This week on Maker Update: a vacuum sorter for Lego, a pixel art oscilloscope, a new home for printed parts, tiny toy guns, folding buildings, and getting the most out of a low end table saw.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.277]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Lego Sorting Vacuum by Unnecessary Inventions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0AbOTftMps

-=News=-

Prusa Printers is now Printables.com
http://printables.com

-=More Projects=-

Noisy Cricket Replica Prop by Punished Props
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSJO44_jgnA

100 LED Oscilloscope by lonesoulsurfer
https://www.instructables.com/100-LED-Oscilloscope/

Aliens Diorama Book Nook by Muhammed FaysaD
https://www.instructables.com/Aliens-Movie-Book-Nook-Diorama/

-=Tips & Tools=-

Using a Jobsite Saw for Fine Woodworking by 3x3Custom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22oqr6o5z-w

Monport 20w Fiber Laser Review by Caleb Kraft
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjdv2wVuiCQ

Print-flat 3d-Printed Buildings by Desktop Makes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBwKc8DM5OA

Lighting for Miniatures and Dioramas by Tested
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veSJ4K5rwWU

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Types of Diodes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkKIDcfTIYY

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: A vacuum sorter for Lego, A pixel art oscilloscope, A new home for printed parts, tiny guns, folding buildings and getting the most out of a low end tablesaw.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner and I hope you’re doing pretty alright. I have not been very productive in the past two weeks since I managed to catch my first cold and flu that I’ve had in the past two years – I hope your weeks have been better for working on fun projects. Speaking of which, let’s check out the project of the week.

There’s no shortage of stories and memes about how one of the most painful things you can step on is a Lego brick, so it’s pretty important to do a thorough cleanup after a good build session. But sorting out the bricks is a whole other tedious process – but what if you could do both at once?

That’s exactly what Matty at Unnecessary Inventions is trying to accomplish, and this is what he’s come up with. He’s got this multi-tier sorting chamber attached to a shop vac, so that he can easily hoover up the bricks. Each layer in the sorter has a set of holes that gradually decrease in size. The idea is that the largest bricks get trapped at the top while smaller pieces tumble down into their appropriate sorting layer.

Its a fairly simple method of sorting, since its not trying to sort by color or brick dimension, but there’s still plenty of clever design going on here: each tier of the sorter snaps together with magnets, so you can lift off each one separately and it becomes its own bin for storage or for organizing. Also, he used the 3d printing slicing trick for the filter layers where you set the number of your top and bottom layers to zero, so the vertical structure is just the infill pattern – this increases the overall airflow through the sorter, so it doesn’t reduce the suction for picking up bricks.

But the most important part of any creation is making sure it all works- and by the looks of things this one does exactly what it set out to accomplish – large bricks all get trapped in the top chamber and successively smaller ones find their way to the lower chambers. I don’t know if Matty is making the files available anywhere, but the design shouldn’t be too difficult to replicate if you want to build your own.

In the news this week, Prusa Printers has a new home on the internet, Printables.com. For several years, Prusa Printers has been a public repository for people to share their 3d printed files. It’s always been a fantastic site, but the url… just made the site sound like it was exclusive for Prusa’s printers and their users – even though that was never the case. The new domain should help its userbase grow, and if you already had an account on prusa printers, it will work over at printables. The site design is fast and responsive, and they plan to do lots of community activities like contests and spotlights. If you’re looking for a new place to find and share printed files, check it out.

More Projects! Bill Doran of Punished Props is taking on one of my favorite film props ever: The Noisy Cricket from Men In Black. And apparently its one of his favorites as well. The build begins in a fairly straightforward manner with a bunch of SLA printed parts, and then he assembles them using epoxy and registration pins to keep things aligned. But stick with the lengthy video, because its chock full of great tips – like using baking soda and CA glue to make a sort of filler paste for gaps – or bending an X-acto blade so that when he uses it to cut open a silicone mold, it forms a registration key. Or how he added a lip to the interior cavity after it was assembled so the electronics sled would stay more securely in place.

