This week on Maker Update, the joy of flexures, tracking your face with your neck, Rasengan 2.0, air-powered clamp champ, and solder for your solder.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 245]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Flexure joystick for Xbox by Akaki Kuumeri
https://youtu.be/7wZQwBcmanE

-=News=-

Smart necklace could track your detailed facial expressions
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/08/smart-necklace-could-track-your-detailed-facial-expressions

-=More Projects=-

Real Rasengan v2.0 by Allen Pan
https://youtu.be/Jviu_SlW9FI

Making a Pneumatic Powered He Man Clamp by I Like To Make
https://youtu.be/dJNfgvhfSFU

-=Tips & Tools=-

Looping Pliers review
https://kk.org/cooltools/easiest-pliers-for-looping-wire/

The Humble Hard Drive Motor – Great Greeblies by The Smugglers Room
https://youtu.be/cBguDcZjCcU

Best Maker Schools
https://makezine.com/best-maker-schools-2021-from-make-and-newsweek

Desoldering Alloy
https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/08/06/new-video-desoldering-alloy-collins-lab-notes-adafruit-collinslabnotes

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

How Smart Shift Register LEDs Work: NeoPixels
https://youtu.be/PPVi3bI7_Z4

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update, the joy of flexures, tracking your face with your neck, Rasengan 2.0, air-powered clamp champ, and solder for your solder.

Hey, I’m Donald Bell, back with another Maker Update. I hope you’re all doing well and staying safe out there. I’ve got a fun show for you, so let’s get started with the project of the week.

The coolest thing I saw this week was this incredibly engineered, 3D printed joystick by Akaki Kuumeri. The whole thing perfectly snaps directly onto an Xbox controller. And it’s hard to believe, but all the joystick buttons and throttle controls ingeniously translate into mechanical connections to the Xbox controller. 

Now, if you’re having dejavu, about a year ago I covered a similar control Akaki made for a PS4 controller. That one was equally cool and had two sticks and some extra controls managed by strings. 

That said, it looked a little cumbersome, it didn’t have any button controls, and the string connections worked but left a little something to be desired.

What makes this latest design so interesting is that it uses flexure joints. This is a technique we see in 3D printing and laser cutting, similar to living hinges, where you deliberately remove and reinforce material so that it flexes just the way you want. 

Most notably you see this here on the base of the joystick, where 3D printed flexure hinges spring the joystick back into place. No one likes a floppy stick.

But you’ll also notice how he used flexure joints to translate the joystick movements to the thumbstick. It’s pretty slick.

Now for all the button and bumper presses, he’s using a system of rods and ball joints that run right through the center of the stick. This helps to minimize any misfires caused by stick movement.

If that weren’t enough, stick around to the end of the video and you’ll see a separate throttle mechanism he’s made that also uses flexures.

It’s really inspired me to think about designing this way. To make something that’s so mechanically intricate, but entirely 3D printed, with no additional hardware. That’s a cool trick.

And it’s worth noting that he’s just printing with basic PLA here – no crazy filaments, no advanced settings. 

You can find the full video down in the description. He’s also selling the STLs for the design on Etsy for $30 if you want to print your own.

Now for some news. A team led by Cheng Zhang at Cornell University has developed a necklace that can detect your facial expression using only a pair of sensors that point up to your chin. 

The call it NeckFace, which sounds like an old school Batman villain, but the hardware is essentially an IR LED and an IR camera. Using just the light reflected off your chin, the system can calculate what your face is doing with a surprising accuracy. 

It’s a neat idea that could have applications in tracking your mood, or puppeting an avatar of your face in real time. You can find the full video and research paper in the show notes.

Now for more projects. Allen Pan has made an updated take on the first project he ever posted on YouTube — a Naruto LED Rasengan. 

If you’re not familiar, this is the ball of energy attack that’s one of Naruto’s signature moves. Allen recreates it with a spinning disc of LEDs that is then spun around on its axis. 

For a cosplay prop that requires no programming and minimal components, it looks like a fun and approachable project. And unlike the first version, Allen includes files for all the 3D printed pieces so that you can recreate this design perfectly.

Digging deeper into the cartoon cosplay vault, Bob Claggett from I Like to Make Stuff made this giant, pneumatic powered pincher inspired by the character Clamp Champ from the He-Man cartoon series. 

To make it happen, he’s using an air-powered piston with a 7-inch throw. And bear in mind that in all his years making things, this is Bob’s first time working with pneumatics. So, it’s interesting to see him out of his comfort zone a little. 

Just like Allen’s LED ball, this is a project with no microcontroller and no programming. There’s just a solenoid switch that turns air on and off.

The real magic is getting the mechanical movement just right, so that the 7 inches of throw turns into a dramatic — hopefully non-lethal — clamping action.

The end result looks great. And really it has me excited to play around with pneumatics for Halloween props, which use a lot of these same ideas. 

Now for some tools and tips. On the Cool Tools channel, I take a look at looping pliers. These are primarily made for placing perfect, accurately sized loops in jewelry wire. But, there’s also applications here for freeform circuit design, animatronics, RC projects, or automata. I also show a trick for creating more of a hairpin shape.

The Smugglers Room has a short video tip on reusing old hard drive motors as greeblies for your sci-fi props. Because so few people open up hard drives to peek inside, they tend not to recognize when these bits get repurposed.

Make magazine and Newsweek have teamed up to create a list of the best Maker schools in higher education. It’s a worldwide list of 200 schools, some are huge universities with well-known engineering programs, but there’s a fair amount of community colleges and trade schools here too. 

Desoldering header pins, or multi-pin components is a real pain. One tip I found this week from Robert Feranec, is a demonstration of how adding more solder to rows like these can help extend cooling time and allow the heat from your iron to flow out across multiple pins so you can gently release them all at once. 

It’s not perfect for every situation. There’s a good chance you’ll make a mess, or fling a hot blob of solder to your face — so proceed with caution, but keep this tip in your back pocket.

Collin Cunningham at Adafruit has a similar tip, but adds a special sauce called Desoldering Alloy. This is a solder formulation designed to cool slowly. You slather it on, heat it up, and you should have an extra second or two to remove your components before things seize up again.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out their latest video on how the smart shift registers work inside of Neopixel LEDs. 

If you’re like me, and you’re comfortable programming addressable LEDs, but fuzzy on how exactly a single data pin can be used to define colors and animations across an infinite length of lights — this video provides a great explanation with graphics that cleared up a lot of the mystery for me.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumb’s up or leave a comment. I’d be curious to know if there’s some prop or special effect from a cartoon that you’d want to make. You can get on the Maker Update email list, so you never miss a show. A huge thanks to Digi-Key for making this show possible. I’ll see you soon.