This week on Maker Update: a dorm room drone show, a tiny volumetric display, a new look at screen printing, and bullying robots.

This week on Maker Update: bringing your own baby Wall-E to life, Hackaday’s Op Amp challenge, a new twist on the video synthesizer, and adding animations to backlit panels.

This week on Maker Update, the most expensive rip surf ever made, some huge news from Raspberry Pi, thin floating shelves, clever mechanisms, making cut lists and foaming TPU.

There’s an Instructables page up now, collecting all of the work on my cocktail machine for the 2020 Cocktail Robotics Grand Challenge.

I call it the VK-01 Off-World Bartender. It’s a Blade Runner-inspired machine that’s a mix of sci-fi and retro. Every detail I can think of is collected in the Instructable — every line of code, wiring diagram, and 3D design.

I hope it can inspire you to build your own cocktail machine. It’s been a challenging project, but one of my most rewarding yet. It was also a great motivation for becoming more comfortable with coding, 3D design, and exploring the possibilities of working with other makers and artists. I wouldn’t take back a minute of it.

This month on Maker Update: A Robot Xylophone, Adafruit’s Open for Business, Painting with Light, Teletyping with Clue, Texting with Blinka, and the BBC MicroBit grows a tail.

This week on Maker Update, an LED filament clock, a pool noodle robot rover, a scream that screams back at you, a motorized Flippy crawler, 7 vintage toy robot designs you can 3D print, a project packaging generator, and a mini metal chop saw.

Tools: LED Light Weight Magnifier with 5 Lenses
http://amzn.to/2uDdG90

Transcript

For this week’s Cool Tools review, I’m going to show off these wearable magnifying glasses. These run around $14 on Amazon, and by using the link in the video description you help to support my videos and the Cool Tools blog.

I bought these a year ago looking for a way to get a better look at soldering up small stuff. They really are perfect for those times when you’re wiring or painting or glueing up something tiny and delicate. Plus there’s a little LED on the front that helps put a little extra light on things.

This time around, I’m going to show you a tool recommended by Adam Savage on episode 57 of the Cool Tools podcast. This is a spokeshave. You can get one on Amazon for around $35. 

The Kreg Rip-Cut Circular Saw Guide (Amazon link) is a $32 guide for a circular saw. It’s great if you have a small workshop, or no workshop.

If you have a table saw, there’s probably no reason to buy this. But if you have a small garage like mine and you don’t want to surrender the space and money to have a table saw, this and a circular saw are an effective way to accurately break down sheets of wood.