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.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep.262]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Explosive Nutcracker by Stuff Made Here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1RaC7YJ7sk

-=More Projects=-

Human Tensegrity Structure by Shang Ke
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08JMGdNDHCE

Handmade Computer by JDH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaGZapAGvwM

Motorized Lightbulb Changer by Mattwach
https://www.instructables.com/Motorized-Light-Bulb-Changer/

Resetting Flexure Mechanism by Amy Makes Stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7PDB854p3Q

-=Tips & Tools=-

The Best Soldering Iron? By Thomas Sanladerer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2sPDQeGlj8

How to Get Perfect 3d Prints by Makers Muse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPAXeBuq9qU

Pi Zero 2 WiFi Antenna by Brian Dorey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZqaKZLIqFg

Giant Mechanical Key from Kailh
https://www.adafruit.com/product/5306

Adam Savage’s Favorite Media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6ZRDCG1ZDA

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

The Great Search: USB to Serial Converters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyZY5tfZxoA

-=Transcript=-

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

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner, and I hope you’re doing great. I hope you’re finding all the time you need to finish up all the gifts you’re making for people for the holiday season. we’ve got another great show for you so let’s kick it off with the project of the week.

Shane from Stuff Made Here has assembled a pretty incredible list of insane projects over the course of the year – auto-aiming pool cues, chainsawing robots, and walls that paint themselves – and when I saw that his latest video was about a ridiculously overpowered nutcracker, I was prepared to be, well, maybe a little underwhelmed. I mean, how impressive can a nutcracker be?

It turns out, really, really impressive. Shane’s nutcracker has a 2” diameter steel piston that can crush – pretty much anything. The piston is powered by four pistol blanks that are normally used to drive nails into concrete. In this application it’s delivering around 80 thousand pounds of force – that’s about as much as a house weighs. It has a special exhaust valve to allow the hot gasses escape once the piston is fired. It has a safety pin that prevents it from firing unexpectedly. If you’ve ever wanted to see a masterstroke of overengineering, this is the project.

Shane spends a good chunk of the video describing how he engineered the nutcracker so it doesn’t blow itself apart whenever its used. If you ever took a calculus class and wondered where you would actually ever use it, you use it when you need to figure out how thick you need the walls of your steel nutcracker to be so it doesn’t turn into a hand grenade when you use it. Also I didn’t realize that I needed a fabrication montage set to Tchaikovsky until I saw this video.

Of course, no project is perfect right out of the gate, and that definitely applies here. The tolerances of the breech weren’t as tight as they could have been, so that let some of the force from the blanks escape – and there was nowhere for the explosive gasses to go after the charge, so that needed to be fixed as well. But once it was working properly, it was able to crush just about anything that went into its jaws – walnuts, lego minifigs, glass marbles, a steel nut, pretty much anything but a hardened bearing. Its an impressive video, and a great way to cap off a year of amazing projects from Shane.

More projects! Remember last year, when it seemed like everyone was obsessed with making Tensegrity structures? In a recent video from Shang Ke, she asked the question no one else did: Can you make a Tensegrity, out of people? The exercise actually does a pretty good job of helping you understand how the structures actually work – how they’re held together and how they’re supported by what otherwise looks like floating pieces of string. Of course, people are a pretty poor material for Tensegrities, since they’ll eventually want to do something else with their afternoon – but its a fun and educational video all the same.

When you hear someone say “I’m building a computer” you normally think of someone buying a cpu, some memory, a gpu and then jamming them all into a motherboard. Normally. But JDH had a different idea in his head, and built an entire computer from scratch – its all made of rudimentary ICs, a whole lot of jumper wires and a lot of breadboards.l Of course, there’s a massive amount of debugging in a project like this but he ends up with a computer than can output to a monitor, he can write software for it, the whole lot.

