Sommaire pour #50 de HackSpace

You might be familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle. The basic idea is that when technologies are young, they get a lot of media attention, but they’re not yet mature enough to be actually useful. This inevitably leads to disappointment as the wild claims made about the technology don’t miraculously come true quickly. However, after the media attention has died down, the technology quietly matures without much fanfare. As time goes on, it gradually becomes more and more useful, and this time, excitement grows with actual usefulness. It’s this latter stage that machine learning is now in. Ten years ago, it was all hype and of little practical use. Now, the tools and techniques have moved on to the point where it’s possible for a moderately technical person, with a…

hsmag.cc/MicroMac Californian computer company Apple now houses its machines in machined aluminium, but there was a time when, like all other computer makers, they housed their wares in a rich shade of beige. If you miss those primitive days, you can now print your own very small Macintosh computer on which you can play Lemmings, surf the web, and do whatever else you can do on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. You’ll need – no surprise here – a Raspberry Pi Zero W, plus the headers to attach to the GPIO pins, a power supply, and a mini HDMI to HDMI cable (for setup). The most important component however is the screen: this design uses a 640×480 LCD display; if you can’t find one of these, or if the screen…

hsmag.cc/DarrieusWindTurbine This isn’t the first, or the most complicated windpowered generator we’ve featured in HackSpace magazine – that honour falls to WinDIY, the completely 3D-printed, beautifully engineered creation by Fabian Scherschel. This creation, by Adrian Cubas, is very different, but it shares some similarities. First of all, it’s a vertical axis turbine, meaning that the user doesn’t have to constantly adjust its position so that it’s facing the wind. Secondly, it’s 3D-printed, and it’s also a great educational tool. The difference is mainly in the simplicity – instead of extruded aluminium, steel rods or the like, this model used only 3D-printed parts and something that every teacher should have plenty of: pencils.…

ATTENTION ALL MAKERS! If you have something you’d like to get off your chest (or even throw a word of praise in our direction) let us know at hsmag.cc/hello FAREWELL SANJAY As we went to press, we learned of the passing of Sanjay Mortimer. Sanjay had been heavily involved in the hobbyist 3D printing industry for as long as there’s been a hobbyist 3D printing industry. As a co-founder of E3D, he helped create the hot ends that many of us use everyday. Thank you Sanjay for helping make the 3D printing world a happier place. Our thoughts go out to all of his friends and family. FILM SCANNER Well done to your writer [Anton Gutscher, How I Made, issue 49] who digitised a load of old film with a…

Fitness trackers log plenty of data about the wearer, from how much cardio or other fat-burning exercises they undertook, to the restfulness of the previous night’s sleep. Whether you’re a Garmin, Strava, Apple Watch, Google Fit, or Fitbit user, they all use data across apps and devices to build up very detailed pictures of our daily lives. AI uses information accrued by the fitness tracker not only to remind us of our most recent achievements but also to encourage us to do better today, and applaud us for exercising efficiently and having all the right moves. Google Coach uses motion capture to check whether we’re lifting weights in line with instructions, while NadiX yoga pants come with built-in sensors and an app containing guided poses. Your smartphone camera recognises when…

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t just for domestic chores, driverless travel, and agriculture: it’s great for gaming too! Brainwave - and eye-movementcontrolled gaming headsets, plus a DIY AI games controller, have their origins in technology developed for amputees and wheelchair users. A mind-controlled means of playing World of Warcraft was developed a decade ago (hsmag.cc/MindWoW), while an Arduino-based option that allows the user to operate Grand Theft Auto controls resulted from keen gamer and NeuroSky controller hacker Imetomi’s frustration at the limitations of games available for the brainwave-driven headsets. Detailed instructions can be found at hsmag.cc/GameThoughts. BE AN AI GUITAR HERO nt to use to nudge you to participate, leading to a potentially busy Google Calendar. This guitar progress tracker cannily knows you want to be able to show off guitar…

Some people know as children what they want to do when they grow up; they do their professional training, then stay in that one niche until they retire. Not so with Matt Stultz. He’s been a writer, editor, maker space founder, digital fabrication expert, maker, and more (including a time spent ensuring that McDonald’s fries made it to every corner of America). He’s now the community manager at prusaprinters.org, and works on the file sharing site set up recently as a competitor/complement to the better-known Thingiverse. He’s seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of 3D printing, and we loved hearing about it. HackSpace You’ve been involved in the maker community for a fair while, at Make Magazine, at MakerBot, and now at Prusa. How did it all start?…

