This week on Maker Update, from zero to robot arm, the return of the Hackaday Supercon, a 3d printed sewing machine, rolling tape measures, repairing threads, and printing glass on your FDM printer.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.292]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Scratch Built Robot Arm by Jeremy Fielding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XasThxf_YGo

-=News=-

Hackaday Supercon 2022
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/18/the-2022-hackaday-supercon-is-on-and-the-call-for-proposals-is-open/

-=More Projects=-

3d Printed Sewing Machine by Fraens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2U4lxzaf48

Digital Measuring Wheel by AGBarber
https://www.instructables.com/Digital-Measuring-Wheel/

Smart Water Bubbles Lamp by DIY_MVB
https://www.instructables.com/Smart-WATER-BUBBLES-LAMP/

Geonosis Battle Diorama by Boylei Hobby Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHJa7RH1EUE

-=Tips & Tools=-

How to Print Glass by Rygar1432
https://www.printables.com/model/15310-how-to-print-glass

Best Thread Repair by Project Farm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jknMrFOGMOQ

Magnetic Connector by Adafruit
https://www.adafruit.com/product/5469

Five Tools to Make With Your CNC by carbide 3d
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg3ooNALpZw

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

MyLists – Parts List Management
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA919Rqj6kA

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update, from zero to robot arm, the return of the Hackaday Supercon, a 3d printed sewing machine, rolling tape measures, repairing threads, and printing glass on your FDM printer.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner, I hope you’re all doing great, staying cool and working on fun projects. Recently I’ve been building a ton of picture frames in different sizes, and appreciating the benefits of using assembly-line methods of working – it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the process. We’ve got an awesome show for you, so let’s not waste any time checking out the project of the week.

This one’s been a long time coming, but you have to check out Jeremy Fielding’s home built industrial robot arm now that its finally complete. Maybe its just me and my personal fondness for motion control camera systems, but I’ve wanted an industrial robot arm ever since I learned about Bot & Dolly, but never imagined that it was possible to build one on my own.

Which is not to suggest that Jeremy just knocked this out in a weekend. He’s been doggedly pursuing this one for over a year and a half. And while he was able to bring all of his existing knowledge as an engineer to the table, he still had dozens and dozens of challenges to overcome – which is to be expected for any project, let alone anything that’s this complex. This robot combines a little bit of everything – engineering, machining, electronics, motor control, software design, the whole lot.

The real surprise was Jeremy revealing that he had never actually seen an industrial robot arm in person until he was invited by a few companies to learn their own software control systems. Maybe that can be helpful to some since they can take a more blue-sky approach to design and problem solving, but its still impressive to consider all the problems he managed to solve without a direct reference.

This robot – this project is nothing short of jaw dropping – one of those lifetime achievement projects. The video itself is more of a final build montage of the project, and its more satisfying than directly educational – but if you want to drill down into the nuts and bolts, Jeremy has several videos documenting the entire process. But as an inspiration this really can’t be beat – of having a vision for a thing you want, and pursuing it through all of the challenges and finally arriving at the result you want is one of the best feelings you can have as a maker. Don’t take it from me, just listen to Jeremy on this one.

Time for some news, after a few year hiatus, the Hackaday Supercon is back! Set for November 4th, 5th and 6th in Pasadena California, this will be the first live and in-person Supercon event since 2019. There’s still plenty more information to be released about badges and tickets in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, the call for presenters is currently open. They’re accepting proposals for 20 and 45 minutes talks, and the opportunity for that will remain open until August 18th. Get on it if you’re interested.

Time for more projects, I was blown away by this DIY, 3d printed sewing machine by Fraens. Also I’m just going to apologize now because I probably butchered that pronunciation. Anyhow whether you’ve been stitching things together for years or never sat down at a Singer, you have to be impressed by the design of this thing. Every part of every mechanism of a standard sewing machine is on display here, so you not only get a functional tool, but you also get to marvel at how it works. This stitch hook alone is just a work of art, and getting to see it in action is nothing short of mesmerizing. If you want to start sewing, you’re probably better off just buying a sewing machine – they’re pretty cheap these days.

