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:
Benchys are being taken down due to IP infringements. A Reddit user by the name of mkrjoe has reported that his custom benchy file was taken down from Printables due to licensing issues, with Printables saying they will be taking down more in the coming days. As it turns out the benchy is licensed under the Creative Commons No Derivates license meaning that you can happily re-upload and use the original benchy file, but you are unable to distribute modified or altered versions of it. The creators of the benchy have thus far turned a blind eye to it, possibly with it being the world’s most 3d printed object. Many in the community started pointing their pitchforks at NTI group, who have recently acquired the rights to the bench through a merger. However, NTI group released a statement saying that did not actively or intentionally strike down the benchy derivative. At this point, we don’t know why Printables started taking down benchys on behalf of a 3rd party and we will need to wait for the dust to settle. Until then be careful about distributing benchy derivates.
If you have been a little out of the loop you may of missed the race to find suitable methods of producing PCBs at home. Currently, waiting a week for PCBs to arrive is the bottleneck in many projects and through the work of many people in the community we are seeing some very cool advancements like Stephen Hawes’ method of producing small PCBs in 20 minutes! We have seen a variety of different tools and procedures being used but his video makes a strong case for using a fiber laser on a copper sheret, coating it in solder mask, and then stripping the mask off the pads with the laser again. It is only a single-layer board and a fiber laser can be quite expensive, but the ability to iterate a board in hours rather than weeks is a huge bonus (and more fun). We still may be a while off but we are steadily closing in on the dream of easily and rapidly producing PCBs at home.
Raspberry Pi has launched a 16Gb version of the Pi 5, the largest RAM model to ever be launched. Besides it coming with the newer D0 chip revision that also comes on the 2Gb model, which Jeff Geerling found to be up to 30% more power efficient, not much else has changed. This one caught even us off guard as the 2, 4, and 8Gb models didn’t have an indicator for a 16Gb model on the board, but it looks like its a new board run altogether. For most makers this amount of RAM is overkill, even in heavy tasks like running large computer vision models we have never used the full 8Gb of RAM, but if you are running a virtual machine or any sort of server, that extra RAM may serve you well.
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!
