This week on Maker Update, a book-actuated lamp, big caliper energy, reviving old power banks, injection molding, space ship paneling, and how to debounce your circuits.

++Show Notes [Maker Update Ep. 267]++

-=Project of the Week=-

McGuyver Lamp by Laura Kampf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPi6vQz2m4U

-=More Projects=-

Giant Caliper Clock by Fantasy Forge
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKd1luTGQvI

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JD6fM84Lds

DIY Desktop Injection Molding machine by Action Box
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtcJAaYVMAg

Repurposing Dead Power Banks by LoneSoulSurfer
https://www.instructables.com/Re-purpose-Broken-Power-Banks/

Bluetooth Pedal Footswitch by Nuri Erginer
https://hackaday.io/project/183533-bluepedal

-=Tips & Tools=-

Spaceship Paneling with Adam Savage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiZPuE0wBE8

KiCad 6 Impressions by VoltLog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlUhXlaiFZw

Designing Within Constraints by Make Something
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHO98r7zKIw

Caliper Fusion 360 Integration by 84Mota
https://twitter.com/84mota/status/1484752979307626496

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

What is Switch Bounce and Debouncing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvU8m_30iK0

-=Transcript=-

This week on Maker Update, a book-actuated lamp, big caliper energy, reviving old power banks, injection molding, space ship paneling and how to debounce your circuits.

Hello and welcome back to Maker Update. I’m Tyler Winegarner and I hope you’re finding a lot of great ways to stay creative and inspired. If you need a little boost, you’ve come to the right place. I find that having a few limitations can really inspire a lot of creative solutions in my work, and that’s exactly what our project of the week is all about. Let’s check it out.

We’re almost two years into the pandemic, and while we’re starting to get good at it, we can still get caught out. That’s exactly what happened to Laura Kampf, and she was forced to quarantine herself in New York after she tested positive for Covid. And while I’m sure that’s still plenty frightening, her quarantine location might be the best place for creative isolation: The vacation home of Tom Sachs.

And there’s a workshop in the basement. Yeah.

Every project is borne from a problem, and its usually a very specific or personal one. Thats exactly what this is. Laura wants to build a lamp that simplifies turning it off when reading in bed before going to sleep – since trying to find a bookmark, setting the book down, and switching off the lamp might be enough activity to wake you up again. The challenge is to make this lamp not only using just the tools in Tom’s workshop, but also the materials, since she can’t go out to acquire more.

The result is a lamp with a shade that can act as a bookmark, but when you rest the book on it, it switches the lamp off. Not only is it a clever design made entirely out of the materials she had on hand, but there’s some fascinating use of materials at play here too. Who would have thought to make a lampshade out of cardboard that’s been reinforced with fiberglass and resin? Not me, that’s for sure.

What I love about this project is that even though he wasn’t there for the build, the lamp still looks like a Tom Sachs project. I don’t know if that was intentional on Laura’s part, or a byproduct of the tools and materials she had available in his shop. Either way, there’s a lot to think about with a project like this. How often do you go into your workshop to build something specific, and use just the materials you have, and nothing else? Its a useful constraint to work with sometimes.

The other great news is that Laura’s Covid symptoms were very mild, and she was feeling well the whole time in quarantine. She’s already been able to fly back home in Germany.

More projects! One of the best ways to challenge yourself as a maker is to remake something familiar, but at a completely different scale. That’s the idea behind this workshop clock by Fantasy Forge. It looks like a giant pair of digital calipers, but with a digital clock where the readout would normally be. The electronic body of the calipers is a massive 3d printed enclosure for the clock. What really impressed me is how the scale and the jaws were built. They’re all made of plywood and MDF, but have been shaped and finished to look like polished metal. There’s definitely a lot of skill of finishing MDF at work here, so if you’ve struggled with that in the past, give this one a look.