Christmas means different things to different people. Here in HackSpace towers, it means an excuse to play with LEDs. Lots of LEDs. In the past, we’ve used strings of addressable LEDs to adorn Christmas trees and other decorations, but this year, we decided to go a step further and get some PCBs made to show off the LEDs. It offered the opportunity to experiment with different ways of driving LEDs, different types of LEDs, and different PCB effects we can create to make our PCBs artistic. We decided on three PCBs, each experimenting with a different thing: A bell-shaped PCB with a large area of exposed copper to see how the shiny HASL (silver-coloured coating) looks in big areas. This has a single APA106 (through-hole NeoPixel) as an LED. A…

Longtime contributor to The MagPi, Phil is a freelance writer and editor with a focus on technology. @philkingeditor Humans experience the world through a range of senses. This enables us to be aware of whatever’s happening in our environment so that we can react to it. So, it makes sense (no pun intended) that your Raspberry Pi would also benefit from being able to sense things. Fortunately, this is made possible using a wide variety of electronic sensors. In this series, we’ll explore some of the most commonly available sensors and their use cases. To start off, we’ll build a simple fire and gas leak alarm system using a couple of sensors. When either hazard is detected, a visual and audible alert will be triggered. 01 Connect flame sensor For…

@ben_everard Ben's house is slowly being taken over by 3D printers. He plans to solve this by printing an extension, once he gets enough printers. Last year this author wrote some code to control some NeoPixel lights on his Christmas tree. He wanted an organiclooking ‘twinkling’ display. In a given length of lights, he wanted individual LEDs to fade in and out in a random-looking pattern. He wanted the length of each flash to be independent of the others and to be a different colour. Since then, he’s reused this code quite a few times as he likes the effect it gives. While the code isn’t perfect, it’s quite battle-hardened, and it might be useful for other people working on Christmas lights. Here’s the code in full (you can download…

hsmag.cc/Marblevator We love simplicity, but we also love the whirr and click of moving parts working exactly as they should. That’s why this build by Greg Zumwalt stands out: it’s just so precise. This circus-themed marble run comprises 50 unique 3D-printed parts, many of which fit into confined spaces, needing very precise alignment. Because of that, Greg used the Engineering Profile in Ultimaker Cura to slice his models, and did a dry run before he glued anything together. Mechanical parts include a motor, power supply, 32 3×1.5mm neodymium magnets, two 6×1.5mm magnets, and two 8mm ball bearings. Greg’s made all the design files available, so if you feel like a challenge, have a go yourself!…

hsmag.cc/FibonacciClock Some of the builds we see are fiendishly complicated, full of moving parts, CAD, and advanced techniques that we promise ourselves we’re going to learn about one day. Some builds, in contrast, are so beautifully, brilliantly simple that we know we could replicate them right away, but there’s no point, as the original is perfect. This clock, inspired by the Fibonacci series of numbers, is one such example of simple perfection. Bushra’s creation uses the guts of a standard wall clock, which he’s mounted to a single piece of stainless steel, bent so it’ll stand up. He’s kept the minute hand, but the hour hand has been replaced by a spiral modelled after the Fibonacci curve, which tells the time as it turns by overlapping markers placed on the…

The menorah is used to mark the days of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah; to mark each day of Hanukkah, you’d normally light a candle each day. This interpretation by the Ruiz Brothers uses NeoPixels instead of candles, in a simple 3D-printed frame, which prints with no need for supports, thanks to its clean design. Even the bulbs are 3D-printed – in this case in translucent PLA to diffuse the light. Intelligence is provided by an Adafruit QT Py RP2040, which takes in power through a USB-C socket at the back of the menorah, and spits out CircuitPython logic to light one additional bulb per button press. hsmag.cc/Menorah…