Do you have that one light fixture in your house that leaves you wondering how on earth you change the bulbs in it? Instructables user Mattwach has one of those, and when the bulbs started to go, he needed a solution. His solution involves a painter’s pole, a motor, and one of those light bulb changer grabby things. Some 3d printed parts allow the motor and grabber to be at a right angle to the painters pole, and an analog stick lets him control the motor from the either end of the pole. The crazy thing is that he doesn’t use an off the shelf microcontroller board like an Arduino or a Trinket, he just uses an ATTiny85 IC and an H-Bridge and just makes his own. The video goes into an incredible amount of depth, and it’s a long way to go to just change a light bulb, but its a great payoff.

A while back we introduced the flat flexture designs from Amy Makes Stuff. One of her goals with that original project was to easily communicate to the rest of the house whether or not the cat has been fed. The flaw in the design was that advancing the day didn’t reset the two feeding toggles. With a new sliding mechanism to the rescue, it now handles both tasks at the same time. Part of the video also involves a review of the CNC machine she used to make the flexture. It’s a fairly affordable machine, but it certainly has its limitations.

Time for some tips and tools, Thomas Sanladerer took a break from talking about 3d printing to give you his review of a collection of soldering irons and stations. In the shootout he reviews portable solutions like the Pinecil and the TS-80P, The popular Hakko FX-888D, the Weller WE1010 and the Ersa I-Con Nano. He reviews the ergonomics of each machine, the user interface, as well as heating performance and speed. You can also detect some review inspiration from Project Farm if you’re paying close attention.

Speaking of 3d printing, Angus from makers Muse has released his ultimate guide to perfect 3d prints. Whether you’re struggling with your first layer, or stringing, or part size accuracy, Angus tackles each printing issue on its own and gives you some great advice on how to improve each one. His goal is to help get anyone who watches the video to be able to print his clearance castle, which is his own torture test print that features a number of interlocking, print-in-place moving parts.

From hackaday I found this guide to adding an external wifi antenna to the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W by Brian Dorey.If you’re disappointed with the Pi’s WiFi performance this might just be what you need. There’s a few solder points on the board that enable you to install a UFL antenna connector. The first thing you’ll need to do is cut the traces on the pi to the existing wifi antenna – and then once the UFL connector is soldered on, you can attach an antenna. The soldering you need to do is all surface mount, but the pads are large enough that with a steady hand you should be able to do the job with just a standard pencil-style soldering iron.

Just when you maybe were thinking that the mechanical keyboard/macropad craze was getting a little tired, now you can supersize those projects. Over on Adafruit I found these giant mechanical key switches from Kailh. They’re just like regular mechanical key switches, but 4 times larger in every dimension. There’s three different colors with three different switch actuation styles. They can make fantastic fidget toys, or for making comically large macro pads, or anything else you’d need a supersized keyboard key for. Each one is $20 so they’re fairly inexpensive.

And finally, from Tested, as part of their year-end favorite things videos, Adam Savage talks about the media that got him through 2021 – his favorite youtube channels, podcasts, movies, television shows and books. The whole series of video is full of great recommendations, but hearing him talk about his favorite machining channels, his love of the Ologies podcast, or just waxing about his love of Ghostbusters Afterlife is a nice way to close out the year.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight we have the latest video from Adafruit in their The Great Search series. This one is all about USB to serial converters that you might want to use in a project, and of course since we’re still very much in the dark times of the chipocalypse, LadyAda gives you some great tips on how to find components that you can actually get your hands on, as well as will perform the task you need them to do.

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show, and for the normal episodes of Maker Update for 2021! As I mentioned last week, we’’ve got one more show for you, where Donald and I both talk about our favorite projects, our best tips and tools, and some of the maker trends we saw over the course of the year. That will be coming to you right before the end of the year. In the meantime I hope you enjoyed this episode, if you did, give us a thumbs up, leave us a comment, and sign up for the Maker Update email list so you never miss a show. Huge thanks, as always to Digikey for making this show possible and to you for watching. Take care, and we’ll see you in the new year.