Table of contents for #61 in HackSpace

Even if you don’t consider yourself a geek, learning to code (even a little bit) can open up huge new possibilities Programming is one of the core maker skills and, like many skills, it doesn’t need to be difficult. With wood working, for example, it takes years to master the skills of fine joinery, but you can go from beginner to making something useful in a few hours (even if there are a few gaps in the joints and you’re relying on brackets to hold it together). It’s the same with programming. You don’t have to master everything to create something useful, and in a few hours you can join the bits together to make something that works. Even if you don’t consider yourself a geek, learning to code (even…

hsmag.cc/GeigerCounter Here’s a simple but useful project: an internet  connected Geiger counter. Its creator, Dmytro Panin, lives in Kyiv, Ukraine, not far from the site of the Chornobyl nuclear reactor and its associated fallout zone. Understandably, Dmytro wants to keep an eye on local radiation levels. The build consists of an M4011 Geiger sensor connected to a Raspberry Pi Pico W, which sends the readings to a server every few hours. Dmytro’s also included a 128 × 64 pixel OLED screen to display readings, for those rare occasions when he isn’t glued to the internet.…

hsmag.cc/OscilloscopeCyberdeck A non-functioning oscilloscope, plus Raspberry Pi 400, form the guts of this cyberdeck build, one of a number of small, portable computers that have been delighting the internet lately. One of the benefits of upcycling old technology is that there’s often a lot of room inside it for more modern gear, and that’s the case here: the maker has cut into the oscilloscope case and mounted USB sockets, a power distribution board, and an LVDS/HDMI adaptor board, which enables Raspberry Pi 400 to display graphics on the original oscilloscope screen.…

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 PLANT CARE, PART 1 I note from your look at ‘compostable’ PHA filament that it hadn’t actually started to break down by the time you wrote it up. Could you give us an update? Have the worms eaten it yet? Will you be growing your tomatoes in it next year? Diane London Ben says: I’ll check tonight [checks; I've gone drastically wrong, and I think the worms have drowned]. Obviously we're only going to get a limited amount of compost out of a spool of plastic, so I’ll have to rely on vegetable peelings etc. for the bulk of my compost, but…

YOU’LL NEED Raspberry Pi Pico with soldered headers and MicroPython installed (see hsmag.cc/PicoMicroPython) PROJECT 1 Dual H-bridge motor driver, e.g. hsmag.cc/MotorSHIM 2 × Micro metal gear-motors (with suitable connectors, e.g. JST-ZH) Chassis and wheels (optional) PROJECT 2 Breadboard SG90 micro servo 9g 1 × 330 Ω resistor Male-male jumper wires f you want to make the wheels on that robotic vehicle go round, you’re going to need I some motors. We’ll explore how to create code to control them, along with the precision angular movements of a rotary servo motor. Drive motors Motors have many uses, but here we’ll use them for a simple two-wheeled robot. To be able to drive each motor in forward or reverse, we’ll need a dual H-bridge driver which can reverse the polarity – depending…

@RosieHattersley Rosie Hattersley writes tech, craft, and life hacks and tweets @RosieHattersley. “BACKING UP TO ANOTHER MEDIUM OR THE CLOUD THUS SEEMS DE RIGUEUR” In the late 20th century battle of the global consumer brands, Sony took the crown for the Walkman but shares the glory with Philips with the compact disc, which it launched in 1985 with Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms and claims of audio superiority. Despite the success of iTunes, iPods, and iPhones, plus streaming services such as Napster, Spotify, and the like, the compact disc is in rude health. In fact, offline music consumption is making something of a comeback as spoilt-for-choice music lovers embrace albums and plump for directly supporting artists they enjoy, rather than gifting most of the proceeds of their digital music choices to the…

@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. One of the biggest challenges with learning a new skill is having a project to start with. Too complex a project and it can be hard to know where to start, and you can end up going round in circles and giving up before you’ve really started. Too simple, and it can seem like you’re not really getting anything out of it. In this article, we’re going to pick our favourite ‘simple but not too simple’ PCB project – Christmas lights. It’ll be a little PCB that holds one or more LEDs that you can solder up. If you want to, you can add a…

ANYCUBIC $235 anycubic.com @ben_everard Assembling the Anycubic Kobra Neo is straightforward, and shouldn’t take too long. There were about a dozen screws to join the parts together. The aluminium seemed a little prone to cross-threading, so don’t rush. Once the machine’s all together, the first step is to level the bed using the auto bed levelling feature. This is done automatically, but only when you instruct it to (rather than happening by default each print, as some printers do). The levelling makes sure that the print bed is the same distance away from the print head across the whole bed, but doesn’t actually make sure that the print head is the right distance away, that’s the job for Z-levelling, which comes next. This is a pretty straightforward process, where you…

hsmag.cc/PeasantKnife We’ll admit that we hadn’t heard of the Svörd Peasant Knife, seen here complete with laser-engraved handle by Artful Dabbler. It’s a model of a non-locking folding knife based on designs from 17th-century Bohemia and Bavaria, and in its modern incarnation, it’s extremely popular in New Zealand. Peasants everywhere like to decorate their belongings, so it seems only right to bring the tendency bang up-to-date with a spot of laser engraving. The ancestors would approve.…