Millions of homes now have voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri, and many are using Apple HomeKit or Google Nest Hub to schedule lights, heating, grocery orders, and other electrical devices. Plenty of people also have video doorbells to provide reassurance that Alexa and Google Assistant are AI-based. The AIY Kit costs £82 from The Pi Hut and Pimoroni, and lets you build these voice assistants into your DIY projects. VISUALISE ENERGY LOSS AND PLUG THE GAPS Thermal cameras became popular in the US as people began to correlate high temperatures and Covid-19 infections. The technology is useful for detecting hot spots and heat loss, giving it an obvious application in offices and houses. With winter looming, PiThermalCam maker Tom Shaffner set about detecting the parts of his home…

Low-profile autonomous delivery vehicles have been trawling the streets of Milton Keynes, Greenwich, and elsewhere for several years, while self-driving vehicles that log road and terrain details as they go (much like lidar-based robot vacuum cleaners) are now starting to do the same. Elon Musk has been tweeting about the rapid road layout learning abilities of his latest autonomous vehicles, while Wayve.ai announced back in 2018 that its second generation self-driving car was “teaching itself to drive” in just 20 minutes: hsmag.cc/SelfTaughtCar. This differs from the Waymo and Google Aurora approaches because there's no need for multiple sensors and to have digested a detailed map in advance (hsmag.cc/WayveAICar). Cars themselves have become smarter with the prevalence of owner-accessible diagnostic tools that allow your car’s onboard computer to be hooked up…

Whether you’re a Christmas fan, a Christmas Grinch, or simply don’t celebrate the annual festival of consumption, it’s fair to say there’s no avoiding the sheer amount of Yule-related paper and pap around right now. In fact, the whole industry relating to gifts and celebrations seems to generate an inordinate amount of stuff that is almost instantly discarded. Often, the wrapping that adorns thoughtfully chosen gifts is gossamer-thin and more ink than pulp. Such examples are best reused for their vibrant shades and kept well away from damp, but even the cheapest sort of wrapping-paper can have a worthwhile afterlife. In fact, the malleability of cheap gift wrap makes it perfect for papier mâché. “OFTEN, THE WRAPPING THAT ADORNS THOUGHTFULLY CHOSEN GIFTS IS GOSSAMERTHIN AND MORE INK THAN PULP” Decent…

Kitsch home furnishing upcycling company Muck N Brass has some fantastic options for creating a visual impact using small amounts of wrapping-paper, wallpaper, paint, and glue. The company’s maximalist approach to making over dressers, wardrobes, and chairs often involves wildlife designs, as seen in this YouTube demonstration hsmag.cc/MuckNBrass, but can equally be applied to wrapping adorned with festive scenes and celebratory themes. As well as incredibly careful image or pattern placement, hours are spent preparing the furniture to which paper is to be applied, after which, lashings of protective lacquer is required. Project Maker MUCK N BRASS Project Link hsmag.cc/MuckNBrass…

Dr Andrew Lewis is a specialist fabricator and maker, and is the owner of the Andrew Lewis Workshop. This project is about building a gearbox for an old lathe that really should be retired from service. It’s a lathe that has some sentimental value, and keeping it alive is not commercially sensible decision. During a recent thread cutting operation, the lathe coughed, sputtered, and then fired a large steel gear out of the side of the machine, missing the owner’s head by a couple of inches. Part of the gearbox had jammed, and had damaged the rest of the box beyond all reasonable chance of repair. What at first seemed like a disaster actually turned out to be a perfect chance for the Raspberry Pi Pico to shine. Thread cutting…

@concreted0g Jo Hinchliffe is a constant tinkerer and is passionate about all things DIY. He loves designing and scratchbuilding both model and high-power rockets, and releases the designs and components as opensource. He also has a shed full of lathes and milling machines and CNC kit! In this issue, we are going to work mostly on an add-on workbench called ‘Sheet Metal’, so let’s get that installed. Open up FreeCAD and click Tools > Addon manager, and then scroll down the list to find ‘Sheet Metal’. Click to install the workbench, and then close the Addon manager – you will get prompted to restart FreeCAD. Once you have restarted FreeCAD, start a new project and, as a very simple first example, let’s first go to the Part Design workbench, create…

January of 2021 was an interesting time for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It had announced the new 32-bit dual Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller integrated circuit, dubbed the RP2040. It was a bold move from a company known for making single-board computers and not microcontrollers. And, as usual from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, it’s powerful and affordable, at only $1 for the bare integrated circuit. With the introduction of the new microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Foundation could grab more customers and grow their community. There are a lot of people that love working on a computer, and the Raspberry Pi is an amazing product for them. But many people also find themselves wanting the simplicity of a microcontroller, myself included. What we didn’t expect was the power of the RP2040. It’s blazingly…

