Table of contents for #48 in HackSpace

Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are almost ubiquitous in the modern world. They are cheap to make and easy to assemble. For a long time, though, they’ve been seen as the preserve of professional manufacturers and only the more dedicated hobbyists. However, in the last few years, they’ve become more accessible than ever before. There’s a wealth of beginner-friendly design tools, and getting PCBs made is both simple and cheap. In this issue, we’re looking at how to bring your builds up to the next level, with custommade PCBs that look great and hold your components securely. It’s much easier than you might think. There’s a wealth of beginner-friendly design tools, and getting PCBs made is both simple and cheap If all this talk of PCBs feel bit modern for you,…

hsmag.cc/FightStick This glorious piece of work is a self-contained retro games emulator, lovingly crafted out of polished, shaped, and drilled aluminium. The buttons are custom-made, the joystick is custom-made, and it can be used either as an all-in-one gaming system or as a USB joystick. Naturally, there’s a Raspberry Pi at the heart of this device.…

hsmag.cc/TubeCutter If you’re soldering wires together in an enclosure that’s going to live outside, or as part of a machine that moves, you’ll probably want to protect the bare wires from the elements (and from each other) with something nonconductive that will wrap around the exposed wire. That something is usually heat shrink tubing. This machine, made by YouTuber Mr Innovative, has been built to cut heat shrink tubing to consistent, pre-programmed lengths. The machine feeds tubing into two lengths of metal pipe, while a blade passes up and down in a narrow gap between the pipes; it looks like a guillotine, but for plastic rather than decadent aristocracy. Mr Innovative used an Arduino Nano, two stepper motors to drive the moving parts, and a 2.8-inch touchscreen, held together with…

LEGO® has introduced generations of children to making. The little blocks slot together in almost endless possibilities and, if you add in mechanical components from Technic sets, you can create some complex builds. Through the years, LEGO® has built a few different programmable electronics systems for adding silicon brains to your builds. MINDSTORMS® and SPIKE Prime Sets have given users an interface for controlling their plastic bricks with code and, through this, have introduced countless children to physical computing. Of course, LEGO® is not the only organisation helping children learn physical computing, so perhaps it’s inevitable that LEGO® and Raspberry Pi have worked together to create the Build HAT. This add-on to Raspberry Pi computers lets you control the latest generation of LEGO® motors and sensors from Python code running…

PCB design may seem like a hugely technical endeavour that’s the remit of elite engineers, but the truth is, it’s not. If you can build electronics on a breadboard, you can design a PCB. There’s no magical difference. Instead of wires, you just have traces of copper. That’s the only difference. Turning PCB designs into real boards used to involve either harsh chemicals or harsh prices. While the homespun route still requires some careful use of powerful chemicals, it’s now easier and cheaper than ever before to get your PCBs manufactured. Small boards are often only a few pounds, including delivery, and only take a few clicks to order. While you can use protoboard to make your projects permanent, there’s a whole heap of advantages to building custom PCBs. •…

That’s all our standard components added. The one thing left is the decoration on the front. This is partly functional as we can use the exposed metal on the front as touchpads. However, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution as obviously we have names of different lengths. This author goes by a three-letter name, so to fill the space, he added a couple of stars. You might have a longer or shorter name, so we’ll leave it up to you. The important thing is that this exposed metal can be either a touchpad or simply decorative. In our circuit, we’ve used the two stars as touchpads, but you can use letters if you’d rather. You can also make more than two touchpads, but you’ll have fewer pins spare for LEDs. The…

Accidental YouTuber, Etsy seller, sculptor, photographer, and scholar of mid-century roadside art, Wesley Treat is a man of many talents. But he’ll be the first to tell you that he’s not an expert in any one thing in particular: instead, like a lot of self-taught makers, his number one skill is teaching himself new things. We caught him just as he was heading out the door to the Catskill Mountains Maker Camp in New York State, to ask him about learning, the space age, and why imagination making things for yourself is the best kind of making. HackSpace What do you do, and how did you get started doing it? Wesley Treat My background is actually in theatre; that’s what my degree is in. But I’ve always been a photographer.…

Project Maker SAN DIEGO KITE CLUB Project Link hsmag.cc/BWKite The near weightlessness of bubble wrap is another quality upcyclers can easily exploit. Since it’s also fairly easy to cut into shapes and fasten with sticky tape, its use as a material for building kites seems obvious. There’s a straightforward how-to video here: hsmag.cc/BWKiteMake. California blogger Nancy Kissack photographed characterful undersea-themed examples that the San Diego Kite Club made from the bobbly stuff, complete with trailing tentacles and eyes that seem to float above the kite’s surface and stare down at onlookers. The transparent 3D material belies the fact it’s just paint.…

