Table of contents for #64 in HackSpace

Got a comment, question, or thoughtabout HackSpacemagazine get in touch at hsmag.cc/hello GET IN TOUCH hackspace@raspberrypi.com hackspacemag hackspacemag ONLINE smag.cc This cover feature comes to you thanks to multiple requests. Soldering is a regular feature of our articles in HackSpace magazine, and there are a huge range of soldering irons out there, but we’d never spent much time really sitting down and comparing the options. We’ve looked at a few in reviews over the years, and some others have come across our workbench for various reasons, but when people came to us and asked ‘what soldering iron should I get?’, we honestly struggled to provide a good answer. So, we decided to get our hands dirty and find out about the good, bad, and ugly of hobbyist soldering irons. We’ve…

Instagram @JackAndTheOther Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, as a wise man wrote; so to describe this beautiful musical cyberdeck, we’re going to ask the person who built it. Take it away, Jack: “My brother and I converted this old briefcase we found at a thrift store into a control centre for the rackmount PC we use during our band Jack and the Other’s live gigs. I’ve always loved the cassette futurism (aka retro-futurism) aesthetic portrayed in TV shows like Maniac and Severance, and wanted to create something similar with this. The briefcase contains a 10” touchscreen display, a midi controller which doubles as a computer keyboard, a trackpad mouse, and an LED VU meter (a type of audio decibel meter) with a 6.35mm audio line-in jack that…

Matt Gray is a TV and radio broadcast engineer, Game Boy enthusiast, artist, maker of unique things, enhancer of street furniture, and many other things. He’s also a big fan of – to borrow Nike’s phrase – just doing it. If you’ve ever thought of a cool idea, but left it on the shelf at the back of your mind because it’s too hard/nobody else will like it, read on – Matt’s a shining example of the hacker ethos that tells us to go ahead and make it ourselves. He’s online at Mattg.co.uk, or on all the social media as @MattGrayYES. He also exists in physical space, where he has been known to put baked beans in ice cream, sell beer from a moving hovercraft, and many, many more silly,…

@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. Polypropylene (or PP as it’s known in the 3D printing world) has some excellent material properties. It’s slightly flexible – so has excellent toughness. It’s resistant to a wide range of chemicals. Prints can be watertight. However, it has one annoying flaw when it comes to 3D printing – polypropylene loves to stick to polypropylene, but it doesn’t stick efficiently to anything else. Effectively printing polypropylene, then, is basically a process of finding a way to get it to stick to your print bed. We tested out two methods: using packaging tape stuck to the print bed and using a painted-on primer. In both cases, we…

Despite loving all things digital, Mike admits to being a bit of a Luddite, vinyl records and all. Surprising, you might think, in a magazine dedicated to making stuff, that we’re not going to be showing you how to make anything here. Admittedly, we’re looking at growing crystals, but the fact is that many chemical substances form themselves into crystals without any human assistance whatsoever. What’s more, some of those crystals are works of beauty, as you can clearly see from the photo of a mineral sample below. The chances are those particular crystals grew deep in the ground, at high temperatures, perhaps over thousands of years. However, crystals can grow much more quickly, and in more benign conditions. And while that process will take place unaided, by providing ideal…

@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. CircuitPython is great for getting started with microcontroller programming, but it can have a few shortfalls. One of which is very accurate timing. The CircuitPython interpreter does quite a bit in the background, and this means that the execution of the program pauses occasionally. These pauses are short and don’t generally cause any problems, unless you need something to be very accurate time-wise. One thing you might need accurate timing for is reading an analogue signal. If you want to understand what the signal is doing, you need to know exactly when the readings are taken. Thankfully, in CircuitPython 8 on Raspberry Pi Pico, there’s…

instagram.com/gazzaladradesign We found this model, by gazzaladra, on Printables. It’s functional, it’s decorative, it’s designed and printed tightly enough that it’s watertight, and it’s perfect for any plant lover who spent their childhood being dragged around medieval fortifications. Our favourite feature of this is the moat, which holds excess water so that the roots of your plant don’t get drowned. It’s a playful, functional detail, and we love it.…