But if you want to build one of these, they provide all of the 3d printed files for you to make your own over on Printables and Thingiverse. I’m guessing you’re on your own to make all the metal parts though. This thing is rad, and I’m glad it exists. This maker has a bunch of other 3d printable versions of traditional machines – I’m willing to bet we’ll be seeing more of their work in the future.

On Instructables, I found this Digital Measuring Wheel by AGBarber. This is sort of like a traditional measuring tape, but it works by rolling the object along a surface to take a measurement. When you take a look inside, you see the entire rotating part is an internal gear driving a mouse encoder. There’s an OLED DIsplay for a visual readout, a few buttons for mode setting, and an Arduino pro micro running the show. Its an impressive piece of hobbyist industrial design, and there’s even a mode to determine RPM of a spinning object if you press the tool against it.

Also on Instructables, I found this gorgeous bubble lamp by DIY_MVB. It seems simple enough – a fishtank air stone creates the bubbles and some side mounted LED strip illuminates them, but there’s a ton of clever design to take in here – like the 3d printed jigs to help align the plexiglass for assembly, and the servo mechanism for moving the air stone. I’d want to stare at this thing for hours, and if you want to build your own, you can follow the links down in the description.

Finally, from Youtube, I found this video for creating a diorama of the Star Wars battle of Geonosis by Boylei Hobby Time. At first blush, this is your fairly standard diorama using 28mm figurines. But where I was genuinely surprised by this project was the use of these LED filament segments to represent the blaster fire in midair. These are the filament segments that would normally be used in LED versions of Edison bulbs – and you can get them in multiple colors. These seem like a good thing to know about, and could be useful in a number of projects.

Time for some tips and tools, I found this great guide for making mostly transparent FDM prints by Rygar1432 on Printables. I’ve seen a few different versions of this before, but this is the first one I’ve seen that didn’t involve a ridiculous amount of sanding. The trick here is to print with 100% infill, no top and bottom layers, and with an infill pattern that has a consistent direction. If you do all that, and use a properly clear filament, you can get these strikingly transparent 3d prints.

There’s nothing less heart-sinking than destroying the threads of an expensive or irreplaceable part, so this review by the heroes at Project Farm on the best tools and techniques for thread repairs is right on the money. While this is primarily a tool review channel, I never knew until watching this video that threads could be temporarily repaired using stranded copper wire or even loctite. But he goes onto review traditional thread repair tools like helicoils and other repair kits. Hopefully you never need this, but if you do, this should serve you well.

Over on Adafruit I found this 8-pin magnetic connector that you can easily adapt into your own projects. Whether you’re designing a project that requires a hot-swappable interface, or you just need something that can easily break away and reconnect without damaging the part, this seems like it could have a ton of uses. The permanent side has an array of .1 pins that you can solder to any standard perf board,

The folks over at Carbide 3d put together this helpful video on five different tools that you can make if you have access to a CNC Router. There’s some pretty obvious stuff like tool jigs, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a fillet gauge before, or this center finding jig. There’s a lot of cool little tool tips in here that you can make on your own – whether you have a CNC router or not. Check it out.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight, we’ve got a tutorial about MyLists, a parts list manager available on the Digikey Website. Whether you’re trying to organize a bill of materials, prepare a comparison list of similar parts, find substitutes and more. This video offers a thorough guide on organizing your lists, putting the right information front and center, importing from external files, and more. This is a really powerful looking tool.

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show. Thank you so much for being here and watching it. If you enjoyed the show, give us a thumbs up, leave a comment, tell someone about this show if you think they would like it. As always, big thanks to Digikey for making this whole thing possible, and you for watching. Take care, we’ll see you soon.