Despite loving all things digital, Mike admits to being a bit of a luddite, vinyl records and all. So diving into vacuum tubes proved a perfect distraction. In December 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Laboratories invented the transistor and, in so doing, pretty much consigned its predecessor to the history books. That predecessor was the thermionic valve as it’s called here in the UK, the electron tube as our American cousins would call it, or just valve or tube for short. Yet the triode valve, as invented by Lee de Forest in 1906, which he actually called the ’Audion’, was a game-changer. Transitioning the world from a reliance on steam-engines, gears, and levers to one empowered by electronics is an achievement that shouldn’t be forgotten, hence our…

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! STL files have been around since the 1990s, and in simple terms, they contain a mesh of triangular facets that describe the shape of the design. STL files are a common mesh format to use in 3D printing where they are imported into a ‘slicer’ piece of software that generates the G-code for the 3D printer to follow. As such, STL has become a standard file type for sharing 3D print designs on sites such as Thingiverse and GrabCAD and more. Whilst heavily associated with…

@devinck HackSpace magazine is celebrating its fourth year in print, and I’m happy to have been a little part of that history, having written over 40 Best of Breed roundups, and even a build here and there. I decided to look back at some of my early reviews, and I thought it was about time I revisited my favourite microcontroller ecosystem, the Adafruit Feather. It’s been years since we last did a dedicated roundup, and there have been so many new products launched that it warrants a second look. In fact, I could do several Best of Breed articles and I’d still only cover a small percentage of the new products! And although it has been a while since there was a dedicated roundup, I have covered a few Feather…

ADAFRUIT $14.95 adafruit.com/product/5201 There are lots of ways of adding programmable LEDs to your project. NeoPixels are probably the classic, but they’re not without their pitfalls – they are expensive if you need a lot of them, can be slow to update, and don’t have great brightness control at the low end. HUB75 LEDs can be cheap and fast, but can also be awkward to wire up and control. APA102s are fast and look great, but they also get very expensive very quickly if you’re using a lot of them. This board uses an LED driver – the IS31FL3741 – which controls the 13×9 RGB LED matrix. This driver is controlled over I2C with a selectable address, so you can control four of these boards using a single two-wire I2C…

jivamaterials.com PCBs, as you’ll know from our cover feature this issue, are currently constructed from epoxy resin and fibreglass. To extract the metals used in their construction, they need to be shredded and incinerated, which is an inefficient, time-consuming, and energy-consuming process. Electronic waste is a growing problem, and with the current squeeze on semiconductor prices, it makes sense to have a PCB substrate that makes it easier to reuse components without chucking a load of waste in a landfill. Enter Soluboard®, from Jiva Materials. This PCB substrate is based on natural materials, which delaminates when it’s soaked in warm water, allowing the natural parts to be composted and the metals to be recycled. We like the thinking behind this product, and we also like the woody aesthetic. Here’s how…

hsmag.cc/DigitalPictureFrame We’re big fans of upcycling old hardware here at HackSpace Towers, but there is some tech that’s just too far gone to rescue. One approach to this is to rip out the guts, but keep the vintage-looking shell of the old kit. That’s what Instructables user Democracity did with this Sony Micro TV. In place of the old CRT that the TV originally used, there’s a TFT LCD screen, behind a bezel made out of black acrylic and the original glass of the TV. Images are served up by a Raspberry Pi 4, and the whole thing is held together with a lot of hot glue.…

We’re breaking new ground here at HackSpace towers, for this is the first time we’ve featured an animation on these pages. Floaty Boaty, shown here, is a 240-frame (very) short film showing the classic 3D-printed Benchy in its element, sailing the seven seas. Well, we say seven seas – in fact there are 240 individual seascapes, designed by visual effects professional Mark Theriault. Mark’s made the source files for this work available at the link below. As well as the 240 slightly different wave scenes, there’s a frame to keep the whole thing in one place, a modified version of the Benchy boat, and a peg to hold the Benchy in place on the waves. Mark warns that the process takes hours, so you’ll also have to think about lighting…

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 3D PRINTING It seems that you’re starting to take 3D printing seriously. First there’s your columnist talking about using 3D printing to renovate her house. I like this; for anyone lucky enough to be able to buy a house, it’s the biggest expense of your life. If 3D printing is mature enough that she trusts it with her house, that says a lot more than printing Marvel or Dungeons & Dragons figures, as pretty as they are. And now in this issue there’s '50 top 3D prints'. I can see myself using a few of these! Sometimes it’s a pain to…

