HackSpace #68

Most people receive the majority of their information about the world through their eyes. This is great, but they do have a few flaws. You can’t adjust the frame rate on them, they need to be switched off for around eight hours a day, and there’s no record function on them. Fortunately, inventive scientists have come up with a solution for this – cameras. These let you see the world in ways impossible with our on-board faculties. While there are some excellent off-the-shelf cameras available, you can get much more control by building your own, and there’s one standout platform for this: Raspberry Pi. In this issue, we’re looking at how you can combine programming with a range of camera modules to capture the world in ways our primitive face-holes…

hsmag.cc/NanoRobotGeek Mechanical watches aren’t just timepieces: they’re miniature works of art, engineering marvels. They don’t run out of battery power and, if you look after them, they can last for decades. This author has a cheap pocket-watch made to the famously high manufacturing standards of the late USSR, and it’s still functioning to this day. The natural thing to do with an old, useless Apple Watch then, is to replace its obsolete electronics, unsupported software, and drained battery with a mechanism that’ll tell the time without constantly annoying you with updates from social media. That’s what Jack Spiggle has done with this build, augmenting a 42 mm Apple Watch Series 1 in stainless steel with a Seiko NH38 watch movement. Jack’s donor watch had been unsupported by Apple since 2020,…

hsmag.cc/4ShaftLoom Weaving is a complicated business; so much so that you could plausibly argue that computer programming was invented as a by-product of encoding weaving designs. This design, by architect, researcher, and maker Asli Aydin Aksan, is a more complicated build than some other homemade looms we’ve seen, but the brilliance of that is that it enables the user to create more complex patterns than you would if you were using a simpler loom. What we love about this is that it’s open-source, so anyone can learn from, copy, and modify the design to suit their work. And it’s not a toy; Asli’s woven real, useful bits of fabric with it. It’s also ideal for anyone who doesn’t have a Victorian cloth mill in which to store it: in use,…

bad-dog-designs.co.uk We’ve marvelled at the work of Paul Parry (aka Bad Dog Designs) before in these pages; here’s one of his latest builds. Paul has got his hands on some Cold War-era military field telephones, and, of course, has turned them into Nixie tube clocks. Both telephones are housed in bakelite enclosures; the lighter-coloured one (shown here) is a Russian TA-57 telephone dating from 1968–1975; the darker one is a Polish TAP-67 dating from somewhere between 1968 and 1974. Both phones feature programmable RGB LED back-lighting to show off the Nixies in their best light, four Z570M Nixie tubes, and tell the time accurate to plus/minus one minute per year.…

hsmag.cc/PlanetSpinner An orrery is a mechanism that shows the relative positions of the bodies in our solar system. You can have small ones, showing just the Earth, the sun and the moon, and there are larger ones showing all nine planets (Pluto is still a planet, whatever scientists may say). This is another example of a build that is simple on the surface – it’s comprised of laser-cut plywood and toothpicks – but that’s only because of the hard work and original thinking of the original creator. There are no complex gears on this orrery. Instead, a tiny stepper motor rotates the disc that shows the signs of the zodiac. This has a pin sticking up from it, and this in turn rotates all the planets until the one closest…

extremeelectronics.co.uk What’s the first thing that happens when new computer hardware is released? Someone runs DOOM on it. What’s the second thing that happens? Someone builds a cluster. It’s been over two years since the Raspberry Pi Pico came out, and in that time nobody had built a Pico cluster, so Derek Woodroffe decided that he’d do it himself. Inspiration for the build came from the 1970s Cray supercomputers and, with a little custom electronics and the magic of I2C, Derek’s put together a very small supercomputer that he’s using to calculate Mandelbrot sets. If you like the sound of this, tune in next issue for more details on the hows, the whys, and the wherefores.…