This week on Maker Update: ant-weight combat robots, Leia’s little robo-buddy, a pick and place marblevator, and vintage signs served up two ways.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.291]++

-=Project of the Week=-

3D Print Your Own Mini Battlebot! by Maker’s Muse
https://youtu.be/BvNRtRuOALw

-=More Projects=-

LO-LA59 Droid by Ruiz Brothers, Philip Burgess and Kattni Rembor
https://learn.adafruit.com/lola-droid

Marblevator, Pick and Place, Version 2. By gzumwalt
https://www.instructables.com/Marblevator-Pick-and-Place-Version-2/

Making a Space Age Neon Sign, Start to Finish by Wesley Treat
https://youtu.be/WT88LeltbT4

-=Tips & Tools=-

How To Make Vintage Hand-Painted Signs with a Laser Cutter! by Jen Schachter
https://www.tested.com/making/how-tos/how-to-make-vintage-hand-painted-signs-with-a-laser-cutter/

 

Fascinating Production Method: Hot Wire Extensions
https://www.core77.com/posts/116267/Fascinating-Production-Method-Hot-Wire-Extensions

Adafruit NeoPXL8 FeatherWing and Library By lady ada
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopxl8-featherwing-and-library

Knurled knobs generator by franpoli
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5348989

Now you can simulate circuits with Fritzing
https://blog.fritzing.org/2022/06/27/Simulating-Circuits-with-Fritzing

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Startup Roadmap – Take your Project from Concept to Market
https://www.digikey.com/en/maker/roadmap

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: ant-weight combat robots, Leia’s little robo-buddy, a pick and place marblevator, and vintage signs served up two ways.

Hey everybody, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Maker Update. I hope you’re all doing well, enjoying your summer, and maybe even finding some time for a project. If you’re looking for some inspiration, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s get started with the project of the week.

Angus from Maker’s Muse is challenging himself to make a series of combat robots for his local bot battle happening in Australia. On his YouTube channel, he’s taking us along for the ride, starting with the design of this fully 3D printed ant-weight class robot.

I think because robotics is such a departure from his usual 3D printing focus, Angus goes above and beyond to explain each component and design choice, making it an excellent introduction for anyone just getting started with robotics in general.

He covers the different kinds of small gear motors you can choose from, the variety of speed controllers available, types of batteries, transmitters, receivers, and of course design and 3D printing.

You can also tell he is genuinely excited to be building these, which makes it pretty infections to watch.

The bad news is, this thing looks like so much fun, you’ll probably walk away from this video with a tiny battlebot added to your never ending project list. The good news is, Angus has included his 3D design files for free so that you can easily replicate his design or build on it.

So go check it out, and stay tuned for his increasingly bigger and more challenging combat robot builds.

More projects! Interested in a robot that’s not hellbent on destruction? On Adafruit, the Ruiz Brothers, Philip Burgess, and Kattni Rembor have a guide on making this friendly companion robot, modeled after Lo-La from the Star Wars Obi-Wan Kenobi series.

Inside, you have an Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP2040 board, connected to a few LEDs a LiPo battery and two servos to move the wings around.

The code is written in Circuit Python and provides some fun random movements and LED blinking for a convincing robot look.

The 3D printed body shows a lot of thoughtful design details. There are sections for all the components to screw or press-fit into. The antenna and wings hinge on bits of paper clip…

And my favorite touch is a space for a strong neodymium magnet on the bottom, allowing you to mount it to a shoulder plate or hang it on any available metal surface.

Great project, and a nice addition to any star wars costumes you have planned for halloween.

I also got a kick out of this new pick-and-place style marblevator project by Greg Zumwalt.

The fully 3D printed design includes smiling robots, a complex arrangement of gears, and this ingenious little passive gripper that picks up the steel ball and gently releases it at the top.

His instructable includes all the files and the bill of materials to build your own. It seems like a great, weekend project or a perfect, nerdy, handmade gift.

On YouTube, Wesley Treat shows how he made this old school, Vegas-style neon sign.

From start to finish, he shows how he created the original vector art in Adobe Illustrator, CNC cut the letters from expanded PVC, created the frame from aluminum square tubing, and hand wired all the light bulb elements.

Of course, for it to be a neon sign, you need the neon. And instead of reaching for the LED simulated neon strip he ponied up to get the real thing made for him by a local neon fabricator.

Very cool build, and something that I didn’t initially appreciate is that all the materials here – the aluminum, the light sockets, the expanded PVC, the electrical box – it’s all rated for outdoor use, making it perfect for a backyard or public installation.

For some signmaking inspiration on a smaller scale check out Jen Schacter’s technique for creating professional looking hand painted signs using a laser cutter.

What’s so interesting about this technique is that what’s really being cut here is the protective paper that comes attached to the cast acrylic. So, a low power laser etching machine may be enough to execute this technique.

By carefully planning and peeling away just the layers you need to paint, step-by-step, you essentially use the protective paper as a series of masks for each color.

Jen even shows how you can use this technique to get fancy with vintage-style gold leaf lettering. The results look fantastic and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this technique really take off.

On the Core77 blog, check out this wild fabrication method called Hot Wire Extensions. It’s a technique for fusing leftover nylon powder from SLS 3D printers around sections of nichrome wire.

This is the same type of wire used in toasters. Submerge it in a batch of SLS powder and pass some electricity through it to get it hot and the surrounding Nylon will fuse and harden.

The end result has a kind of organic look to it. And because you’re not limited to the size of a 3D printer bed, you can go pretty big with your designs.

Over on Adafruit, they’ve got a new guide for a new product: the NeoPXL8 FeatherWing. If you’re creating a project with hundreds of addressable LEDs pushing all that data around on a single wire starts to hurt the speed and performance of your animations.

This $7 board can fix the bottleneck by splitting out the data on a single strand into 8 synchronized, concurrent signals.

You have to do a little more advance work to wire your strands into an Ethernet type connection, or a 16-pin Fadecandy-style connection. The guide points to resources on how to do this.

But as a reward for your extra effort, not only can you create LED animations on a massive scale, but you can also unlock a new HDR mode for some extra impressive animation extras, such as Temporal dithering, 16-bit color components, Gamma correction, and Frame-to-frame blending. Cool stuff.

By way of Gareth Branwyn’s Tips Tools and Shop Tales newsletter I learned about this knurled knob generator by François Polito on Thingiverse.

You’ll have to follow the link out to GitHub to grab the OpenSCAD file and customize it, but once you do, you get control over bolt head size, knob height, knurl profile – all kinds of stuff.

And I was excited to see that there’s been a major update to the Fritzing circuit diagram tool allowing you to actually simulate your circuit in the software.

You’ll need the latest version and there’s a beta feature preference you need to toggle, but it seems like a great option to have for verifying and troubleshooting circuits before you commit to mashing them together.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out their step-by-step guide for taking a hardware invention from concept to market.

If you’ve ever thought about spinning your project out into an actual product, this is a super useful and approachable guide, filled with resource links and advice videos from Adafruit’s Lady Ada.

She uses the Adafruit Circuit Playground board as an example, walking you through concept, research, designing, funding, production, and more. Give it a watch.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up, or leave a comment. A big thanks to Digi-Key electronics for making this show possible. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you soon.