This week on Maker Update: a rolltop puzzle table, 4D Printed robots, A spit-flap flip clock, dichroic lamps, CNC vs laser death matches, and how to make your design a little less dumb.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 253]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Mechanical Table for Puzzles by Simone Giertz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5VQUDpK9Iw

-=News=-

4-D Printed Robot Can Climb Up Hills
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2291164-4d-printed-robot-self-assembles-into-a-tube-and-rolls-up-hills/

Catskill Mountains Makers Camp
https://catskillmountainmakerscamp.com/

-=More Projects=-

Flip Clock by DavidHuangLab
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N47ne4M_Lo

Dichroic Lamp by RayP24
https://www.instructables.com/Dichroic-Lamp-LEDs-But-No-RGBs/

-=Tips & Tools=-

What to Buy First? CNC or Laser by Make Something
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gximOSrOGpM

Should You Buy a Cheap Laser Engraver by Under Dunn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqyag1Gc7_0

A Lesson in Dumb Design by Wintergatan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN90HYiFpAw

Acrylic Model Making tips by Eric Strebel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se2-zhutPn4

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

The Great Search – MEMS Microphones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFd3mD-WhRs

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: A rolltop puzzle table, 4D printed robots, a spit-flap flip clock, dicroic Lamps, CNC vs Laser deathmatches, and how to make your design a little less dumb.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner, and I hope you’ve been doing great. We’ve got a jam-packed show full of great projects, tips and news, so let’s not waste any time getting into the project of the week.

If you love Jigsaw puzzles, then you’re probably familiar with Simone Giertz’s problem: They’re a rewarding and relaxing way to focus in on a problem, but they take up a ton of table space while you’re working on them. And sure, there’s a couple of practical solutions, like a table with an undershelf and a tray for your puzzle. But, there’s no engineering like overengineering, so she’s made this rolltop table where the flexible top can roll out of the way, and the underlayer for the puzzle rises up to sit flush with the table edge.

For the rolltop surface she’s making a material called tambour – its made of a large number of interlocking slats of wood that are held together by fabric that’s been glued onto the back. For the rest of the structure of the table, she’s making heavy use of her CNC router. The tabs on the tambord slats slot into these grooves on the table sizes. The sprockets that feed the slats are also cut on the router, and even the legs that interlock gorgeously into the frame were cut there as well.

When it came to making the cranks to roll up the table top, Simone had two choices: Of course she could buy something off the shelf, but instead she made the more sensible decision – to buy a small machinist’s lathe and make her own. This might be my favorite part of the video – because you get to see her react to the brand new possibility space of a new tool and a new discipline. We’ve probably all made this specific yelp at some time or another in our own individual maker journeys.

This is a fun, frustrating, satisfying build. There’s a lot of complexity to this project, and a ton of places for it to go wrong – and Simone definitely struggled through a lot of it. BUt the result looks fantastically satisfying, and a great reminder that sometimes you just need to set your sights a little high, and stick with it – just for payoffs like these.

Time for some news, researchers at Tianjin University have developed a 4d printed robot that can change shape on its own – and then carry heavy loads up inclines. It was created by 3d printing a lattice of liquid crystal elastomers, but its considered 4d printing because it can then roll up on its own as the final step of its manufacturing. The robot responds to heat by changing its shape, which allows it to roll itself up inclines and wrap its body around a load that it can carry with it. This sort of falls into that rift between creepy and cool, and I don’t know what the eventual applications might be, but sometimes the technologies you don’t see the immediate applications for have the most exciting futures.

If you’re up for some last minute weekend plans in Upstate New York, The Catskill Mountains Makers Camp is happening this weekend at the Blackthorne Resort in East Durham. Not quite a maker faire, this sounds like its something between a demo showcase, a meet and greet and an anti-conference. It’s organized in part by Jimmy Diresta, so you can probably expect to find some familiar maker faces there like Paul Jackman, Pat Lap and plenty others.

