This week on Maker Update: A pool game you can’t lose, a saw blade bicycle, a modern desk, cardboard whales, extra GPIO and casting tips from The Crafsman.

++Show Notes [Maker Update #221]++

-=Project of the Week=-

Automatic Pool Cue by Stuff Made Here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsTTXYxydOE

-=News=-

-=More Projects=-

Sawblade Bicycle by The Q
https://youtu.be/y_bwKW6V1lw

Floating Desk with Secret Compartment by DIY CReators
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vk4RuYIxROo

ESP32 Asteroids by Atomic 14
https://hackaday.com/2021/02/18/laser-galvos-and-an-esp32-recreate-old-school-asteroids/

Denture Bit Holder w/ Magnets by iPlop
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4745852

Cardboard Whale by XaioQianFeng
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHrh_jVjxqE

-=Tips & Tools=-

Make 3d prints look like Wood by Off-World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NBW7uJnJGo

Adafruit GPIO Extender by Kattni Rembor
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-aw9523-gpio-expander-and-led-driver

Avoid Bubbles in casts without a Pressure Pot by Crafsman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOuLRMgDzVs

The perfect pencil (almost) by Make Something
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37QXtOToaZE

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Basics of Circuit Protection
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4ZQ_ePbPmg

Transcript

This week on Maker Update: A pool game you can’t lose, a sawblade bicycle, a modern desk, cardboard whales, extra GPIO and casting tips from the Crafsman.

Hello and welcome back to maker update. I’m tyler winegarner,I hope you’re doing well and staying warm wherever you are. We’ve been getting a lot of snow here but, we’re used to it, and I hope you’re dealing with it well wherever you are. We’ve got a fantastic show for you with a bunch of great projects, so let’s start with the project of the week.

I love playing pool, but like so many of us, I’m pretty lousy at it. Luckily so is Shane from Stuff Made Here – and that’s why he built a pool cue that can execute any shot flawlessly. We’ve featured a few of his projects previously on this show, but this might be the most complex one we’ve ever talked about. 

There’s a lot of layers to solving this problem. A camera mounted above the pool table captures the current state of the table. To help square up the image he’s placed fiduciary tags around the edge as a reference. The image of the camera is fed into an algorithm that then determines the best play possible. That’s great, but you still need to actually take the shot with your flawed human arms.

That’s where this weird robotic pool cue comes in. To correct for all your human errors, the tip of the cue is mounted on what’s called a stewart platform, which is a specific arrangement of six linear actuators that lets the tip of the cue shift and pivot around. A robotic gas-powered piston is able to strike the ball with the exact amount of force needed to sink the shot. A projector mounted above the table shows the proper shot to take in real time, so he knows where to place the cue so the robots can handle everything else.

Like with any problem this complex, it turned out there were a million places where it could go wrong – camera distortions, servo flaws, slipping belts, and even some old code was throwing him off. But once he got them all right, the results were extremely satisfying. What’s more, he realized that he can share the image of the table online, allowing him to play a game of socially distanced pool with friends – he uses a regular cue, while his friends can line up their own shots virtually while the robot cue executes that shot. It’s an amazing project, and a fun watch.

More projects! I know it’s been snowing and freezing in a lot of places around the US, and even my local river is frozen over, but I don’t think I’m brave enough to try this bicycle, with sawblades for wheels, for riding on ice. In this video by The Q. Replacing normal bicycle wheels with these giant sawblades is easier said than done, but you get to see the whole process of how he makes these modified hubs to mount the new bladed wheels while retaining the brakes and chainrings – and all to realize that the blades themselves just cut the ice. After welding on some wider teeth, it rides like a dream. Or, an icycycle.

After a long break, Glen from DIY Creators just released this video on how he made this floating wall desk. Like so much of the work he does, this is an elegant modernist design, but he shows you how to build the entire thing with just simple tools – a circular saw, drill, orbital sander and a jigsaw. There’s some LED accent lighting behind the wall mounted panel, and the main shelf has a hidden compartment in the back panel, in case you need a secret place to store valuables. It’s also a testament to the strength of french cleat systems. I recently hung a cabinet with a french cleat, and I guess I don’t need to worry anymore if it’s strong enough.

Over on Hackaday I discovered this project by Atomic14 where he’s recreating the classic arcade game Asteroids using a laser projector and an ESP32. Asteroids was originally played on a vector display so this is a perfect system to run the game in this modern form. I know how rudimentary the computers in classic arcade systems are, so I shouldn’t be impressed that this game can run on a microcontroller, but I am.

If you like to combine your tool storage with a little bit of body horror, check out this denture bit holder that I found over on thingiverse by iplop. It’s a storage container for your driver bits, but it looks like a human mouth- only the bts are the teeth. The magnets to help secure the bits are embedded in the print halfway through. If you want to make sure that no one ever steals your tools, this might just do the trick. Ugh.

Finally we have another gorgeous, meditative build by XiaoQianFeng. We’re all guilty of ordering off of amazon a little more than we should, especially under current pandemic conditions – and while the cardboard boxes recycle well enough, its better when you can turn it into something useful. Instead, she turns it into something beautiful. After soaking the cardboard in water for three days, she uses this oversized mortar & pestle to grind it into a paste and then mixes it with latex to make the coating for this flying space whale sculpture. 

Time for some tips and tools, on the Off-World youtube channel I found this fantastic tip on making 3d prints look like wood. He’s starting with an SLA resin print, but this should work with FDM prints if you take the time to prime and sand to a smooth finish. He starts with a flat brown primer, and then uses copic inks in a few colors and a cheap chip brush to spread the ink in what looks like a wood grain pattern. It’s pretty convincing, and if I’m not mistaken, the pattern looks even better with a worn brush, so maybe this technique is a good use for tired brushes.

If you’ve ever specced out a project and realized the board you want to use doesn’t have enough GPIO for your needs, fret not – this GPIO Expander from Adafruit might be just what you need. This uses the i2c bus to grant you an additional 16 GPIO pins for whatever you need. Because they’re bottlenecked by the I2c bus, their latency is slower than native pins, so use these for interactions where timing isn;t critical. Kattni Rembor has a full guide over on Adafruit.

Craftsman Steady Craftin just dropped a great video on how to avoid bubbles in your resin casts. Normally you’d drop the cast into a pressure pot to pull the bubbles out, but if you don;t have or don’t want one, this is the video for you. He covers how to massage bubbles out by tilting and shaking the mold while its curing, or by breaking the surface tension using baby powder, and a few more tips and techniques. Check it.

From Gareth’s tips tools and shop tales newsletter I learned about this video from Make Something where he spends almost 13 minutes geeking out about pencils. Mechanical pencils, wooden pencils, cheap pencils, expensive pencils and his favorite pencil. It’s a simple tool but arguably the most important one you can carry with you at all times.  He promises several times throughout the video that its going to be boring, but it just isn’t.

For this week’s Digikey Spotlight we’re taking a look at this older video about circuit protection. It covers a wide variety of ways your circuits can be damaged, from electrostatic discharge to lightning strikes. And you’ll also get an overview of the different devices used to protect circuits from damage. Fuses, circuit breakers, surge protectors this video covers how each of them work and what kind of conditions they protect from.

And that is going to do it for this week’s show. Thank you so much for watching. Whether the projects you’re working in are fairly simple or as complex as a robotic pool cue, I hope you got some inspiration or some useful tips out of it. Be sure to tell us about it in the comments, give us a thumbs upland sign up fo the maker update newsletter so you never miss a show. Huge thanks to the folks at Digikey for making this show possible, and for having all the parts. Take care out there, and we’ll see you soon.