This week on Maker Update: plunging to new depths, remembering Sanjay Mortimer, a birdsong freeform circuit, mech controllers, lightning infill, and how to make paint out of milk.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.261]++

-=Project of the Week=-

DIY Submarine by DIY Perks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUba126uzvU

-=News=-

10,000,000 Arduinos Sold
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjim3G95vIk

Remembering Sanjay Mortimer
https://e3d-online.com/blogs/news/sanjaymortimer

-=More Projects=-

Laura Kampf Cupholder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AT0VP8bpRM

Chirping Bird Freeform Pendant by NanoRobotGeek
https://www.instructables.com/Free-Formed-Solar-Chirping-Bird-Pendant-Using-0603/

Steel Battalion Controller Adapter by SantiagoSaldana
https://hackaday.io/project/182810-steel-battalion-controller-teensy-adapter

-=Tips & Tools=-

Making Milk Paint by George Romanov
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0AxL4PFDrg

Cura 4.12 with Lightning Infill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjFRT6Txn3U

Maker Invent Calendar by Makezine
https://make.co/maker-invent-calendar/

Stay Creative by Maker Monster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntNKsiQZ5Y8

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

How to Calculate Resistance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_32YEi6ji5k

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update: plunging to new depths, remembering Sanjay Mortimer, a birdsong freeform circuit, mech controllers, lightning infill, and how to make paint out of milk.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner, and I hope you had a restful, or maybe productive week off while we took a short break. We’ve got another great show for you so let’s check out the project of the week.

Have you ever thought about how submarines work – I mean really thought about it? Sure, when an object is less dense than the volume of water it displaces, it will float, and if it isn’t, it sinks – which is why when you have a heavy object like a ship made of steel, it can float as long as it has a nice big pocket of air in it. But if you compress that pocket of air, it becomes more dense, and it’ll sink into the water.

James from DIY Perks is taking this little scientific exploration to its logical conclusion – building his own remote control submarine. There’s no shortage of projects like this – just look at pretty famous stuff like OpenROV. But normally they’re just neutrally buoyant and get around using a set of thrusters and some fins to adjust their direction in the water. James’s design works like an actual submarine – it uses these huge syringes as the ballast tanks, and compresses them using a pair of geared motors. It moves about laterally using an array of water pumps that work like thrusters.

As is typical of James’s builds, there’s really nothing fancy going on here other than his ability to problem solve. The battery pack is just a series of 18650’s in an acrylic housing secured with some zip ties. The ballast motors are these geared DC motors you’ve seen in other projects – though he scavenges the control board from a servo motor to make it easier to control using an RC transmitter. He’s basically turning it into a really long throw linear servo.

Also, check out how he’s made a waterproof on-off switch. A pair of reed switches open and close a latching relay – so all he needs to do is wave a strong magnet over the on switch to turn it on – and the other to turn it off again.

Ok, maybe you won’t go following this video as a guide to building your own remote control submarine, but maybe you can use a handful of these hacks in some of your future projects. At the end of the video he tests it out at some local ponds and canals, and its worth sticking around, just to see all of his clever work pay off.

Now for the news, while we were on break, Arduino sold their ten millionth Uno controller board. This is the original arduino you know and love, and is probably the first microcontroller you learned to program for. To celebrate, they released a limited run of the Uno in a mini form factor. It has the same pinout as the original uno, and it’s packed in on a PCB that’s around one third the size. The PCB is black with gold printing, with a USB-C interface for power and programming. These will probably be in pretty high demand, but you can get your pre-order in now if you want to get your hands on one.

And, sadly last week we saw the passing of Sanjay Mortimer. Sanjay is best known as one of the co-founders of E3D – makers of some very excellent, high quality extruders and hot ends for 3d printers. More than that, he’s remembered for his infectious curiosity and endless kindness – he was always eager to talk to anyone about their shared passion for 3d printing, and his work can be found in countless 3d printer designs, maybe even the one on your workbench. If you have a special memory of Sanjay you’d like to share, E3D has set up a special Discord server for people to chat about his passing. You can find the link for that down in the description.

