This week on Maker Update, a hover board for witches, lasercut zodiak, a starburst display, thread plotting, wobbling oloids, and interactive trees.

++Show Notes++

-=Project of the Week=-

Making a Magic Witch’s Broom by Make Anything
https://youtu.be/8I-eUvV-u8I

-=More Projects=-

Orrery – a laser cut wood project by Zhao
https://eleccelerator.com/orrery-laser-cut-wood-project/

Custom Starburst Digits by Mangus Tiranus
https://hackaday.io/project/174193-custom-starburst-digits

ThreadPlotter by Shiqing He, and Eytan Adar
https://github.com/LiciaHe/threadPlotter

The Moving OLOID – a Different Pet in Different Times By lopal
https://www.instructables.com/id/The-Moving-OLOID-a-Different-Pet-in-Different-Time/

Heartree by Helen Kwok & Israel Carter
http://shakethatbutton.com/heartree/

-=Tips & Tools=-

Organize your cables in a closet shoe organizer
https://techpod.content.town/episodes/46-the-suborbitable-caterpillar

Adam Savage’s One Day Builds: Lathe Chuck Rolling Rack!
https://www.tested.com/art/makers/910360-adam-savages-one-day-builds-lathe-chuck-rolling-rack/

The next “BIG” thing: Prusa Mini review! by Thomas Sanladerer
https://youtu.be/Ce4oluQxyc0

Spring Tools Double Punch review by Sean Michael Ragan
https://youtu.be/dxr4uo0eTm4

Print-In-Place Spring Loaded Box by Turbo_SunShine
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4382544

Water Pump With 4 Different Turbines by LetsPrintYT
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4382059

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

How to Repair Broken Traces
https://youtu.be/CCOuKLHsSIs

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, a hover board for witches, lasercut zodiak, a starburst display, thread plotting, wobbling oloids, and interactive trees. 

Hey, I’m Donald Bell and welcome back to another Maker Update. I hope you’re all doing well. I know it’s still August, but I’ve been thinking a lot about Halloween. What is going to go on with Halloween and what can we do to save it? I don’t know what the answer is, but that’s what I’m thinking about, and I’d be curious to know what your thoughts are.

But first let’s get started with a project of the week that I think you’ll have time to make before Halloween comes.

On the Make Anything channel, Devin Montes has a video up on how he made this motorized witch’s broom that can push him around on a skateboard or roller skates. 

To make this work, he’s hacked one of these motor shoes, which were part of the hoverboard fad. It’s basically a hub motor and battery pack, with a tilt sensor that throttles the motor depending on how far you tilt it.

To adapt this to run on the end of a broom stick, Devin created this 3D printed mount. One piece acts as a baseplate that screws down where your foot would normally go. 

Then another piece screws on, which allows you to connect the threaded end of painter’s pole and gives you some adjustment over the angle of the stick. It’s a clever design, especially the way he built in these slots for washers to drop into. The STLs for these designs are available on MyMiniFactory. 

That said, even though it’s a fun hack, unless you already have this specific model of hover shoe, you might do better to shop for individual e-scooter parts and build something similar from scratch. It sounds like this version is pretty hard to control, and a simple scooter throttle could remedy that. Then again, maybe a witch’s broom is supposed to have a mind of its own.

Now for more projects. Frank Zhao made this awesome laser cut orrery. This is a mechanical depiction of planetary rotation from a time before we realized that planets take elliptical orbits. 

As a toy, though, it’s pretty fun, and I love all the little details for moon phases and zodiac signs. You can find the files to make your own on Franks Github page.

Have you ever heard of a starburst display? These are traditionally a 14-segment alpha-numeric digit. One of the rarest and weirdest are used in the F18 Hornet fighter jet, which look almost like a dot-matrix digit.

Mangus Tiranus challenged himself to make a version in the same style, using surface mount LEDs and a grid of holes to mask and diffuse the lights. The design uses a custom PCB with a 595 shift register to drive the LEDs from an Arduino. 

