Table of contents for #73 in HackSpace

Robots are strange things because, in many ways, they’ve completely taken over our lives. But, on the other hand, it seems like they haven’t because as soon as a robot becomes common, we stop calling it a robot. 3D printers, automatic vacuum cleaners, even many cars, are all robots. They’re machines that are controlled directly by a computer. However, we don’t usually call them robots. This issue, we’re not skirting around the fact. We’re making robots, and we’re calling them exactly that. Raspberry Pi 5 makes a great base for a robot because it’s got enough processing power to churn through almost any sensor input you can throw at it. In this issue, we’re going to test this out by processing image data coming in from two cameras. If that’s…

hsmag.cc/TechNIK-cyberdeck We love seeing Raspberry Pis built into fresh new packages. Nik Reitmann’s cyberdeck follows a solid, sturdy design that reminds us of the beige box that used to get wheeled into the classroom for our regular one hour of early 1990s computing. It’s based on a Raspberry Pi 4, and the design features a trackball rather than a trackpad, to save space; it can run DOOM; it can access the internet over Wi-Fi; and the creator has broken out eight of the Raspberry Pi 4’s GPIO pins for easy breadboard tinkering. This build really shines in its execution; all the screws used in construction are internal, giving it the clean lines of an injection-moulded product, and there’s even an extra usability feature in the shape of a scroll-wheel connected…

hsmag.cc/QRTE Have you ever been to one of those restaurants that don’t have a paper menu, instead inviting you to scan a QR code on your phone? If so, and if you found it as annoying as we do, you could take a leaf out of Guy Dupont’s book. He’s built this delightful machine, the A La QRTE, which scans the QR code, presses it into a simplified format, and prints out a menu on paper, as is right and proper. The device runs on a 12V battery, and uses a QR code reader from Useful Sensors, and an ESP-32 S3 from Seeed Studio to drive the printer module. There’s also a little bit of Python involved that scrapes data from the web and formats it so that it’s printable.…

We’ve got our robot hardware and electronics. Let’s put it all together and get our robot running. One slight issue with Raspberry Pi 5 is that the layout is a bit different to previous versions. Firstly, we want to make sure there’s space for the active cooler; secondly, the ribbon connectors for the cameras are in slightly different positions. This means we can’t just plug the HAT in normally. We could raise up the HAT, but it would have to be pretty high to allow the camera cables to pass underneath. Instead, we opted to simply use header wires to join the GPIO pins and the HAT. It’s not always obvious which GPIO pins are used by a HAT, but fortunately, Adafruit releases the schematics, so we can take a…

We’re familiar with the idea of open-source hardware: designs that a motivated user can download, modify, and rebuild for themselves. But the idea of designing your own chip is surely out of bounds for mere individuals. The Raspberry Pi Foundation spent in the region of $10 million to develop the RP1 chip that sits on the Raspberry Pi 5, for instance; Apple, using a more modern production technique, will have spent many times more than that. Thicknesses of functional parts are measured in nanometres, and are getting smaller with every generation of chip manufacturing process. The Raspberry Pi 4, for example, used an Arm Cortex-A72 chip, which used a 16nm process; right now, the world’s leading chip manufacturer, TSMC, is developing a 1.5nm process. The scale of the investment required…

GET YOUR RASPBERRY PI 5 NOW! Want to get Raspberry Pi 5 sent to you right now, without waiting for stock? With Priority Boarding, you can order your Raspberry Pi 5 (4GB or 8GB) and it’ll be sent out right away. Raspberry Pi has set aside thousands of Raspberry Pi 5 computers for The MagPi and HackSpace magazine print subscribers to buy. Enough to guarantee every subscriber can get one without going out of stock. How it works! If you take out a print subscription to HackSpace magazine or The MagPi, we’ll send you a unique code in the next few days. Along with the code, you’ll get details of how to use it through our partners (Pi Shop in USA and Canada and the Pi Hut everywhere else). Get…

Jo Hinchliffe is a constant tinkerer and is passionate about all things DIY space. He loves designing and scratch-building both model and high-power rockets, and releases the designs and components as open-source. He also has a shed full of lathes and milling machines and CNC kit! It’s increasingly common for projects to incorporate PCBs as a mechanical part of the mechanism. In our last section, we looked at hierarchical sheets and laid out a motor driving circuit that we could copy and paste to add motor drivers to a project. In this part, we are going to create a simple robot rover that we’re calling ‘stoRPer’. StoRPer is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a favourite childhood toy from the 1980s: the ‘Stomper’. The Stomper, by toy company Schaper, was the first…