SPARKFUN → $11.95 sparkfun.com The SparkFun MicroMod Pi RP2040 Processor board is a use-case-specific, low-cost, and high-performance addon board featuring the RP2040 microcontroller. What makes this board special, and potentially a bit more limited, is the MicroMod interface. That is, unless you already have a MicroMod Carrier Board. So, what is MicroMod? It’s SparkFun’s ecosystem of Main Boards, Function Boards, and Processor Boards that all have M.2 form factor connectors. It works by allowing Processor boards to plug into Main Boards or Function boards to add additional capabilities. You could plug the SparkFun MicroMod into an Input and Display Carrier board to add a TFT display and other functions to your RP2040 – all without soldering any components. It’s a robust system with lots of options. Learn more about this…

@ben_everard Soldering irons are great, but if you start to work with smaller and more complex components, you might find you reach a point where a hot stick no longer has the dexterity to do what you need. At this point, you’ll need another way of applying heat to your soldered joins. The most flexible and affordable way of doing this is with a heat gun that blasts hot air at your PCBs. We decided to test one of the cheapest ones we could find to see if it was worth the money. We got a ‘JCD Hot air gun 8858 Micro Rework soldering station LED Digital Hair dryer for soldering 700W Heat Gun welding repair tools’, from JCD store on AliExpress. It’s a little concerning that this is labelled…

hsmag.cc/MoonPhaseClock James Mabon wanted a project for his new 3D printer, and to give himself an excuse to learn Fusion 360. So here’s what he created: a clock that, as well as telling the time, shows you the phase of the moon. This wasn’t just a 3D printing challenge: astrophysics is notoriously difficult, and James made a few simplifications to the mathematical model he used, ignoring the way the moon wobbles on its axis, as well as a couple of other things. Nevertheless, the gear train he’s used to show the constantly shifting phases of the moon is astonishingly accurate, having a deviation of less than one minute in 25 years.…

hsmag.cc/QuantumDeathMachine If you had a background in quantum physics, what would you build? A time machine? A teleporter? Or, a box that detects the presence of a human, then tells them how they’re going to die (based on utterly nothing)? Maker Gocivici decided to do the latter, and here it is: the Quantum Death Machine. It’s an audacious exercise in overengineering, using IBM Quantum – an online quantum computer that can provide truly random data (randomness is something that computers struggle with on their own). It also uses a Raspberry Pi 3, an Adafruit thermal printer, an Arduino Nano, and a fingerprint sensor. In use, the clever quantum computing is hidden away: the user sticks a finger into the opening where the sensor is mounted, the machine registers that you’re…

Self-taught, masterful command of 3D printing, CAD, electronics. There’s something refreshingly old-fashioned about Lewis’s material, which he shares at diymachines.co.uk. He’s not trying to constantly release new content to grab the attention; his builds are ready when they’re ready. Much more than that, they’re a resource for learning from. We spoke to Lewis to find out why it’s so important to him to make learning accessible, what keeps him going when things are going wrong, and why he’ll never leave electronics unattended again. “Someone in Australia could invent something today, and I can have it on my printer in a matter of hours – here, physically in my house” “When I started making things, I knew nothing about making. I didn’t have any education in electronics or design or coding…

Wildlife identification tracker BearID is one of a number of identity-based conservation endeavours that makes use of Google image recognition tools, highlighting the distinct facial features and head profiles of brown bears. The same technology recently caught our attention (hsmag.cc/ArtDouble), after Google suggested sharing photos of our pets online and automatically identifying their art world doppelganger. TRACK WHAT GOES WHERE AI and camera traps have transformed the possibilities of wildlife monitoring in even the most remote locations. AudioMoth acoustic monitoring was first created as a means of identifying nocturnal species such as bats and moths, but is now being used to record and relay soundscapes in the Doñana river delta in southern Spain, and to let us listen to the dawn chorus in the forests of Borneo. As well as…