Traditionally speaking, injection molding machines tend to live in the realm of professional manufacturing and out of the reach of hobbyists. Not having any of that, the folks at Action Box have built their own desktop injection molding machine – and after seeing what goes into a machine like this, and how it was built, it looks a lot more accessible than I thought.

The most specialized part here is the plunger that they turned down on a lathe. Everything else here is just some aluminum bar stock, some brackets, and these massive pneumatic plungers. Some heating elements melt down the plastic pellets so it can be injected, and a thermocouple reports the current temperature. Sure, you still need to machine your own molds, But the rest of this looks pretty attainable even in a modest shop.

Over on Instructables, I found this great project by Lonesoulsurfer on how to give dead power banks some new life. What he found was that most of the time, it was the electronics in the power bank that had failed, not the battery. Replacing the usb charging circuit is easy enough, but he also added a voltage regulator and a pair of terminals so that he can use it to power his electronics projects. Not only has he saved a piece of electronics from the landfill, but he’s also made it a lot more useful.

And on Hackaday I found this great project by Nuri Erginer (er-GIN-ajj) for a bluetooth foot switch as a computer interface. If you find yourself constantly hitting the same key over and over again in the computer work you do, a footswitch might be just the thing you need. The design is 3d printed, integrating a spring-style hinge. There’s a charging circuit for an 18650 battery, and the pedal connects to your computer wirelessly over bluetooth. Its a great design, and might just free up your hands from repetitive tasks.

Time for some tips and tools, On Tested, Adam Savage is going back to his roots to share an extensive video about his process of panelizing a space ship model. If you’ve never worked with styrene before, this video acts as an excellent primer on how to cut, shape and glue this versatile material. But then you get to see how he uses the panels to creatively form and stylize the wing, and that’s before adding the greeblies. Its a fun watch and, I love this tip of having the bottom of a soda can glued to a piece of wood. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve needed a small shallow container for glue, or paint or a solvent. This seems like the perfect solution.

The VoltLog has released a video offering their impressions of KiCad 6. KiCad 6 was released about a month ago, and by the video it looks like there’s been some significant changes made to the schematic interface, there’s a new plugin and content manager, there’s an improved 3d viewer with faster render times, and a whole lot more. If you’ve been a KiCad user for a while and you’re not sure if its worth it to upgrade, give this video a look.

David Piccuito released a video recently that shows the part of making that almost no one ever talks about: the design phase. In the video he’s designing a cabinet for his audio gear, but he needs it to fit not only the equipment he wants to store in there, it also needs to fit into the space he’s planned for it. Most of the video is him sketching out the cabinet, how he plans to build it and determining how many sheets of plywood he’ll need. This is probably something that everyone does differently, but its always fascinating to see how other folks tackle common problems.

On twitter I found this short video from 84Mota about a set of digital calipers they’ve modified to input the measurements directly into Fusion 360. Most digital calipers have a data port that allows them to interface with other hardware, and it looks like that’s in play here. On the back of the caliper there’s an arduino pro micro and a few other components handling the translation. There’s not a whole lot to go on other than a video and a few photos, and hopefully 84Mota will share some of their code in the future. In the meantime it just looks super satisfying to see them measure an object and see those measurements just snap into the software.

For this weeks Digikey spotlight, they’ve got a new video about switch bounce. Switch bounce is a lot less fun than it sounds, and it can cause a lot of headaches when debugging a circuit. There’s two popular ways of debouncing a component: in software and in hardware. This video discusses the pros and cons of each method, how to design a hardware solution for debouncing, and why you want to avoid switch bounce in the first place.

Alright, and that is going to do it for this week’s show. I hope you enjoyed it – I’d love to hear about any projects you’ve made that were entirely out of materials that you already had on hand. If you have a story like that, let us know in the comments. Otherwise give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed this show, and sign up for the Maker Update email list if you want to get this show delivered right to your front door, instead of hoping it turns up in your Youtube feed. Big thanks to the folks at Digikey, and you for watching. Take care, and I’ll see you soon.