This week on Maker Update: a skeleton with a drinking problem, upcycling vinyl signs, what happens when a mouse and a controller love each other very much, fake windows, Tinker tips, and adding sounds to your videos.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 249]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Endless Drinking Skeleton by Wicked Makers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXzt-aeNq7o

-=More Projects=-

Dry Bag from Vinyl Banney by Laura Kampf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0emjIYCk_Y

Versatile Phone Camera Mount by MrBalleng
https://www.instructables.com/Short-Form-Camera-Mount/

Fake Basement Windows by I Like to Make Stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDeEuzKXCH4

Mouse Controller by Tech Yesterday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kerK52IRGjs

-=Tips & Tools=-

Sound in Your Videos by Crafsman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yuo4ALLz2A

Donald’s 22 Tips for Working Faster in Tinkercad
https://blog.tinkercad.com/22-tips-for-working-faster-in-tinkercad

How to use Gauge Blocks by Make Something
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDEbDRdLi8E

Metal Weathering by Off-Earth Cosplay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfNyyS-G40E

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

The Great Search: SP4T Switches!
https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/08/31/the-great-search-sp4t-slide-switch-thegreatsearch-digikey-adafruit-digikey-adafruit/

Transcript

This week on Maker Update: A skeleton with a drinking problem, Upcycling vinyl signs, what happens when a mouse and a controller love each other very much, fake windows, Tinker tips, and adding sounds to your videos.

Hello, and welcome back to Maker Update! I’m Tyler Winegarer and I hope you’re doing great – it’s good to see you. It’s September! We made it to September! Give yourselves a pat on the back – The air is starting to get a bit cooler, the leaves are coming down from the trees, and it’s high time to get busy on Halloween projects – so let’s check out the project of the week.

As maker channels go, Wicked Makers is pretty much your one-stop shop for DIY Halloween Props & projects – but with their latest design, they’ve really hit it out of the park. This is a Pirate Skeleton drinking his eternal guzzle of wine – and the best part is, it’s a fountain installation.

If you give this project a good squint, it’s pretty easy to tell what’s going on here – the wine barrel acts as the reservoir for the fountain. A pump moves the water through a tube that runs up the skeletons arm and into the downward-turned wine bottle, which then pours into the skeletons mouth, down its throat, and back into the reservoir.

Just because the problem is fairly simple doesn’t mean its execution is, and there’s a ton of great tips all throughout this video – like how to use wood stain to make your skeleton look more aged, how to pose it in exactly the way you want using heat guns, saws and hot glue, and weathering the the clothing and the bottle so it doesn’t look all fresh off the rack.

Though one of my favorite tips is looking to your local goodwill for halloween decor. In the interest of transparency, Wicked Makers’s Video is sponsored by Goodwill, but it turns out they’re a great and economical resource for halloween decor and props, and a left-field alternative to your typical crafts store. Whether you need weird clothing for your spooky scarecrow or some second hand speakers for some sound ambiance, definitely check out your local thrift or salvage store.

More Projects! Speaking of salvage, Laura Kampf has a new video about how she made this waterproof dry bag out of an old vinyl sign. After cutting out the pattern, she’s using an industrial sewing machine to stitch it all together and attach some fabric carry straps. I know it’s been a while since we’ve had conferences and expos to generate endless resources of reinforced vinyl signage, but you can probably still find this stuff around if you know where to look, and who to ask.

There’s a ton of clever products out there to help you attach your phone to fence posts, street signs, or whatever else you might want to use as an in-situ tripod. But on instructables I found this design by MrBalleng that might be the clever-est. This is just a simple loop of steel braided cable that’s passed through a couple of 3d-printed bits that carry some fairly large neodymium magnets.

The magnets not only can secure the mount to metal structures, or even drywall screws, but can also provide enough friction to keep the cable secure. The Cable loop at the end can be used to hold the phone through use of simple loops like this lark’s head knot. It looks like you’ll have to think pretty creatively to get the most use out of this, but once you get your head around it, you attach your phone in a ton of different situations.

Bob and Josh at I Like To Make Stuff have this great project on creating fake windows for a basement bedroom for Josh’s son. It sounds silly until you’ve dealt with it, but being deprived of natural light over time can have a pretty serious effect on your mood. They’re using these large LED lighting panels and mounting them into a wall – and then framing them just like you would a window. They even put them on a timer so they dim up and down with the natural daylight cycle. This doesn’t quite provide all the benefits of having access to natural light, but they definitely make a basement room feel a lot more inviting in the daytime, and should make it a more pleasant place to be for long hours.

On Youtube I found this video series by Tech Yesterday about their hunt to make the perfect game controller for first person shooters. There’s been a longstanding divide between controller players and keyboard and mouse payers, and they just want the best of both worlds. In their latest interaction, they’ve added the optical sensor from a mouse to a controller – at the base of this spherical recess in the controller – and the user manipulates it using this dish-shaped thumb pad.

It’s good for fine accuracy, for gross movements like quick turnarounds, it’s not great – which is why there’s another analog stick on the back of the controller. There have been a ton of different approaches over the years to bring mouse control to game controllers, like the Steam controller, but this looks like the best yet – and its great to see it coming from makers.

Time for some tips and tools, The Crafsman Steady Craftin’ youtube channel just dropped a fantastic video on improving the sound in your videos. The front half of this video is all about adding sound effects to your videos – a step that I admittedly often neglect. There’s a ton of great tips on sources for creating foley sounds, but the back half is really where it’s at – understanding microphone terminology, why recordings sound the way they do, how to make sound sources seem distant, and how to remove unwanted sounds, like when a garbage truck drives by during your recording. As someone who has always championed audio production in videos I love this one – don’t miss it.

Our very own Donald Bell just dropped this post about 22 tips to get you started with Tinkercad. I don’t know about you, but I tend to get stuck the rut of my favorite CAD tool – and when I run up against its limitations, it’s really disheartening. Tinkercad is one of the many free alternatives out there, and has a huge degree of flexibility in your modeling options. Keep this one in your back pocket – its almost guaranteed to save you someday.

David Piccuito of Make Something has a great tip on how to use Gauge Blocks in your workshop. You’ve heard us go on and on about 1-2-3 blocks and, these are similar – they’re machined pieces of metal that you can reliably use to set up your tools in your shop – but they come in a broader variety of measurements. They seem simple enough, but he shows a ton of different ways to use them that might not be obvious. Like he always says, check it.

And finally we have a fantastic tutorial about weathering metal from Off Earth Cosplay. His technique starts with a base metallic coat, and then working in alternating layers of light and dark using a very dry brush. He later uses a toothpick dipped in alcohol to scratch away some of the effect to create a different kind of wear effect. If you’re looking to recreate beat-up metal, this is where to look.

For this week’s DigiKey Spotlight, we’re checking out the latest in The Great Search series by Lady Ada and Adafruit. This one is all about slide switches. If you’ve ever wondered what all the designations mean – Double-Pole, Single throw, Single Pole Double throw, this video begins with a great explainer on what those terms mean. She also reminds folks to always read the data sheet since the order of the pins might not match the switch position. Personally I’m a big fan of toggle switches, but the satisfaction of any mechanical switch just can’t be beat.

Alright and that is going to do it for this week’s show – thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, give us a thumbs up, hit subscribe, and leave us a comment! I want to know if you’ve got any halloween projects of your own in the works. For me, I’ve always wanted to have a replica of this sign from Beetlejuice and I really want to get it done for halloween – even if its a miniature version of it. As always huge thanks to the spooky but helpful folks at Digikey for having all the parts and making this show possible. Take care out there, and I’ll see you soon.