What I used 3 125 LED APA102-2020 strips RaspberryPiZero W 240240, 1.3-inch IPS LCD display HAT for Raspberry Pi Mattblackaluminium profile and diffuser USB-Cpowerbank with Power Delivery Cablesandconnectors ”It’s magical!” is the comment that most often comes up when night-walkers come across me during a light painting session. At a time when the possibilities of image manipulation seem to be unlimited, light painting remains a photographic technique that is rather artisanal and yet fascinating. It is about taking long exposures using different light sources. In this universe, a light painting stick is like a programmable lightsaber; the idea is to superimpose an image on a composition, scanning the space, like a Jedi. The light reflections contribute to the atmosphere of the final result. The photographer Michael Ross popularised this technique.…

Get ahead in the present packaging stakes by using both used and offcuts of unused wrapping-paper to clad ordinary card or cardboard as festive, birthday, or other celebration-themed boxes. You could even cut up an old greetings-card for this. The simplicity of this project, which involves gluing and smoothing down your chosen wrap onto stiff card, makes it an ideal way to amuse the kids between Christmas and New Year too (or involve them in the gifting process at other times of the year). First, create a box template: simply draw six squares in a long t, plus tabs to glue the pieces together. Cut out the card template and make as many copies as you need to create multiple boxes. Place a card cutout over the area of wrapping-paper…

Celebrating gift wrap in all its kitschy, gaudy glory, AvantGeek’s showstopping dress doesn’t just riff on the decadence of festive wrappingpaper designs, her highly original garment is actually made from the very stuff her presents came in. A second version, also made from gift wrap, atones for having been remiss about recycling and, instead, uses leftover rolls of wrapping-paper for a more considered design. As she comments, the amazing creation has a fairly structural quality to it – so much so that, when left unattended, the wrapping-paper dress doubles as a cat fort! Project Maker AVANTGEEK ART Project Link hsmag.cc/WrapDress…

@ben_everard Ben's house is slowly being taken over by 3D printers. He plans to solve this by printing an extension, once he gets enough printers. WS2812B LEDs – sometimes known as NeoPixels – are a great way of adding colour to your project. They’re chainable RGB LEDs, which means that you can connect lots of them to a single GPIO pin on a microcontroller. If you’re adding a few tens of LEDs, this works really well. However, if you try to chain together too many, you get a few problems, including slow updates and the potential for one broken LED to stop your entire project working. However, even if you have spare GPIO pins, it’s not always possible to connect NeoPixels to additional GPIO pins. These LEDs speak a slightly…

@holtonhandmade Nicola King is a freelance writer and sub-editor who also enjoys trying her hand at new crafts on a very regular basis. Her ‘craft room’ is looking rather full… Over recent years, digital cutting machines have become hugely popular amongst the crafting and making communities. Brands such as Brother, Silhouette, Cricut, to name a few, have developed a range of machines that enable users to cut bespoke shapes from all sorts of materials, including cardstock, foam boards, leather, and even thin metal sheets. The key advantages to using such a machine are the degree of precision and uniformity that you get, the ability to cut extremely complex shapes, along with the speed of cutting – you could certainly try cutting such things by hand, but the results achieved with…

ADAFRUIT → $9.95 adafruit.com SEEEDSTUDIO → $12.95 seeedstudio.com It’s itsy and it’s bitsy – it’s the Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP2040. At only 1.4” × 0.7” (36mm × 18mm) in size, it’s amazing that they were able to pack in so many features and breakout so many pins. Just like all the RP2040 board variants out there, it features a fast dual Arm Cortex-M0+ processor, along with a few other nice features. They have added an 8MB SPI flash chip for storing all your CircuitPython code, along with an RGB NeoPixel, a red LED connected to pin 11, and both a reset button and bootloader select button, so you don’t have to unplug it to launch your code. There are a few other more technical features too, so head on over to…

ADAFRUIT → $4.95 adafruit.com @ben_everard There are literally hundreds of development boards to choose from, with a mind-blowing range of processors, memory, storage, pin count, and size. Why is it, then, that we always seem to be missing a feature when we get to our projects? Sometimes it’s because we start with one design and keep adding bits until we run out of pins; other times, it’s because we use the dev board we have on hand rather than the most suitable one. Fortunately, there’s a stock of components that can help us. Port expanders, I2C analogue-to-digital converters, and more can be tacked onto most microcontrollers to give us the extra features we need. They’re not too hard to use if you plan them in from the start, but you…