More Projects! If you’ve been watching this show for a while, you know we’re suckers for mechanical displays. Through Hackaday, I found this video about making a Flip Clock by David Huang Labs. The video mostly focuses on how the split flaps are made – some laser-cut cardstock makes up the visible part of the display, while some glued-in white cardstock adds rigidity and contrast.

There’s two tips in this video which I absolutely love – the first is keeping a spare electric toothbrush in your shop to clean up your laser cut paper projects. The other is using a reservoir or CA glue to add rigidity to these paper tabs. That’s important because these tabs are what will mount the flaps into the spindle. The spindles are 3d printed and each one is driven by a small stepper motor. Magnets and hall effect sensors give feedback on the spindle positions to the ESP32 that’s controlling everything. The project video is a little light on details, but maybe if you email him, he’ll share the code and circuit details.

On Instructables, I found this Dichroic Lamp by RayP24. Don’t worry if you’re new to the word Dichroic – I am too. It refers to a material that splits up light into specific, distinct wavelengths. In this case, they’re harvesting the material from a lamp shade sold by Ikea, and then cutting and folding it into this geometric shape that will then sit on top of a flat LED lighting fixture. The result is this gorgeous fixture that transforms an ordinary white light into this prismatic explosion of color. This looks like a really fun material to play around with.

Time for some Tips and Tools, David Piccuito from Make Something has this helpful video to help you decide which machine you should buy first: a laser cutter or cnc router. No spoilers here, but I’ll tell you up front – there’s no easy answer. Instead, he lists out the pros and cons of each machine, tells you how he uses each machine and what he uses them for. He then lets you decide for yourself. His opinions are very much formed by the machines that he owns, but I think you can get your head around the general capabilities of each type of machine, and make an educated guess for your own shop

If you came away from David Piccuito’s video with a hot wallet ready to buy a laser cutter, you might wonder what’s up with these relatively cheap laser engravers. Robert from Under Dunn has a review of one of the many affordable diode laser engravers you can have for just a few hundred dollars. These fairly low power machines come with a ton of caveats, and their safety features might leave a lot to be desired – but if you can work with that, you can get a lot done with them too.

In a recent video from Wintergatan, Martin serves up a big slice of humble pie – to himself. In this video he applies a design strategy he learned from SpaceX. In his struggles to finish the Marble Machine X, he’s considering that he may have planned the machine wrong from the beginning. This video is fraught with mea culpas to the folks who have supported the project from the beginning, and many of us may never tackle a project as complex as this one – but there’s some great lessons in product design that can apply to any project – like making sure your design constraints make sense, or understanding which problems matter to your end result, and which ones don’t. And of course, listen to experience.

Finally, we have this great video from product designer Eric Stebel about basic design using acrylics. This video assumes you don’t have a laser cutter and shows three different ways you can fabricate basic cube shapes in acrylic plastic. For the first one he uses a band saw, finishes the edges and then assembles the box. Next up he uses the score and snap method of cutting acrylic. The last one really surprised me – he uses a tablesaw to cut the pieces, but then finishes them with a 45 degree bevel using a router. It seems like there’s a push-pull relationship here between dimensional accuracy and clean edges, but there’s a ton of great skills to pick up along the way.

For this week’s Digikey spotlight, we’re checking in on the latest from Adafruit’s The Great Search series, and this one is all about MEMS microphones. Ok this video is about this type of microphone in specificity, but more it’s about how to find the product you need for your prototypes in the world of global chip shortages. She talks about products marked as NRND or Not Recommended for New Design, where prohibitive minimums might apply. Lady Ada helps you navigate the salty seas of the chipocalypse to help you find the product you need to keep your project afloat.

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show! Thank you so much for watching. I know we focused a lot on different CNC machines in this week’s episode and I hope that wasn’t a bummer. I know they’re still not as accessible as some other tools out there but I hope we’re past the point of arguing that this isn’t real making. If you have an opinion on this, let us know in the comments – just… keep it civil. If you enjoyed the show give us a thumbs up, hit subscribe, and sign up for the Maker Update email list so you don’t miss the next one! Big thanks to the folks at Digikey for making this show possible. Take care, and we’ll see you soon.