This week on Maker Update: a head-mounted nerf launcher, a secret piano for tiny apartments, cardboard prototyping, bit breaking G-Code bending, and 3d printed couture for easier breathing.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.275]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Clean Air Necklace by Geeky Faye Art
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niAL5Nqm1jY

-=More Projects=-

Desk with Hidden Piano by Get Hands Dirty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlZgZ0vOPh0

Head-Mounted Nerf Launcher by Adam Savage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LVFVTMleio

3D Printed Molds for Carbon Fiber by Matthieu Libeert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0MwuuJ6cJA

-=Tips & Tools=-

Prototyping in Cardboard and Foamcore by Jen Schachter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtQTIZSf8Mo

Photo Etched Plastic Parts by Plasmo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NntLi4KcLlI

Non-Planar G-Code Bending by CNC Kitchen
https://youtu.be/0XaaUXOwzTs

Five Screw Clamp Tips by DIY Creators
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I18y14nuqgY

Milling PCBs by Zack Freedman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm_JrACrmVs

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Custom Skills for Mycroft AI by Shawn Hymel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blBYft6r0-E

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: A head-mounted nerf launcher, A secret Piano for Tiny Apartments cardboard prototyping, bit breaking G-Code bending, and 3d printed Couture for easier Breathing.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update! I’m Tyler Winegarner and I hope you’re doing well and the time change didn’t jostle you too much. I’m always excited for the later daylight hours, and I’m excited for this week’s show. So let’s check out the project of the week.

We’ve seen a lot of wearable fashion tech over the years, but none quite like this. Allie from Geeky Faye Art has developed this gorgeous necklace of addressable LEDs that not only looks fantastic, but it also reports on the ambient air quality at the same time.

They began by sketching out the basic design for the necklace, laying out the addressable LEDs, placing the housing for the microcontroller and planning for the power considerations. The Air quality sensor is a completely separate unit that they’ll wear on their belt, but that means that the microcontroller needs to have wireless capabilities. Which is why they went with the TinyPico V2 because of its onboard esp-32 chip, tiny size, and overall power.

Since the structure of the necklace would be 3d printed in flexible filament, Allie made the choice to begin designing using paper prototypes to make sure everything was the right size and would lay correctly. It also helped with making sure all of the LED strips were cut to the proper length.

Of course, with any project this complex, there’s a ton of great tips all along the way – like this USB in-line amp meter to see how much power your circuit is drawing that I never knew about. Or this necklace clasp that’s made of a 3d printed dovetail that holds the necklace securely but can easily break away if it gets caught. Or using 3d printed parts with Hilbert Curve patterns for light diffusion.

Once it was all assembled, Allie took the necklace for a walk around the streets of London to see what the local air quality looked like. The good news is, the necklace worked fantastically. The bad news is that, even in parks, the air quality in London is pretty poor. All the same, it’s hard to imagine a more gorgeous way to get a reading on your ambient air quality.

Time for some more projects, Cristiana from Get Hands Dirty has a new installment in her Tiny Apartment series, and this one is building a desk that houses a hidden electric piano. This built-in has a handful of particular design considerations, like needing to conform to this oddly angled wall in the space. There’s also a ton of great tips to be found in this video, like colored MDF. I never knew about this stuff! I’ve never gotten the hang of painting MDF and having it look good, and this looks like the easy workaround for it. Also, if you’re drilling and screwing into the side of an MDF sheet, you can clamp it to prevent the MDF from splitting from the force of the screw.
She finished the desk with this side cabinet drawer unit – and she even included a secret drawer in the toe kick area since she didn’t want to waste the space between the casters. Clever stuff.

If you’ve ever wanted to see Adam Savage go completely giddy, check out this video where he tests out the Nerf D-Dart blaster, and then modifies a pair of them into a head- mounted launcher. After wiring both launchers to a single battery to power both of them as well as this spinning safety light, he brought some theatrics to the trigger mechanism with this momentary safety switch with an aluminum handle. There’s also a helpful lesson in this build that you can never, never do too much testing.

