This week on Maker Update, animating ferrofluid, fabricating a landspeeder, advanced animatronic eyes, Adam Savage hardware rack, workbench mods from Laura Kampf, and shrinking molds with the Crafsman.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Week=-

Fetch by Applied Procrastination
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PFgVtzsXHM
https://github.com/AppliedProcrastination/

Really Beautiful Swimming Ferrofluids By rogercarr
https://www.instructables.com/id/Really-Beautiful-Swimming-Ferrofluids/

-=More Projects=-

Colin Furze Landspeeder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2h_yHnTwVw

How to Make a Compact Animatronic Eye Mechanism with 3D Printing and Arduino by Will Cogley
https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Compact-3D-Printed-Animatronic-Eye-Mechanism/

-=Tools/Tips=-

Adam Savage’s One Day Builds: Workshop Hardware Storage!
https://youtu.be/6ps4vbQ6Tk0

Clever Workbench by Laura Kampf
https://youtu.be/TPVq0zXKy3c

How to GROW or SHRINK Silicone Molds! by The CrafsMan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6fnGUL307U

3D Printed Paper Folding Experiments
https://www.instagram.com/p/B4tNz-AnOOO/

Folding Techniques for Designers: From Sheet to Form by Paul Jackson
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1856697215/makerprojec0c-20

Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales – Issue #27
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/garethbranwyn/issues/gareth-s-tips-tools-and-shop-tales-issue-27-211280

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

How to Read a Schematic
https://youtu.be/-dzHDgJVJh4

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update, animating ferrofluid, fabricating a landspeeder, advanced animatronic eyes, Adam Savage hardware rack, workbench mods from Laura Kampf, and shrinking molds with the Crafsman. 

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, and welcome back to another Maker Update. I think there’s something about the year end deadline that’s just making all the cool projects jump out at the last minute here. There’s so much cool stuff to talk about, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

You know what you’ve been missing in your life? A ferrofluid display. 

Fortunately, the guys at Applied Procrastination have a project they call Fetch. It’s a container of magnetic fluid and salt water mounted in front of a grid of 252 electromagnets. 

The project documentation and code is all on Github, with PCB files and a build diary all on Hackaday. They’ve also made a bunch of videos you can find on their Youtube channel that offer a deeper look at each aspect of the project.

Ultimately, the code for Fetch runs on a Teensy 3.6 board connected to custom controller boards for the electromagnets. The animations are created in a free pixel art editor called Aseprite which is then parsed by a Python script.

While there’s a lot of technical challenges they had to overcome, what I think is really interesting is how difficult it was to create a good ferrofluid container. It clumps, it gets rusty, it tends to get stuck to the glass.

They point to a great Instructable by Roger Carr that provides many of crucial details for working with ferrofluid and enclosing it. Not as easy as you’d think, but the results look amazing.

More projects! Just in time for the new Star Wars, Colin Furze has a new video out showing how he converted a golf cart into a full-scale landspeeder. 

It’s actually refreshing to see Colin pushed a little out of his comfort zone for this one. There’s a lot of metal fabrication, steel tube bending, and welding. He had to buy and learn how to use an English wheel to make all the compound curves on the outside of the landspeeder. 

The end result looks really cool, with lots of little details. He also has a follow-up video where he tries to fit actual jet engines in the back and mirror panels around the bottom. Go check it out.

And in my continuing obsession with Will Cogley’s animatronic designs, he has a new eye mechanism up that expands on the ideas in the simple mechanism we saw a month ago. This one is stronger, more compact, and a little lighter. 

Instead of an all-3D printed design, this version requires some small hardware, some ball links, and push rods. To drive the six servos you’ll need an Arduino and an Adafruit servo driver board. The end result looks great. If you ever wanted to get into animatronics, Will has really spoiled us this year with some great projects.

Now for some tools and tips. Some real heavyweights this week. Adam Savage has a new one day build video on how he redesigned and fabricated a new shelving system to organize his inventory of hardware. 

His old system was a two-sided cart on wheels that he just never took out and rarely turned around. For the new system he made the cart one-sided and shrunk the capacity of each bin so that he could fit more options in the same space.

On her YouTube channel, Laura Kampf talks about why she prefers using stage platforms as worktables. To challenge herself, she sees how many ways she can optimize one of these tables for drop-in clamps and lights, and a rail system around the edges for tacking on power strips or anything else she needs.

The CrafsMan has a great video on how to grow or shrink a silicone mold. As an example, he casts a mold of a figurine and makes a version that’s bigger and one that’s smaller. The trick is both cases is using mineral spirits, but you have to watch the video to see how he’s doing it. It kinda blew my mind. 

During November, as part of my Makevember challenge, I made a series of origami experiments where I 3D printed the folding pattern directly onto the paper and then glued another sheet of paper over the pattern. 

I thought it turned out pretty cool, and you can see what I made over on the Maker Project Lab Instagram and Twitter accounts. I’m hoping to document the process in an Instructable before the year is out. If you’re cusious to do something similar, the patterns I’m using come from a book by Paul Jackson called Folding Techniques for Designers. You can find a link in the description.

Finally, in the latest issue of Gareth Branwyn’s Tips, Tools and Shop Tales, there’s a tip on copying complex shapes with a tick stick, a recommendation for an inexpensive multi-bit driver, why you should sharpen a shovel, and how to use a $99 pressure pot to squeeze the air bubbles from your casting projects.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out their latest video on the basics of reading a schematic. The video shows how a circuit can be described as a series of symbols that, once you get the hang of it, you can use to get a basic understanding of how a circuit design functions. Check it out.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumb’s up or leave a comment. If YouTube’s not your regular hangout, you can get on the Maker Update email list to have show notes emailed out to you automatically each week with all the links you need. 

I’ll have one more show for you next week, and then I’ll be taking a break until the new year comes around. Thanks for watching, happy holidays, and I’ll see you next week.