Table of contents for #76 in HackSpace

Workshop is a flexible term. A workshop can be a chunk of a former warehouse packed with photogenic industrial machinery – you know, the sort of thing that half of YouTube seems to have – or it can be a corner of a room in your house with space for a few drawers, a soldering iron, and maybe a 3D printer. It can even be a temporary space – for years, I had to get the kids off to nursery and then set up the workshop on the kitchen table. This month, we’re looking at how to set up your workshop to be as good as it can be. That doesn’t mean drooling over some fantasy list of features, but real steps to optimise your space. Whether it’s in your…

hsmag.cc/solderer Soldering is one of those key maker skills. Typically, you take a soldering iron in one hand, some solder in your other hand, then hold a part with … hang on, we’ve run out of hands. Sometimes you can use clips or vices to hold wires and components together, but wouldn’t it be very handy if you had a spare hand? The Solder Sustainer gives you this extra hand, not by increasing the number of appendages you have, but by letting you control both the soldering iron and the solder wire with a single hand. Solder is fed out of a tube next to the soldering iron itself. Crucially, this tube is slightly flexible so you can bend it with one finger to direct it where you want to.…

Every maker dreams of having their own workshop. Even those fortunate enough to already have a space of their own wish that they could change a few things to make it perfect. It turns out that a perfect workshop isn’t a static thing. It’s a living space that changes as your skills advance, and as the focus of your projects evolve. Even though a leatherworking studio is going to look a lot different to a metalworking space or an electronics lab, there are areas of overlap between the tools and methodologies employed by almost every maker, and that’s what this article is about. There are two ways to get the perfect workshop – you can do it by accident or by design. In the former case, you start with a…

Tom Ranson is a 3D visualisation specialist at the Natural History Museum in London. This means that it is his job to scan anything that is or was part of the natural world, from dinosaurs to herring ear bones, and many, many things in between. Most of these scans are for researchers, but that doesn’t mean they’re locked away in digital ivory towers. Tom shares some of the Natural History Museum’s digital treasure-trove on Sketchfab at sketchfab.com/NHM_Imaging. There, you can find scans of some of the museum’s most iconic animals, including Dippy the diplodocus and Hope the whale. We got in touch with Tom to find out what goes on in the vaults under the Natural History Museum, and to learn what it takes to digitally preserve some of the…

Nicola King is a freelance writer and sub-editor. She’s looking forward to the new year, new possibilities, new opportunities… and plenty of making, creating, and hacking! You won’t be at all surprised to learn that leather-work is an ancient craft, possibly one of the oldest known to humankind. We talk a little later about its extraordinary history, but the purpose of this tutorial is to show how easy it is to take some tentative steps into the world of leather handling and manipulation. It’s one of those skills that is reasonably inexpensive to experiment with too – it has its own set of tools and techniques, of course, but once these are purchased and mastered, leather craft is an engaging and unique kind of pastime. We’ll take you through some…

Having given up learning the trombone in school, Ben has very little musical skill. However, he very much enjoys making noise. In this article, we really hit the first big problem of the series. So far, we’ve looked at generating tones and control voltages. These are fairly straightforward problems on a microcontroller. In this issue, however, we are going to read in an audio signal, manipulate it, and then output it. The particular module we’re going to look at this month is an enveloper – this takes an audio input and a trigger. When the trigger is activated, it lets the audio signal through. However, it’s not just an on/off. It attempts to mimic the volume profile of a real instrument, where the volume varies over time. Most envelopers follow…

Rob 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. In this article, we are going to look at how you can add colour to your 3D prints. We’ll start with a look at lithophanes and them move onto tools you can use to create impressive 3D artwork. You can find the source images and the 3D printable files for this article here: hsmag.cc/Colour3D. LITHOPHANES Lithophanes are a great answer to the frequently asked question: ‘Why did you get a 3D printer?’ You can reply: ‘To make these’ and hold a thin piece of printed plastic up to the light to reveal a neat image. The next question that is asked is usually:…