To close the project out, Adam secures the two launchers and the hazard lamp to an airsoft helmet, and then added an eye reticle for aiming. It’s a goofy, ridiculous build, but it’s so much fun you just can’t look away from it. Sooner or later we all need to build something that makes us make this face.

Matthieu Leebert has published a video on YouTube on how to make these carbon fiber tubes using 3d printed molds. After printing the outer molds in Power PLA, a filament that can be sanded like ABS, he printed molds for silicone cores that will provide added pressure to the inner surface of the carbon fiber part. Some spare lengths of TPU filament create registration keys for the mold and prevent resin leakage. You get to see the whole process of carbon fiber layup, and the 3d printed molds for the part worked great. Check it out if you’ve ever been curious about this process.

We’ve got a whole bunch of tips & tools this week, starting off with this guide to prototyping using cardboard and foamcore by Jen Shachter. Making prototypes in cheap materials is an easy way to see if your design is going to work the way you want it to before you get in too deeply and create problems with no solution – whether you’re making a design to work with existing objects, want to test out a mechanism, communicate an idea, or just get a sense of how big something should be. Jen shows how to score cardboard to bend it how you want, different techniques for joining pieces together, glues to use, and more.

Over on Youtube I found this guide by Plasmo on how to use photo etching to create these extremely delicate and intricate parts for models and dioramas. If you’ve ever followed guides for etching circuit boards or making etched labels, this is a similar process. The key difference is that if you leave the design in the etchant long enough, only the unexposed part remains, leaving you with extremely detailed parts you probably couldn’t achieve any other way.

CNC Kitchen has a guide for creating these bending, warping 3d prints using vase mode – the 3d printing solution that lays down an unbroken bead of filament from the start of your print to the end. The real trick is to warp the toolpath so you can bend the print away from its central axis. Stefan created a python script that modifies your existing GCode to let you add these bends. It appropriately shifts and warps each spiralized layer, and even adjusts the flow rate to account for the parts of the print that would be more compressed, as well as the ones that are further apart. There’s still a lot to consider with non-planar printing, like making sure that your print head has enough clearance for the required angles, but its a great technique to experiment with to make some unique parts.

Glen from DIY Creators has a video out on 5 quick tips on how to use screw clamps in your workshop. If you’re used to using bar clamps for most of your work, these might seem like a bit of a relic, but they’re incredibly useful for ad-hoc workholding and making jigs for assembly. Since the clamps can securely hold a work piece, but themselves can be clamped to other surfaces, you can easily put them together into a variety of useful jigs. Glen’s video covers a ton of great ways to use these versatile tools. CHeck it.

If you have a CNC Router and have ever considered using it to mill PCBs, you might find that the process is not as straightforward as you thought – like Zack Freedman did in his latest video. Hoping to cut down on the time needed to wait for PCB fabrication, he’s trying to make them on his own using the Snapmaker 2.0. As with any new means of production, there’s a pretty steep – and sometimes frustrating learning curve. But if you’re interested in trying this out yourself, there’s a ton of great info around what bits to use, the results they produce, and some of the techniques you should use in laying out your board.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight, Shawn Hymel has a great video teaching us how to add custom skills to Mycroft AI. Mycroft is an open source, cloud based AI system thats compatible with the Raspberry Pi. Shawn is helping fellow maker Jorvon Moss develop a voice activated robot buddy. Shawn’s video walks you through the mycroft setup, how to establish phrases that it will listen for, and then how to link those phrases to execute python code to trigger hardware interactions. Complex stuff, but Shawn presents it in a way that’s fairly accessible if you take your time.

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show! Hopefully you enjoyed it, if you did, give us a thumbs up, leave a comment, sign up for the maker update email list so you don’t ever miss a show! Big thanks as always to Digikey for sponsoring the show, making it all happen, and to you for watching. Take care, we’ll see you soon.