since the average person burns a single calorie every 25 steps, and a single M&M contains 4 calories, he’s achieved caloric equilibrium. It’s silly, and kind of pointless, but it works!

I also love how he came up with the idea – he’s been collaborating with the fans on his channel to give him ideas for his projects. Once he completes the project, it gets gifted to the person who he collaborated with. Its a great way to get out of a creative rut, and also sends the project off to a happy home so you don’t get stuck with it.

We’re kicking off this week’s Tips and Tools with 10 Bullets: the original heavyweight video from the Tom Sachs studio- and this one is just full of incredible tips. This video was originally released as the ten essential rules of working at the Tom Sachs studio. It covers topics like thought process, organization, workflow and communication. They’re very particular to how this studio works, so carbon copying these to your own workspace might not work for you. But its an essential thought exercise in determining how you work best, whether you’re alone in your own shop, working with a small team on a large project, or establishing the rules of conduct of a makerspace. One rule every workspace should adopt though? Always be Knolling.

From Create Inc I found this video about how to make 3d prints with seemingly impossible features, like printing in mid air with no support. The heart of this process is a website that allows you to write formulas to generate GCode parametrically – and he spends a good bit of time explaining how to use it to get simple, and increasingly more complex results. Because he’s generating the gcode directly and without a slicer, he’s able to inject custom code – like shifting the print speed way down, to achieve these seemingly impossible overhangs. This is a completely different way of approaching 3d printing, and you should be able to use it to get some really unique results.

Over on her channel, Liz Clark from Blitz City DIY takes a quick look at the ASUS Tinker Board 2. The Tinker Board is a single board computer with a similar form factor to the raspberry pi, but with a total of six cores of processing power and a comically large heat sink. The bulk of the test consisted of running a series of benchmarks on the Tinker Board 2 and comparing the scores against the original Tinker Board, and the Raspberry Pi 4. There’s a few surprises in the data, but overall, if you need a single board computer with a little more grunt than a raspberry pi, this could be the answer – though you might find yourself on your own – there’s a much smaller user base for the Tinker Board, and not as much software available. And really, why can’t every single board computer have color coded GPIO?

Lastly, I thought there was a great tip on bending aluminum in this project video from Narwhal Labs. In the video they’re building touchscreen kiosk-style computers to use in the shipping department of Total Boat and Jamestown distributors. To build the sturdy enclosure, they’re milling out flat pieces of aluminum with this slotted pattern at the places where the shapes need to be bent. That’s a great tip on its own, but the other piece of the puzzle is using the right type of aluminum. 6061 is easy to mill, but tended to break instead of bending. 3000 series bent beautifully, but tended to gum up the milling bits. But 5000 series was right in the sweet spot – easy to mill, but remained flexible enough to be bent.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight, I found this slightly older video in their Another Teaching moment series, and it’s all about fans. Axial fans, centrifugal fans, tangential fans, blower fans, there’s a lot of different ways to move some air around. This video covers the considerations of fan shape, the amount of air it can move, and also touches on a few other considerations like ducting. If you want to keep your projects cool in the summer months, give this one a look.

All right, and that is going to do it for this week’s show. I feel like this was a really strong week for creative, outside-the box types of projects. I really enjoyed putting it together, and I hope you enjoyed watching it. If you did, leave us a comment, hit subscribe, and give us a thumbs up. It would be super cool to see more people doing that thing from Sam march’s video where folks dare one another to make different types of projects. Maybe leave a dare for someone down in the comments – just maybe not rocket powered skates – that’s been done. As always, huge thanks to the folks over at Digikey for making this show possible. Take care out there, and I’ll see you soon.