GAMEROOMSOLUTIONS $649 gameroomsolutions.com If you’re still holding out for a Raspberry Pi 5 retro gaming system, why not start on the enclosure? It’s one thing to get your Raspberry Pi up and running, but it’s a whole other set of skills to house your arcade system in a beautiful enclosure. And nothing looks better than a full-size arcade cabinet. Not everybody has enough tools or space to build a full-size arcade cabinet. But if you have the room in your house, you can still get your hands on a customizable, full-size arcade cabinet. These kits by Game Room Solutions offer a variety of shapes and customizability. And best of all, you don’t need any special tools to assemble them. You’ll still have to supply your own electronics, but in most…

hsmag.cc/CocktailMachine Christmas is coming, which is a good excuse to gather socially and drink fermented vegetable products. And what better way than via this Arduino-powered cocktail dispenser, which features a rotary encoder for navigating the cocktail menu, a TFT screen, laser-cut plywood and plastic body, and an Archimedes screw to give your beverage just the right amount of ice. It’s brilliant: so brilliant that we’ve asked Sven to tell us all about how he built it in the next issue of HackSpace.…

hsmag.cc/ProgressBar Here’s one for the minimalists: a progress bar for your day. It’s a simple, intuitive display that displays a line of light that grows from left to right as the working day inches by. And because it’s connected to the internet via a Raspberry Pi Pico W and the magic of MicroPython, it can grab data from your Google Calendar and display when your day’s events are. Other than the Pico W, the components are simple: just a strip of RGB LEDs, a frame to hold them (angled aluminium from your local DIY shop would work), plus a strip of opaque plastic to work as a diffuser.…

Wheeled robots are simultaneously complex and simple. The basics of strapping a motor to a computational device and setting it running are usually fairly straightforward. Getting it to move in precisely the way you want, over the terrain you want, to the place you want, is a complex field of study that takes years to master. Everything starts with the motors. These are what drive your robot, so everything else fits around them. What motors you want to use will determine which chassis you want and what electronics you need. Small hobbyist robots usually use one of two categories of motor: plastic motors that are always (and for reasons we don’t understand) yellow, and metal ‘N20’ motors. Both are ‘DC’ motors that will rotate continuously when a voltage is applied.…

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.A A modular synth isn’t a singular thing: it’s more a concept. It’s an electronic instrument that’s built up out of discrete parts (or modules) that can plug together and communicate using a standard protocol. Typically, the standard protocol is an analogue voltage known as control voltage (or CV), and is transferred around using jack-to-jack cables known as ‘patch cables’. Using these, a set of modules can be combined in different ways to create different sounds. Modules usually come from many different suppliers, and there’s a huge range to choose from, meaning that there is no standard modular setup (though there are certainly some common parts that…

Nicola King is a freelance writer and sub-editor. Madly making things for a Christmas fair stall – her sewing machine, knitting needles, and pliers are working at speed. Eco resin is arguably the new kid on the block in terms of resins, with long-established epoxy resins having been popular for some time in the world of crafting. In fact, we’ve even seen makers embedding LED lights in the substance (hsmag.cc/LEDsInResin), to great effect. The difference with eco resin, however, is that it’s just a little kinder to both the user and the environment while still being strong and durable, and it is gaining traction as a go-to compound for makers of all abilities. It also gives a very different finished effect from epoxy resin, with a far more ceramic/stoneware effect,…

@devinck As soon as I heard about the Raspberry Pi 5, my first thought was, ‘retro arcade’! With the performance boosts and long history of support for classic arcade games, it seems like a great combo. I fully understand that you can do a lot more with a Raspberry Pi 5, but it’s hard to say you could have more fun! Custom arcade builds are always a popular project. I think a lot has to do with the demographic of the Raspberry Pi community, but I also think it’s because it’s one of those projects that you can easily succeed in accomplishing, and it has a long-term fun factor. It doesn’t always have to be a full-size arcade in your house, either. A simple shoebox-size enclosure is all you need…

ADAFRUIT $29.95 hsmag.cc/metrom7 The NXP iMX RT1011 that sits at the heart of the Metro M7 is, frankly, a ridiculously powerful microcontroller. It’s based on the Arm Cortex-M7 core and runs at 500MHz. Twenty-two of the microcontroller’s GPIO pins are broken out in the classic Uno (what Adafruit calls Metro) style. This means that there’s already an ecosystem of shields that can go on top to provide additional hardware, though the majority of these shields come with support for the Arduino programming language rather than CircuitPython, and many are 5V, while this board runs at 3V. If you’re planning on using this with a third-party shield, make sure they will work together, not just physically fit. Hardware doesn’t have to be slotted on top, though. The M7 Metro also comes…

