HackSpace #49

LEGO®. That word alone is so evocative of builds past. Some elaborate builds of my youth – we kept our assortment of parts and bricks in a wooden box that holds so many great memories. Some more simple builds that I’m doing with my daughter as she learns to express her creativity. If someone had never seen LEGO®, it would be hard to express how important it was to me in my development as a maker. It was flexible enough to give me freedom to build what I wanted, yet was still contained enough to make it easy to connect different parts together. Pirate ships blended with castles and racing cars to create robots, spaceships, and more. LEGO® has, of course, continued to develop since my parents passed our set…

hsmag.cc/CircuitSculpture Free-form brass soldering is hard. Working in two dimensions is hard enough, but when you add a Z axis, you suddenly need two hands to hold your workpiece plus another two to hold the solder and the iron. And even when you’ve managed that step, you still have to come up with a working circuit. That’s why, just like the brass ring on page 10, we’re fascinated by this lamp from Edward Agombar. It’s powered by USB-C and uses four WS2812B LEDs to create a soft glow. There’s a Seeeduino XIAO controlling the circuit, and a voltage booster to bring the 3.3 V output by the XIAO up to the 5 V needed by the LEDs.…

hsmag.cc/MiniAmp Tinkercad – great for 3D printing, not so much for woodwork, right? Wrong! Mike Wilds designed the enclosure for this mini amplifier entirely in this free, online software. On the downside, he had to export it into Fusion 360 to be able to put the sign into the CNC router he had available; on the upside, he’s created a video that you can watch and follow step by step if you want to learn how to make smart designs out of wood. Specifically, a few short pieces of mahogany glued together into a block. The electronics for this project all came out of a kit – purists may grumble, but there’s no better way to learn than to follow along with someone else’s instructions, knowing that you have all…

charlyn.codes Free-form brass soldering is hard. The brass cools down too quickly to let you get the solder where you want it, it bends in ways you don’t want it to bend, it takes forever to get things that are even functional, let alone aesthetic. That’s why this brass ring, with inset LEDs and a hidden battery holder, is so impressive. The most impressive thing is the tiny magnet fixed to the underside of the ring, closest to the wearer’s palm, which keeps the battery from slipping out and breaking the circuit – that and the fact that it’s perfect.…

hsmag.cc/CassettePlayer Maker Matty has taken inspiration from Instructables user Ananords to mix the now common practice of playing music on solely electronic files with the ancient practice of actually having to pick up a physical object and put it into the machine. What he’s ended up with is a device, built into the guts of an old cassette player, that has two buttons: Play/Pause and Shuffle. That, on its own, makes it a useful build for anyone with limited motor control who just wants to listen to a pre-selected range of music, but Matty’s also added an RFID reader, so the user can select a card with some album artwork and touch it to the device to play a song.…

niklasroy.com/graffomat One of the many, many cool things about Berlin is the quality and quantity of the graffiti art there. This 2 × 2.2 m plotter build by artist Niklas Roy is the latest addition to that noble tradition. It’s controlled by an Arduino Nano, and uses a pair of electric drills to move the plotter head (actually a can of spray paint and an actuator to press the paint nozzle) along the X and Y axes. Electric drills aren’t meant for precision; they have no way of knowing how far they’ve rotated for, so Niklas had to add black and white encoding strips to each axis, read by an optical sensor, to give positional feedback. So why use electric drills, when the natural choice for something like this would…