Moving on, we’ve got a couple more projects to talk about. Have you ever had something break on you, and instead of just fixing it, you completely rebuilt it? That’s exactly what happened with the cupholder in Laura Kampf’s car. It broke, as old plastic things tend to do, so she replaced it with an entirely new center console built from scratch.

There’s a rolltop compartment featuring that same Tambour technique that Simone Giertz used a few weeks ago for her puzzle table, and I love this phone holder/charging panel and a little gooseneck lamp to make stuff easier to see, but keeping the light out of the driver’s eyes. Its also great to see her using a cardboard prototype to kick the whole project off.

Over on Instructables, I found this gorgeous freeform circuit pendant by NanoRobotGeek. The circuit is composed of a 74HC14 IC and a number of resistors and capacitors to form an array of four oscillators – producing a sound that resembles a chirping bird. To keep everything as compact as possible, he built the entire circuit out of 0603 surface mount components, which made this even tricker to build than your typical freeform circuit. There’s a small solar cell to power the pendant so there’s no need for a battery. You’ll probably get tired of the sound pretty quickly, but there’s no denying how gorgeous this compact design is.

On hackaday I found this project by Santiago Saldana to adapt the controller for Steel Battalion to work with standard USB Xinput. You’d be forgiven if you don’t remember Steel Battalion. It was a game for the original Xbox – and it came with this massive controller with twin sticks, a massive array of switches and buttons, pedals, and an eject button with a safety cover. Impressive all around, but it only ever worked with one game. Until now. Using some clever coding on a teensy 3.6, it can now be used as a standard controller on windows. They demo the controller on a game called Vox Machinae, a similar mech game. If you happen to have one of these in your basement, maybe give this one a try.

Time for some tips and tools, I was this many days old when I learned that you can make paint out of milk. In this frankly gorgeous video by George Romanov, he shows how you can combine skimmed milk solids with pigment and slaked lime and a bit of water to make paint. It doesn’t produce the most even color, so this isn’t a replacement for stuff you can buy, but if you’re looking for a rustic, vintage look, this might just do the trick.

The popular 3d printing slicer Cura just released version 4.12, and with it comes a new infill pattern called lightening. This is a completely different approach to thinking about infill. If the object you’re printing doesn’t need to be mechanically strong, you could potentially print it as completely hollow and just relying on the outer shell walls. The problem is that eventually you need some kind of internal structure to support the top layers so they don’t just get printed in midair. This is where lightning infill comes in – think of it like tree supports, but for the inside of your model – they begin on the interior walls of your model, and as they extend out, they also branch out to support the top layers of your print. It won’t make your models stronger since they’re still hollow, but you’ll use a lot less filament to print them.

Make Magazine is continuing their tradition of the Maker Invent calendar. This is basically a virtual version of a traditional advent calendar – as the days count down to christmas, you get a new link to holiday themed projects, guides, videos and deals. So far there’s a 20% discount for a solidworks license, and a fun guide to making your own Christmas Story style leg lamp and plenty more.

And finally we have a great video from Maker Monster on how to get out of that creative lurch. Pretty much any project you work on is going to have a low point – a problem that gets you stuck or kills your enthusiasm, or you just get distracted from it. These are pretty easy to get through, but as he points out, every project you do in a series is part of a bigger project, and when you hit the doldrums in that bigger project, that’s when things get dangerous. This is when it gets really easy to just give up. He offers some great strategies on breaking out of that rut, like showing up to do work even when you don’t have a project, or when in doubt, tidy up. If you feel a winter creative funk creeping in on you, keep this one bookmarked.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight, we’ve got a brand new video in their Another Teaching Moment series about calculating resistor values. When your circuit is set up in series, its pretty simple – just add up all the resistor values and that’s your total resistance. But when your circuit is in parallel, things get trickier. This video shows you how to plan for that, but also points you towards Digikey’s online resistance calculator, so you don’t have to.

Alright, and that is going to do it for this week’s show – I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, give us that thumbs up, leave a comment, and sign up for the Maker Update email list so you won’t miss the next one. We’ve got a bit of a schedule changeup this month – I’ll be back with you next week, and then later in the month Donald and I are going to be on a show together where we break down our favorite projects of the whole year. In the meantime, big thanks to Digikey for making this show possible, and to you for watching. Take care, and we’ll see you soon.