This week on Maker Update: a necklace with a staring problem, a laser powered mosquito swatter, moire play, and a giant 3D printed mechanical hand.

This week on Maker Update: a tough nut to crack, hand-made computers, top tips for perfect prints, flexures, supersized switches, and making tensegrity sculptures out of humans.

This week on Maker Update, a stargazing microcontroller, frictionless gears, voxelated displays, hand lettering, and a Hakko soldering station on the cheap.

This week on Maker Update, the Adam Savage soldering iron station, Pigeon robotics, cat food control, glowing black plastic, giant LEDs, and the good kind of Fubar. 

Tools:

Aven Adjustable Circuit Board Holder
http://amzn.to/2FB0s2f

Hakko Flush Cutters
http://amzn.to/2GO1nM0

This week on Maker Update, catch with a robot, Arduino’s IoT cloud, sorting screws, making fabric, exploding darth, and the anti-drawing machine.

We’re going to take a quick look at three very different options in portable soldering irons. The point here is really just to give you a demo of each on the same table and you can draw your own conclusions on what might work best for you. 

This is the Hakko FX-901 portable soldering iron (available on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2sh7g0t). It runs off 4 AA batteries that you can swap out really fast with this removable cartridge design. I use rechargeables in mine and I get over an hour of use out of it before I notice the temperature drops. Alkaline batteries will run hotter, but not last as long.

[Editors’ note: This same tutorial was originally published as an Instructable. I’m publishing it here for posterity.]

The quality and design of project boards has become so good in recent years, that I almost feel bad putting them together. In this guide, I’m going to show you a simple soldering technique that can make the back of your boards look as nice as the front. You’ll learn how to make perfectly smooth, consistent solder joints that look impossibly tidy.

This week on Maker Update, a zoetrope and a fidget spinner make a baby, an SLS printer from Formlabs, a Raspberry Pi weather chamber, component carnage, and a tiny OLED Pi screen. Our featured Cool Tool is the Hakko FX-901 cordless soldering iron.