Bill also has a new video course out on how to use Fusion 360 to design and model replica props. It’s also a beginner’s guide to Fusion, so if you haven’t started down that skill tree, this is an ideal place to begin.

Over on instructables, lonesoulsurfer has a published a guide to building this lo-fi oscilloscope, made of a matrix of 100 red LEDs. With the proliferation of low cost, individually addressable RGB LEDs, its refreshing to see a project that leverages the use of classic 5mm LEDs, but even still, I’ve never seen them before with this cube-shaped diffuser. Lonesoulsurfer built a custom PCB for the project, and there’s a handful of potentiometers to control the output. There’s an input for a probe, and a microphone input so you can see the waveforms of the sounds its picking up. Its probably not the best tool for refined electronics work, but its a fun, chunky, beautiful project all the same.

Also on instructables, check out this Aliens Diorama Book Nook by Muhammed FaysaD. This features a split-level design with Ripley and Newt escaping the derelict station on LV426, and below you see a pair of xenomorphs stalking through the flooded sub-level. There’s also an additional sub-level for hiding the battery and the wiring for the LED lighting. Most of the diorama was designed in tinkercad and 3d printed, with some flickering LEDs scavenged from LED candles for some distressed lighting. Muhammed shares all of his 3d printed files, or you can purchase prints directly from him on his Etsy shop.

We’ve got some tips and tools for you before you go, Tamar from 3×3 Custom has a video on how to do fine woodworking using a jobsite saw – like the one she has in her own shop. There’s a lot of stuff that’s very specific to her saw, but also a lot of generalized info like how to work with miter slots that aren’t a consistent width – or how to deal with a table surface that isn’t totally flat. There’s a great tip on how to get perfectly flush jointed cuts for building panels on a saw blade that isn’t at a perfect right angle, and tons of other great stuff on how to get precise, reliable results on a lower end saw.

Caleb Kraft from MakeZine has a review of the Monport 20w fiber laser. This is a laser engraver whose primary function is to engrave onto metal – any kind of metal. Aluminum, steel, brass, titanium, and probably a few others. Since there’s no massive gantry to move about, the engraving is able to happen really quickly since there’s just a pair of dynamic mirrors to redirect the laser beam. These have been massively expensive in the past, but the prices are dropping pretty rapidly – the one being tested here is a little under $3000 – still expensive, but a lot better than they used to be. Also, I’d never realized they were called fiber lasers because the laser gets to the galvo head by way of a fiber optic cable.

Desktop Makes has a video on how to design and print these folding, flat print building designs. The walls all print out as a single piece, and then fold to form a box that’s then held in place by the baseplate. He shows how to create the basic design, the parametric brick texture, and then adding features like doors and windows. It’s packed with a ton of great tips I’ve never seen before in working with Fusion, and I think you could pick up some great tools for working on other projects.

If you loved the Aliens book nook and wanted to design your own scifi or fantasy diorama, Jen and Norm from Tested have a great video how to light miniatures and dioramas. Jen shows off a ton of different lighting techniques for her spooky house model, with diffused lighting, creating hidden spotlights to cast colors on objects, several techniques of edge lighting to create different effects, and recessed lighting to create silhouettes in foreground elements. If you’ve ever thought about creating lighting effects, there’s a ton of great techniques in here to pick up on.

For this week’s Digikey spotlight, we’ve got another great video in their Another Teaching Moment series and it’s all about different kinds of diodes. There’s some different performance parameters in diodes from Standard Diodes, Schottky Diodes, Silicon Carbide, super barrier, there’s a lot to consider here – and that’s just for the standard diode types! I’ll admit that there’s still a ton I don’t know about different types of electronics components, but this is a great introduction to some of the options out there.

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show! I hope you enjoyed it – we had sort of an unintentional theme of scifi props and dioramas this time around. What sort of scene would you love to create in a book nook? Let us know down in the comments – and sign up to the maker update email list so you get the show sent to you with bonus links and all the good stuff. Big thanks to Digikey for making the show possible, and you for watching it. Take care, we’ll see you soon.