Weekly Maker News Feb Week 1

Welcome to our maker news where we wrap up some fun and interesting stories in the maker world from the last few weeks. The video will come out on Fridays, but we are posting a topic here on Wednesdays to post the video’s sources and to collect any news from the community to potentially include in next week’s as well as just open up general discussion.

This week we looked at:

First announced nearly 3 years ago now, the ESP32-C5 has finally seen pre-production samples out in the maker community and being tested, with production boards probably not too far away. The board is based on the C6 with the major addition of having support for dual-band wi-fi 6 - both 2.4 Ghz and 5.8 Ghz. On top of this it also natively supports ZigBee 3.0 and Thread 1.3, and comes with a RISC-V processor clocked at 240 Mhz. An ESP board like this has been a long time coming and we are just super excited to get our hands on one for some IOT and home automation projects.

There is a common theme in the maker community of repurposing an old ender printer into something else, like a laser cutter or welding robot, but Emily the engineer may have taken the cake by turning one into a tattoo machine. After literally bolting your leg into the printer, it works exactly like you would imagine, there’s not much else here its just a whacky thing someone did with a printer, go check out her video.

Onto something a little more helpful, Celestin on MakerWorld has released an incredibly simple but helpful print that allows you to connect 2 Dupoint or jumper wires directly to a USB slot for power. While I wouldn’t call it a long-term solution, for rapid prototyping it’s probably a bit easier than butchering an old USB cable. I just don’t know how we’ve had printers and jumper wires for so long and haven’t thought about this until now.

If you have any news from the maker world, feel free to post it below and we may include it in next week’s video, until then we will see you next week!

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That’s super cuuuute

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This will be huge once the HA & WLED gang get up to date with it, basically removes the need to have both bands running

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