HackSpace #76

Workshop is a flexible term. A workshop can be a chunk of a former warehouse packed with photogenic industrial machinery – you know, the sort of thing that half of YouTube seems to have – or it can be a corner of a room in your house with space for a few drawers, a soldering iron, and maybe a 3D printer. It can even be a temporary space – for years, I had to get the kids off to nursery and then set up the workshop on the kitchen table. This month, we’re looking at how to set up your workshop to be as good as it can be. That doesn’t mean drooling over some fantasy list of features, but real steps to optimise your space. Whether it’s in your…

hsmag.cc/geneva Clocks, they’re pretty simple, right? Spin hands around at three different speeds, pop some numbers on the outside, and you’re done, right? Well, that would do for most people, but not Greg Zumwalt. When his youngest son showed him a video of a watch with an unusual mechanism and asked if he knew how it worked, Greg didn’t just explain it, he designed and 3D-printed a replica. The strip of numbers along the top represent the minutes, and the number inside this strip is the hour. Despite it rotating in four different axes, it’s powered by just a single motor and a Geneva drive. Not only does it look undeniably cool but, unlike most clocks that redesign the mechanical system, it’s actually easy to tell the time on this…

hsmag.cc/RetroDesktop If there are two things that we love, they’re big versions of little things and little versions of big things. In both cases, they’re made twice as cool if the new version works as the original does. Here, we’ve got a tiny version of a desktop PC, and it actually works exactly like the original. Well, almost. The original was a 286 from David’s childhood, while this version is based on a Raspberry Pi. That obviously means that the CPUs run completely different instruction sets but, thanks to the magic of emulation, this tiny PC still runs old DOS programs. Cool-factor alone is enough to make this project worthwhile but, to David, nostalgia was also a motivator. “A big driver in my personal projects is the connection I have…

hsmag.cc/solderer Soldering is one of those key maker skills. Typically, you take a soldering iron in one hand, some solder in your other hand, then hold a part with … hang on, we’ve run out of hands. Sometimes you can use clips or vices to hold wires and components together, but wouldn’t it be very handy if you had a spare hand? The Solder Sustainer gives you this extra hand, not by increasing the number of appendages you have, but by letting you control both the soldering iron and the solder wire with a single hand. Solder is fed out of a tube next to the soldering iron itself. Crucially, this tube is slightly flexible so you can bend it with one finger to direct it where you want to.…

hsmag.cc/ocreebmk2 Most people in the modern world use computers for their job – we spend hours every day interacting with our machines via a QWERTY keyboard – a Victorian design that was never meant to be used to program computers, control robots, manipulate enterprise resource planning software, or any of the myriad of other uses that we give it. Why do we stick with this input system designed in the time before computers? Salim, for one, isn’t going to. He’s designed an adaptable system of modules that you can plug together to create whatever layout you want. You can add buttons, twiddly knobs, turn-y-handles, sliders, and more. Ocreeb MK2 runs the KMK keyboard firmware, so you can map whatever actions you want to the various buttons, knobs, and dials. The…

hsmag.cc/succulent Stained glass work might sound like an exotic form of making, but when you get down to it, it’s really just fancy soldering. Once you’ve formed the glass into appropriately shaped pieces, you pop some copper tape on the edges, then solder them together. Yes, we’re glossing over the details a bit here, but the basic technique isn’t too complex. Jason’s been experimenting with stained glass and noticed that plant designs are common at the moment. However, he couldn’t find a suitable downloadable design to start with, so he decided to create one and share it on the Instructables website. The design is based on a succulent – a type of plant that grows in arid regions and its drought tolerance makes it popular with people who forget to…