From $599 hsmag.cc/ukama Delivery: September 2023 We’ll be honest, this is one of those projects we don’t fully understand and have absolutely zero use for, but we love that it exists. And there is almost certainly someone out there (quite possibly reading this) who has been looking for exactly this thing: an open-source mobile network. Not the phone – the hardware to set up and run the network that mobile phones connect to. An obvious problem with this is spectrum licensing – to run a mobile network, you need a little chunk of the radio spectrum that you’re allowed to use, and these are sold off for enormous sums of money by the appropriate authorities in each country. In the USA, however, there’s a little section that you’re allowed to…

In Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World, there is a small, almost insignificant, side plot, where Danny and his father make a small hot air balloon. It’s been on our list of things to make pretty much ever since. Times change, and it’s now not a good idea to launch a flaming ball untethered into the skies, as it’s at the very least littering and, at worst, is going to cause a fire. Sky lanterns have now been banned by numerous local authorities, but there is still heaps of fun to be had. With that in mind, we jumped right in! We’d seen some ideas where aerostats, or balloon canopies, were flown in smaller ‘hops’, heating the internal air using a device on the ground enabling the balloon to perform…

@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. PLA is by far the most popular plastic for 3D printing. LW-PLA takes this base and adds a little magic in the form of foaming agent. This is activated by the heat of the hot end and creates bubbles of gas inside the plastic as it comes out of the nozzle. This foaming causes the plastic to expand, which means that you need a much lower flow-rate to get the same volume and extrude properly. The foaming is a little less predictable than regular extrusion because it depends upon several printer-specific factors, such as how large the heated part of the hot end is and…

@holtonhandmade Nicola King is a freelance writer and sub-editor. She’s creative, but you can’t expect her to be tidy too…as a peek at her craft room will attest. The craft of weaving is thousands of years old and basically involves the creation of a fabric by interlacing threads. In its most elementary form, even before weaving was used to make cloth, the interweaving of plant leaves and branches was practised in order to make baskets, shelter, fences, and so on. There’s evidence that weaving was used as far back as Neolithic times. The ancient Egyptians were enthusiasts of the craft, as were other cultures around the world, including the Amazonians and Native Americans. Back in issue 57 (hsmag.cc/issue57), we discussed how the craft of weaving and, in particular how the…

hsmag.cc/3D-PrintedGenerator We’ve seen 3D-printed generators before: highly technical, superbly accurate, and made for a specific purpose. This one is different: it’s extremely simple. And we say that in a good way; the simplicity is what makes the design so compelling. All you need to make this is a 3D printer and some easily accessible hardware parts, such as nuts, bolts, a wire, and magnets. The bit that generates the electrical current is actually the smallest part of this model; most of it is a 64:1 ratio gearbox, meaning that for every turn of the handle, the rotor (that’s the part with the six magnets attached to it) spins 64 times, which is enough to generate 12V of current.…

hsmag.cc/JagerMachine The JägerMachine is, according to its maker Pegor, “an IoT shot-pouring machine powered by Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. It features a full GUI that allows the user to configure the device, pour a shot, and also check previous messages sent to the machine. Once paired with its own Gmail account, the JägerMachine waits for emails containing a secret user-defined subject line and a custom message that gets displayed on the screen. Once an email is received, a shot is poured.” Brilliant. It started as a daft idea for a gift for a friend’s birthday (the pair exchange Jägermeister-related gifts as a joke), and has gone from a boxy design in Fusion 360 to a fully functioning oblivion dispenser.…

Jonny Taphouse is a product design engineer, and former wedding photographer, whose wood-burning camping stove recently raised £68,896 on Kickstarter. We caught up with him to chat about how he designed the stove, built his own equipment, and prototyping in Bristol Hackspace. Here’s what he had to say. “The stove is a USB-powered, forced air camp-stove. It’s designed to burn biofuels, so wood, twigs, pine cones, and other things like that, instead of burning the usual fossil fuels, like gas. “The stove’s aimed at lightweight backpacking – a lot of twig-burning stoves are aimed more at the bushcraft market – people in forest schools or fishing hobbyists, that kind of thing, and perhaps people camping from their car. “I came up with the idea after the other products that I…

Digital making and learning to program go hand in hand. While you can borrow code from other makers to use in projects, and it’s often a good starting point for adapting, it’s useful and empowering to learn the basics of programming. easy-to In this introductory guide, we’ll explore some of the key coding concepts using a couple of variants of the understand Python language. Throughout, we’re using the Raspberry Pi Pico and mainly MicroPython, but the same techniques can be adapted for use with other microcontrollers or single-board computers (e.g. Raspberry Pi) that support Python or its variants. We start out simple with the ‘Hello World’ of digital making: getting an LED to blink. We then add a push-button to trigger it, using a conditional statement. Controlling a multicoloured RGB…