In this tutorial, we’re going to use EasyEDA. It’s good for entry-level PCB designs. It’s fairly easy to use and you can get started without having to install any software. Point your web browser to easyeda.com/editor. You don’t have to sign in to an account, but if you do, you can save your projects in the cloud. There are two basic steps you need to do to create a PCB: design the schematic and then convert this into a PCB design. EasyEDA does both of these. Technically, you don’t have to create the schematic first – you can dive straight into the PCB, but there’s a high chance something will go awry, so we’d strongly recommend starting with a schematic. You’ve probably seen schematic diagrams before. They show how electronic…

Rosie Hattersley writes tech, craft, and life hacks and tweets @RosieHattersley. “Bubble wrap was originally intended to be used as a form of textured wall covering” Bubble wrap usually finds its way into our lives as a result of a satisfying splurge on something delicate enough to need protection: trinkets, vases, items with sharp edges that might do damage tend to come swaddled in the inflatable wrapping. Receipt of such items invariably leads to an immediate urge to pop the packaging in a bid to produce the loudest, rudest-sounding parp, but if you can resist its tactile entreaty, bubble wrap can be used for all sorts of secondary tasks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most such reuses capitalise on its cushioning effect: line your drawers or tool-box with bubble wrap to stop tools…

It’s perhaps no surprise to find bubble wrap used in a range of children’s art projects, from eye-catching motif printing (see hsmag.cc/BWPrinting) to sculptures made from coloured bubble wrap: hsmag.cc/BWSculpture. The ‘relaxing art form’ creations of Kobus Hattingh take things a little further, with life-size animals sculpted from the plastic packaging material. Kobus says he starts his projects by using double-sided sticky tape to attach pieces of bubble wrap to the wall he wants to decorate, gradually building up a 3D design that he then paints or covers with inexpensive gift wrap. Some of his designs seem more reminiscent of a theatrical set than an everyday interior. Project Maker Kobus Hattingh Project Link hsmag.cc/BWDecor…

Nicola King is a freelance writer and sub-editor who also enjoys dabbling in the fabric and fibre arts fields. She owns more yarn than she will ever use in her lifetime. It’s probably fair to say that most makers and crafters have a lot of ‘stuff’ – cables, wires, PCBs, nails, brushes, threads, balls of yarn… the list is a varied and very long one. It’s probably also fair to say that one of the great challenges we face as makers is storage, so why not fashion your own drawstring bags to hide away and organise some of those bits and pieces? In this tutorial we are going to make a mediumsized, lined drawstring bag in which you can store your paraphernalia, and the beauty of the make is that…

Dr Andrew Lewis is a specialist fabricator and maker, and is the owner of the Andrew Lewis Workshop. Space is one of those things that makers never seem to have enough of. If you have a table to work on, you’ll wish you had another table to keep your tools and notes in order. If you have a whole workshop on multiple levels, you’ll probably wish you had an extra bit of room tacked on at the side for storage. 'If I just had a bit more space', the mantra goes, 'then it wouldn’t be such a mess in here'. This isn’t true, of course. No amount of extra space is going to make you more productive and tidy unless you manage it properly. THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE SHOP…

BLUES WIRELESS $25 blues.io QUICKLOGIC $49 quicklogic.com The Swan is a low-cost, embeddable STM32L4-based microcontroller, specifically designed for batterypowered IoT solutions. Its Feather form factor enables it to be used with a variety of add-on FeatherWings and sensors. You can power the board via USB, a battery, or line power. It also features a software-switchable 2 A regulator for powering external sensors. The Swan only draws 8 μA when in low-power mode, making it an ideal development board for remote and long-term sensing. You can pick up the Swan as a standalone board, or as part of Blues’ starter kit that features the Swan board and the firm‘s Notecard and Notecarrier boards that add additional features, and make connecting to all 55 pins of the board simple and fast. Head…

SUNKKO £169 hsmag.cc/sunkko @concrete_d0g If you are interested in building your own Li-ion battery packs, perhaps for drone use, e-bikes, hacky racer or for a power wall project, you have probably considered a battery spot welder. Like many tools, there’s a range of offerings available, from cheap PCB-based spot welders you run from a well-specified car battery, through to very automated high-end battery production systems. Sat toward the budget end of the spectrum, you quickly find SUNKKO branded machines with a range of features. We opted to take a look at the SUNKKO 709A machine, which isn’t the cheapest model at £169, but offers the range of features we wanted. The 709A is primarily a spot welder designed to spot-weld thin nickel strips to steel battery terminals. The 709A also,…