From his Hackaday post, it sounds like he’s open to share the source files if you ask for them.

By way of Evil Mad Scientist I found out about ThreadPlotter, a toolkit for adapting an XY plotter into a punch needle embroidery machine. This is a project by Shiqing He, and Eytan Adar. They’re using an AxiDraw plotter and the API from EvilMadScientist. They go over how to modify the machine, and how to create designs. 

I’ll be honest, I didn’t think this was going to excite me that much until I watched the video. Now I kinda want a little embroidery bot.

I’m less convinced about the next robot, but how can I not talk about this thing? The moving Oloid by Jan Ingo Haller and Lorin Samija is an Arduino-based robot with an unusual mechanism to help it move. 

Because of its unique shape, the design naturally wants to move forward and backwards. All it needs is a little momentum provided by these weighted servo arms that slowly move back and forth. 

A little fabric cover makes it look less weird… sorta. I can at least say I’ve never seen anything like it.

Another project that surprised me this week was Hear-tree by Helen Kwok & Israel Carter. What they’ve done is turn a tree into an interactive sound installation. 

You press a panel mounted on the tree with LED rings inside, which activates the system. You then go around touching the different ropes hanging from the branches. Each rope has a conductive thread entwined with it so that it can sense your touch and respond by playing back an audio file. 

It’s a neat idea, and if you can find a way to make it solar powered and weather proof, it could be a neat thing to have in your yard. You could turn a backyard tree into a giant MP3 player.

Time for some tips and tools. On the Tech Pod podcast, Chris Arlington wrote in with a tip on using a closet shoe organizer to store and organize your cables. If you have a tangle of audio cables, USB cables. Power adapters — this could be a great hack for organizing them. 

I imagine it might also work for zip ties, LED strip, or even some lightweight tools. For around $10, I might give it a shot.

On Tested, you may have understandably passed up this video on how he built a rolling rack for his lathe chucks. It’s a niche problem he’s solving for, and a long video. But it’s also a chance for you to see a master like Adam fail and get humbled. 

I won’t spoil it, but it’s a great reminder to mark your material with cut lines before you cut, even if you have a jig or a system in place that logically should put the cut where you want it.

The $349 Prusa Mini 3D printer is one of the most talked about machines of the year. But does the machine deliver on the quality and ease of use you’d expect from Prusa? On his channel, Thomas Sanladerer has an exhaustive and mostly positive review of the machine. Still, definitely worth a watch if you were considering getting one.

On the Cool Tools channel, Sean Michael Ragan shows off this double punch that uses a spring to drive a mark into your material. 

This is a $10 tool that provides a prick punch on one side and a center punch on the other. I have to admit that I’ve never used a prick punch before, so the video was worth a watch just to learn the difference.

There were a couple neat 3D prints I came across on the Adafruit blog. The first was this Print-In-Place Spring Loaded Box by Turbo_SunShine. The lid and box and gear mechanism all print as a single piece. But Sunshine also includes the mechanism design as a separate piece that you can incorporate into your own designs. It’s a neat trick.

Another practical design comes from Let’s Print. It’s a series of four different water pump turbines that you can attach to the d-shaft of a DC motor. On his video, he goes over each design variation and what shapes produce the best output.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, check out their video on how to repair broken traces on a circuit board. 

This is a good skill to know about for fixing up old boards that may have peeling traces. It’s also a good skill for hacking or deliberately rewiring boards where you need to cut traces purpose  to make it do what you want. Check it out.

And that does it for this week’s show. Be sure to subscribe, leave a thumbs up or leave a comment. I’m still looking for ideas on hands-free Halloween candy delivery. You can get on the Maker Update email list, so you never miss a show. A big thanks to my patrons on Patreon, and an extra big thanks to Digi-Key electronics for making this show possible. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next week.