YOU’LL NEED Raspberry Pi Pico with soldered headers and MicroPython installed (see hsmag.cc/PicoMicroPython) Breadboard Male-male jumper wires PROJECT 1 DHT11 sensor, e.g. hsmag.cc/DHT11 Moisture sensor, e.g. hsmag.cc/moisturesensor Piezo buzzer – active type Male-female jumper wires There’s a wide range of electronic sensors that you can connect to your T microcontroller or single-board computer. Readings can then be viewed and also used with if conditional statements in the code to trigger an action such as sounding an alarm. Digital sensor First, we’ll read a sensor with a digital output signal. For this example, we’re using the popular DHT11 temperature and relative humidity sensor – alternatively, you could use a DHT22. Connect it to Pico as in Figure 5. Its Vcc pin is connected to Pico’s 3V3 pin, GND to GND, and DOUT…

Alan ‘Pooch’ Puccinelli: is a 3D printing geek who put his money where his mouth is, and is now making a living from 3D printing via his company, R3PKORD. He’s also full to the brim with infectious enthusiasm: we spoke to him when we were full of cold on a grey November evening, and came away from the conversation buzzing with how awesome 3D printing is right now, and how much better it’s going to be in future. We hope you do too! HackSpace Hi Pooch! First of all, let’s have some background: how did you get into 3D printing? Pooch Like a lot of people, I am a maker hobbyist, and always interested in fun and new and exciting tools that are out there. Around 2015, I started hearing…

@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. Christmas is all about food and, if there’s one food that we can’t do Christmas without, it’s mince pies. These little sweet fruit delights are so emblematic of the season. However, too often we see sub-standard mince pies churned out by the million by supermarkets with more of an eye on shelf life and profit per unit than quality. In this article, we’re going to go through our technique for making mince pies that we’ve honed over a couple of decades. Like all pies, the first important thing to get right is the filling. You can buy mincemeat, but we’ve never found any shop-bought mincemeat…

@robmiles 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 and follow him on Twitter at @robmiles YOU’LL NEED You can get sound tracker programs for all computers We are going to use the MilkyTracker program you can get from: milkytracker.org/downloads/ If you want to have a go via your web browser, you can find a tracker here: stef.be/bassoontracker/ Sound trackers are cool again. They were present at the very dawn of digital music. Now, devices like the Dirtywave M8 (dirtywave.com) and the Polyend Tracker (polyend.com/tracker) are finding their way into the hands of musicians who are rediscovering the joy of making music “the spreadsheet way”. In this article, we are…

MAKER KG is a writer, developer, and software preservationist with a particular interest in projects that allow everyone to get hands-on with their own games and technology. magpi.cc/ kgorphanides You’ll Need Rotarytoolwithcuttingdisk and 2 mm drill Solderingstation Flatfacecutters Wirestrippers Optional3Dprinter PartsSeelist YouMakeTech’s Vincent Mistler has produced some of our favouriteRaspberry Pi Pico builds. This month, we’re going to take a step-by-step look at building the ‘Raspberry Pi Pico GameBoy’ - a MicroPython-based handheld console that provides huge scope to develop your own games. Vincent details the equipment you’ll need and provides a video of the assembly process at magpi.cc/buildpicogb that you’ll definitely want to look at. We’ve made a few tweaks and broken down some undocumented steps to make the build extra easy, even if it’s your first time making…

@devinck In this month’s Best of Breed, I’m going to look at a few of the more exotic and expensive development boards and kits on the market. I know what you’re thinking! Just about everything on the market is expensive these days! Sad but true. Especially when buying from third-party vendors. In fact, it seems like you’ve hit the lottery when you are able to source a microcontroller board for the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. I just hope that trend changes soon. Unlike many of the affordable development boards out there, these boards are generally available, but at a very different price point. And just to clarify, I’m not talking about the expensive development boards like a VORAGO Technologies RH-OBC-1 dev board that comes in at around $11,000, or a…

PIMORONI £24 pimoroni.com @concreted0g Nuts and bolts are a mainstay of making, and whilst we may have a sizeable collection of adjustable spanners, socket sets, and more, it’s often the smaller end of the scale that gives us a challenge to work with. Hailing from Japan, the Engineer brand of tools has, for a while now, been garnering a reputation for quality precision tools, and they are becoming more available in the UK via a range of vendors. Whilst not the cheapest of tools, they are generally considered tools worthy of investment, with good quality construction and decent quality control. We found that a set fell into our shopping basket during a recent order from Pimoroni, and we wanted to share our thoughts on them. The TS-04 combination spanner set…