Many makers got their start with Lego. There’s something about the fact that it’s easy to put two bricks together, yet this simple process can lead to huge and complex builds that fire the imagination. This author vividly remembers the Lego Technic kit he had as a child. There wasn’t much technology to the Technic back then – a pair of motors and buttons – but that was enough to let the creations come to life. These days, technology is more accessible than ever. The Raspberry Pi Build HAT lets makers add a huge amount of processing power to their Lego builds quickly and easily. We’re simultaneously jealous of the young makers of today and excited to see what they’ll do with these tools.…

hsmag.cc/T-APE Forget what you think you know about synthesizers: this, from mayojaster, is something (as far as we’re aware) completely new. Instead of using samples, or square waves generated by something like a 555 chip, it uses what the maker calls a ‘bytebeat’, which is software that generates a fractal that the synthesizer can use to generate sounds. We can’t vouch for the maths behind the sounds, but we can tell you that we like the way it looks, and we like the way it sounds. If you want one, buy it from Tindie, unless you’re in a recently post-Brexit country, where you’re best off ordering from mayojaster’s own website so they can calculate the VAT properly.…

hsmag.cc/MetalHorse Since Magdelenian people drew on the cave walls at Lascaux, we’ve felt an artistic connection to horses. Now Reddit user Rickdadick450 has added to the long tradition of horse-inspired art with this scrap-metal sculpture. According to the maker, this took 20 hours of work, and is made entirely of scrap. It’s the attention to detail that gets us about this work; the way that the hard angles of the metal come together to suggest the natural shape of the animal’s face. Brilliant stuff.…

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! Lock picking and other locksport is a popular pastime in many hackspaces and at many maker events. It’s a rich vein of interest for a curious mind, and there are lots of different aspects to the scene. In this article, we’ll take a look over a small collection of locksport-type activities, and explore some of the basic skills to open common locks. In the second part, we’ll look at more DIY aspects of locksport – making tools, stripping and reassembling locks, and much more. The…

EasyEDA Designer is an online tool at easyeda.com/editor. You don’t have to create an account to use this, but if you do, you can keep your projects online and easily access them from any computer. Go to File > New > Project to create a new project. First, let’s add the LEDs. LEDs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so it’s important to make sure you’ve got the right footprint attached to the symbol. In the EELib tab, scroll down until you find the LED symbol. There’s a drop-down underneath it that lets you select the right footprint. Each one comes in Red, Green, and Blue flavours, but this doesn’t affect our circuit in any way. We used LED-TH-3 mm – TH stands for through-hole, and we used…

My Sony car stereo was failing, sometimes refusing to start, so I thought about an improvement: a 7” display head unit. I presently have three conventional gauges above the Sony and wondered if I could put some software gauges into a more modern head unit. Modern cars feature an OBD-II communications bus which allows aftermarket head units to connect to that bus and get signals such as engine RPM, temperature, etc. However, my 1990 Toyota MR2 is pre-OBD-II, so my head unit would need to take some voltages as gauge inputs. Android head units on eBay cost around A$130, including postage. They have built-in radio, audio power amp, Bluetooth, GPS, WiFi, the ability to link with phones, and lots of Android apps. An equivalent Raspberry Pi setup would cost A$238:…

Bubble wrap artist Bradley Hart recreates iconic paintings and photographs by injecting individual bubbles with acrylic paint. Together, his ‘pixelated photorealistic pictures’ combine to form an ‘album of memories’. Bradley uses a computer algorithm to provide a visual overview of his highly detailed bubble wrap artworks’ progress, and keep the colour work as close to the instantly recognisable original image as possible. The laborious painting technique, which mimics the pointillism effect of impressionism or the oversized dots of pop art hero Roy Lichtenstein, is painstaking and time-consuming, in sharp contrast to the disposable plastic derived from crude oil, of which we produce an overabundance. Bradley says his aim is to highlight “the irony of applying such delicate physical artistry to a mass-produced material, and the indestructible nature of plastic versus…

Veteran magazine author from the old days, writer of the Body Build series, plus co-author of Raspberry Pi for Dummies, Raspberry Pi Projects, and Raspberry Pi Projects for Dummies. magpi.cc/mikecook Last month we showed you how to make a switch matrix and enclosure for an isomorphic layout keyboard. This month we will finish the construction, and look at the Pico board, control switches, OLED display, and rotary encoder, as well as how to wire it all together. We will also look at the software we need to test what we have built, and the final software to bring it all to life. 01 The control keys We added four triangular control keys to change various non-playing parameters, and built them on a separate piece of stripboard from the main matrix.…

Rob Miles has been playing with hardware and software since almost before there was hardware and software. You can find out more about his so-called life at robmiles.com. Make a portable MIDI controller that you can use to create complex rhythms and musical sequences and use as a tiny keyboard. In a cheese box. The article ‘Make Music with Pico’, in HackSpace magazine issue 46, showed how easy it is to use a Raspberry Pi Pico device to send MIDI notes to a synthesizer. We are going to build on that to create a MIDI instrument, the ‘Pico musical cheese box’, as shown in Figure 1. The musical cheese box uses a ring of twelve pixels to display notes, and twelve buttons for user input. You can use the cheese…