hsmag.cc/StairClimbingRobot Robots can do all sorts of things, but they’ve always struggled with stairs. Master robot builder James Bruton decided to change this, with a robot that can climb a carpeted staircase and, eventually, bring him a cup of tea. It’s split into three vertical lifting sections powered by hefty motors and ball screws, with bearings and motors held in place by chunky 3D-printed parts and extruded aluminium. There’s a sliding section at the back that extends via a 3D-printed rack and pinion, and there’s also a weight that moves towards and away from the middle section of the robot to keep its centre of gravity in a sensible place for climbing stairs. It’s hard to explain, but it makes perfect sense once you see it in motion – head…

CHOCOLATE FISH It makes perfect sense that you can 3D-print chocolate – after all, it melts when it gets hot and solidifies when it gets cold. What doesn’t make perfect sense (to me, at least) is that you can make such good-looking prints. I can’t get PLA to behave that well, and that’s pretty much purpose-built for 3D printing. Still, if Ellie Weinstein is taking requests, could you ask her for a white chocolate lithophane? Paul Northampton Ben says: Absolutely not. Partly because white chocolate is opaque, so wouldn’t let any light through, but mostly because white chocolate is a scourge upon the good name of chocolate. It’s just chocolate with the chocolate taken out, and what good is that? It’s the ghost of good chocolate and should be banished…

An apple wassail is a tradition in the South West of England to bless an orchard. Like many things in the South West, the exact form of an apple wassail (wassail can also mean visiting houses, and singing songs for money or food in a manner similar to carol singing, but this is a completely separate tradition) varies a lot, and parts of it are lost to history. I was asked to help revive this ancient tradition at a community orchard in Bristol, and as part of that, we had to decide how to marry the old and new. The wassail is led by someone representing the spirit of the orchard (which is thought to reside in the oldest tree in the orchard, although all the trees in this particular…

@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. 3D modelling is a tricky beast to learn. It’s a useful maker skill, but it’s one that takes time and effort to get right. Wouldn’t it be much easier if someone created a tool to quickly and easily customise existing designs? Well, we have good news. The Boxes.py project does exactly this. You can choose from a huge range of existing designs, enter your own parameters, and get files that you can laser-cut. Before we start looking at the designs, we first need to get some calibration information for our cutter, specifically the kerf. This is the width of the cut that the laser makes.…

@devinck It’s been a wild ride for anyone manufacturing electronic kits or accessories over the past few years, myself included. I’ve had some parts on order for over 100 weeks, and with no end in sight. Fortunately, the supply chain disaster of the last few years is looking better for 2023. But still, sourcing some parts, especially microcontrollers, is still near impossible. Let’s hope they start showing up soon! And yet some manufacturers have been able to continually roll out new products. They may have switched their focus to more basic offerings like DIY keyboard accessories and components, or cranking out new variations of LED-related products and accessories as they seem to still be readily available, albeit usually at higher price points. In this Best of Breed, I’ll be looking…

@ben_everard PIMORONI from £69.90 hsmag.cc/inkyframe4 E-ink displays have an almost magical property – they keep displaying an image without using any power. They’re not just low-power – they’re zero-power. You can take the battery out, pop the display in a box, and come back to it days or weeks later and it’ll still display the same image. Black and white e-ink displays are becoming more common (and affordable). However, colour screens are still a bit of a rarity. This month, we’ve been testing the latest offering from Pimoroni: the Inky Frame 4.0. The ‘4.0’ refers to its diagonal size in inches (just over 10cm). That’s the actual screen part of the 640×400 pixel display – there’s also a pinkish-purple surround. It is the second in the series and joins the…