hsmag.cc/PipeOrrery Building an orrery is a brilliant way to combine the theoretical complications of maths and astrophysics with the practical elements of woodwork, laser cutting, or whatever other method of making you’re most comfortable with. In this case, the maker has used copper pipes to support the planets on their way around the sun. And it works brilliantly. There’s no motor or computerised element to this build: it’s just a laser-cut plywood base, wooden balls to represent the planets, and that glorious copper piping, T-joints, elbow joints, and end caps, all rotating around a central steel rod.…

hsmag.cc/NerdyGurdy Now this is a thing of beauty. Instructables user Kudlas is a fan of medieval music – the troubadours, the chivalry, the Plantagenet romanticism of it all. He also knows his way around a laser cutter, which is where this creation was born. While there are kits available, Kudlas chose to make this from scratch, starting with a template from the internet which he modified to produce a superior result. The body is a combination of 3 mm and 6mm Baltic birch plywood, and there are standard guitar tuners, screws, and a few 3D-printed parts. Where Kudlas deviated from the usual build is that, instead of using a threaded rod to rotate the wheel, he used a smooth piece of linear rod, of the sort commonly seen in 3D…

ALEXATRON We’re lucky to live in a time when things are easy for makers. Unfortunately, this ease can sort of pigeonhole us into certain things. There are some off-the-shelf screens that are really easy to use, which is great, but it means that everyone’s projects end up looking the same because they’ve used the same screen. It was lovely to see Thomas Burns turning away from this and using an old-fashioned cathode-ray tube. I’m not sure if he’ll see this, but if you’re reading Thomas, it brought a simile to my face, so thanks. Aaron Leeds Ben Says: That really was a beautiful build. There is something a bit special about CRTs. I’m not sure if it’s just looking back to my childhood through rose-tinted glasses, or if it’s because…

We’re basing our robot on Raspberry Pi 5. You could use a different model of Raspberry Pi, though you wouldn’t be able to have two cameras, and if it’s a pre-version 4 Raspberry Pi, you might struggle to get the software to run at a sensible speed. Alongside this controller, we’re going to need a motor driver and power supplies. Although Raspberry Pi 5 has a range of GPIO pins, these can only drive small currents, so can’t power the motors directly. Instead, it has to go via a motor driver which can power larger currents and voltages. There are a lot of different motor driver boards out there. The three things that you want to consider when picking a motor driver board are: POWER Does it match the power…

As an electronics tinkerer, I get a thrill from perusing the shelves of local charity shops in search of old gadgets I can creatively revamp. I look for things to take apart to see their inner workings, and uncover the system of mechanical and electronic parts that make them function. On one such quest, I came across a dismissed landline telephone with chunky keys, which was practically begging to be hacked into something else. The moment I saw it, ideas started swirling in my head about how I could give it a new life. I initially focused on the keypad alone, thinking it could become a comically oversized numeric pad for a laptop (I might still do this). I would have then been left with a decent, spare speaker and…

During the celebration of the Dragon Boat Festival at Seeed Studio, a booth was set up to serve drinks with an automated cocktail machine and named reBartender V0.1. The prefix ‘re-’ is commonly used to mean ‘again’, and Seeed Studio created a product line called reThings to evoke ‘redefine’, and includes products like reTerminal (which we reviewed in The MagPi 122 (magpi.cc/122) and the latest reTerminal DM (Device Master). They’re both powered by Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and have a lot of industrial interfaces – perfect for attaching to pumps, pipes, and more to help serve some cocktails. Let’s get mixing. 01 Cut the aluminium The aluminium frame needs to be cut into 2 × 15 mm lengths for feet, 2 × 25mm for the legs, and a 70mm piece…

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. Rotary dial phones are fashionable again. You can even buy brand new ‘old’ ones based on the original design shown in Figure 1 below. These have dials, but not the weight or the authentic bell sound. The author was completely unaware of this trend when he picked up his red phone. The idea was to retain the external appearance and behaviours but bring the device up to date with all-new internals and some fun behaviours. It seemed to him that there should be room inside for a reasonable amount of computing power, and he was keen to hear the old telephone bell…

PIMORONI £34.50 hsmag.cc/PicoVision Connecting an HDMI display to a microcontroller is a pretty challenging task. The sheer rate of data that has to fly through the wires is daunting, and that’s not taking into account any processing you might want to do on the data. RP2040 manages to do this with its programmable input/output system which attaches state machines to the I/O pins and can shuffle data out without any processor involvement. We’re using the term ‘HDMI’ here because you plug in an HDMI cable and use it with an HDMI monitor. However, for the pedants among you, it is technically using DVI. HDMI is backwards-compatible with DVI, so this needn’t concern you in use. RP2040 is limited by how fast it can run, so you’ll probably find that PicoVision…