Make: Volume 52

MAKE: GETTING

STARTED

WITH 3D PRINTING

by Liza Wallach Kloski and

Nick Kloski

$20 makershed.com

When I started reading Make:

Getting Started with 3D Printing, by Liza

Wallach Kloski and Nick Kloski of HoneyPoint3D, I felt fairly

knowledgeable about how to use, maintain, and repair a 3D

printer. But even as an experienced user, I found a surprisingly

useful breadth of tips and information on topics including how to

optimize your prints and how to handle and store filament.

One of the most useful sections is the guide that covers open

source 3D modeling software — namely Tinkercad, Autodesk

Meshmixer, and Fusion 360. With the authors’ guidance, Fusion

360 was a lot less scary and difficult to use for the first time.

I highly recommend GSW 3D Printing as exceptional reference

material to everyone who tinkers with 3D printing, regardless of

skill level. I only wish it had been available when I was in college!

— AL

THE MAKER’S GUIDE

TO THE ZOMBIE

APOCALYPSE

by Simon Monk

$25 nostarch.com

If you’re a tech nerd with a penchant

for zombie survival tactics, this book is

super fun. Even if you’re not into zombies, you’ll find some great

projects for Arduino and Raspberry Pi — although the awesome

illustrations keep the theme running even through the technical

sections. The various chapters cover everything from home

defense and monitoring to how to obtain power for survival (and

for building projects). I especially enjoyed learning how to link car

batteries together to create a power bank, and the book covers a

great range of problematic scenarios and survival skills that the

whole family can learn from and enjoy.

— EC

91makezine.com

makezine.com/52

ADAFRUIT METRO AND

METRO MINI

$19.50/$14.95 adafruit.com

If you said the Adafruit Metro fills the same space as the

Arduino Uno, you’d be right and wrong. More accurately, it

duplicates the Uno, but adds so much more. At first glance

it’s an Arduino-sized PCB with an ATmega328P in the center

and rows of GPIO pinouts on the top and bottom. Adafruit says

all of their shields work with the Metro just like any Uno.

However, the company has added some appealing hardware

tidbits, such as a much-needed power switch. You can also

solder closed a jumper to change the logic level to 3.3V from

the usual 5V. They’ve swapped in a micro USB socket for

powering and programming the board. Finally, they offer the

Metro with or without female headers. I used the Metro recently

for a client project, leaving off the headers and soldering

wires directly into the board. When the project changed and I

needed to add a shield, I simply desoldered the wires, added

female headers, and mounted the shield as slick as any Uno.

Adafruit levels up the Metro by adding a Mini version

offering the same capabilities as the full-sized board, lacking

only the power switch. If you’re not expecting to use a shield,

the cheaper Mini offers the full ATmega328P experience as

well as the same FTDI USB-to-serial converter. Contrast

this with SparkFun’s Pro Mini 328, which requires that

you buy a separate FTDI board to program the board.

— John Baichtal

RASPBERRY PI 3

$35 raspberrypi.org

While it keeps the same $35 price tag, a lot has changed under the

surface of the latest Raspberry Pi. Dropping the ARM v7 architecture

of the previous Pi, the RPi3 has a quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A53

clocked at 1.2GHz, which is fast enough to replace a standard

desktop PC for most people. It’s the first 64-bit Raspberry Pi, but

perhaps the biggest change is that it comes with built-in Wi-Fi and

Bluetooth 4.1, making it perfect for an Internet of Things project.

Interestingly the BCM43438 that provides Wi-Fi and Bluetooth also

has an FM receiver, so building an FM radio with an RPi may have

just gotten a lot easier.

Running in headless mode the board is well suited as the hub of

a sensor network, however watch for unresponsiveness in this mode

if the board is only connected via Wi-Fi. You can enable keep-alive

in your SSH client to avoid this problem with the power-saving mode.

With more than 8 million Raspberry

Pi boards sold, the size of the

community behind the board is

really reassuring, as is the

backwards compatibility

that the Foundation

believes to be vital to

the platform.

— Alasdair Allan

BOOKS

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