Usually, we look at a crowdfunding project each month, but this issue, we’ll do something a little different. January is Kickstarter’s Make 100 month. The idea behind this is to encourage creators to start the year with a smaller project. It can be in any area, but the rewards must be limited to 100 of whatever it is you are producing. This, unsurprisingly, is particularly popular with people making things by hand, so there are plenty of interesting things in the fields of textiles and art. There are loads to choose from, but here are a few of our favourites: • Some gorgeous hand-painted, biological-inspired plates. The black-on-white designs feel particularly appropriate for this time of year: hsmag.cc/plates • Yarn is the 3D printer filament of the textiles world, and…

hsmag.cc/MarioPomodoro This 3D-printed block from the Mario games hides a Pomodoro timer, an essential tool for users of the Pomodoro Technique (a time management method), whereby practitioners break up their day into 45-minute bursts of productivity interspersed with 5-minute breaks to make a cup of tea, walk around the block, or anything that will make them more productive when they get back to work. CoderOK listed the functionality he needed, then found a Mario block on Thingiverse, with enough space inside for the Arduino Pro Mini, piezo buzzer, real-time clock, battery, and the wiring that the project needed. He tweaked the 3D model to add holes for the button on the lid, and the 4-digit display that shows the time remaining, how many successful Pomodoro sessions you’ve achieved, and a…

hsmag.cc/OddlySatisfyingClock This project embodies the spirit of the collaborative internet. Reddit user ragusa12 saw a GIF of a clock with the digital time represented on vertically sliding indicators, liked it, and made one himself. It’s a little slower than the animation, and it makes a sound like (in the maker’s own words) a full glass of water being pushed across a table. Nevertheless, it works, and when the digits all arrive where they’re supposed to be at the same time, the effect is… satisfying. The clock uses an Arduino Nano, four stepper motors, a 12-volt power supply, some LEDs, and a few more components. There isn’t a circuit diagram, as ragusa12 worked it out as he went along rather than following a plan, but the project files can all be…

Soldering is one of the core maker skills. It unlocks the world of electronics and allows you to build permanent, high-quality PCBs at home. This could be predesigned kits, or it could be designing your own circuits (either using protoboard or getting PCBs made). There’s a mind-boggling range of soldering irons available and the costs range from a few pounds to several thousands of pounds, yet they all do basically the same job. Why is there such a huge price difference? Is it deserved? We decided to limit ourselves to hobbyist soldering irons, which we decided meant soldering irons under £100 – this meant that one or two of the big names in soldering irons are completely absent from this test. Even with this limitation, there’s a huge range of…

Electric guitars are simple at heart, but that simplicity, and the fact that they have been in existence more or less unchanged for 70-ish years, means that aficionados argue over their minutiae like Italians squabbling over pasta and tomato sauce. Every minor detail matters, and at the same time, it doesn’t matter at all. To keep things simple, we’re going to make a single-coil pickup (as typically seen on a Fender Stratocaster), rather than a humbucker (which you’ll find, again usually, on a Gibson Les Paul). A single-coil pickup is what it says it is: one long, continuous coil of wire, wrapped around one or more magnets that together pick up tiny fluctuations in electrical current when a guitar string is plucked nearby. To give us room for error, we’re…

Long-time contributor to The MagPi, Phil is a freelance writer and editor with a focus on technology. MAKER @philkingeditor Anvil’s Pico W IoT toolkit enables you to connect easily, and securely, to web apps you create. Using the Anvil UF2 firmware image, you can code programs on Pico W in MicroPython, with a few extra lines to connect to Anvil, then create a web app on the Anvil site which can send and receive data to/from your Pico W program. Last issue, we sent DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor readings from Pico and displayed the readings in a web app dashboard. This time, we’ll plot the data in graphs. 01 Install the firmware If you already have a Pico W with the Anvil firmware installed and connected to your wireless network,…

@ben_everard RASPBERRY PI LTD $25 raspberrypi.com The headline feature of almost any digital camera is the number of pixels, and all versions of the Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 have 12-megapixel sensors – a 50% increase from the 8MP sensor on the Camera Module 2. While most cameras are designed to take pictures for humans to look at, that’s not always the case with Raspberry Pi cameras. They’re just as likely to take photos that are analysed by AI, and there are different things that computers and humans take from images. For example, our jelly-filled-skull-holes might appreciate the crispness of an extra 50% of pixels, but to the cold silicon of an artificial intelligence, that means 50% more information to process. Feeding the full 12 million data points would choke…