hsmag.cc/geneva Clocks, they’re pretty simple, right? Spin hands around at three different speeds, pop some numbers on the outside, and you’re done, right? Well, that would do for most people, but not Greg Zumwalt. When his youngest son showed him a video of a watch with an unusual mechanism and asked if he knew how it worked, Greg didn’t just explain it, he designed and 3D-printed a replica. The strip of numbers along the top represent the minutes, and the number inside this strip is the hour. Despite it rotating in four different axes, it’s powered by just a single motor and a Geneva drive. Not only does it look undeniably cool but, unlike most clocks that redesign the mechanical system, it’s actually easy to tell the time on this…

hsmag.cc/ocreebmk2 Most people in the modern world use computers for their job – we spend hours every day interacting with our machines via a QWERTY keyboard – a Victorian design that was never meant to be used to program computers, control robots, manipulate enterprise resource planning software, or any of the myriad of other uses that we give it. Why do we stick with this input system designed in the time before computers? Salim, for one, isn’t going to. He’s designed an adaptable system of modules that you can plug together to create whatever layout you want. You can add buttons, twiddly knobs, turn-y-handles, sliders, and more. Ocreeb MK2 runs the KMK keyboard firmware, so you can map whatever actions you want to the various buttons, knobs, and dials. The…

There’s nothing new about the concept of printin-place. You print a mechanism in one go so that it moves in the way you want it to, straight off the build plate. These boxes have print-in-place latches for holding them shut, but there’s also another trick – the red band around the top is a flexible filament that provides a seal when it’s shut. These are joined to the PETG (for the box with orange latches) and PLA (for the box with white latches). Both of these boxes are exactly as they came off the print bed, with no post-processing or assembly. They’re not water-tight, but it’s a lot more sealed than most 3D-printed boxes that we have made. We printed this on the Prusa XL. Turn to page 90 for…

The mecanum robot in the earlier tutorial (MagPi issue #135, magpi.cc/135) could be controlled with a gamepad. If you didn’t react fast enough, then it was quite easy to crash the robot. Adding an ultrasonic distance sensor means that the robot can automatically stop before colliding with a wall or other object. The sensor used is similar to those found in car parking sensors. The robot senses the distance to objects in front and automatically stops forward movement when an object is too close. With additional code, this could be used as the basis of a robot that could navigate a maze. 01 Ultrasonic distance sensors There are various different sensors that can be used to detect distance. The one used here is based on ultrasonic distance measurement, and works…

PLAY & CODE GAMES! Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi shows you how to set up Raspberry Pi 5 to play a new generation of classic games. Build your gaming console and full-size arcade cabinet, install emulation software and download original games with our step-by-step guides. You’ll discover a vibrant homebrew scene packed with new games for original consoles and legal access to all those retro games you remember! ■ Set up Raspberry Pi for retro gaming ■ Emulate classic computers and consoles ■ Learn to code retro-style games ■ Build a console, handheld, and full-size arcade machine BUY ONLINE: magpi.cc/store…

ONLYTHE BEST Machine learning and AI development boards Artificial Intelligence is all the rage these days. It’s a very polarising subject for many people. There are those who are worried about losing their jobs to it, and then there are those people who look to the new jobs being created out of AI. To some extent, I think they are both correct. In my day job at Deep Sentinel, I work with developers every day on new AI models and technology. And although I’ll never match the skills of my colleagues, it has sparked my interest in playing around with the technology and seeing if I can come up with a few fun projects for myself. And that’s where this Best of Breed comes in. I’ll be looking at some of…

We might be living in the 21st century, but our brains are still basically the same as they were when we chased prey across the savannah. Our squelchy bundle of neurons reacts differently to things that it can poke and prod. 3D printing makes physical objects: things you can hold and touch, and these give us a different reaction to the same image on a screen or on paper. We understand them in a different way, and feel differently about them. This issue, we take a look at making pictures with a 3D printer. In some ways, these pictures are much lower quality than even a basic home printer can manage – there are few colours and the resolution’s terrible. However, in another way, they’re far better because we can…

hsmag.cc/RetroDesktop If there are two things that we love, they’re big versions of little things and little versions of big things. In both cases, they’re made twice as cool if the new version works as the original does. Here, we’ve got a tiny version of a desktop PC, and it actually works exactly like the original. Well, almost. The original was a 286 from David’s childhood, while this version is based on a Raspberry Pi. That obviously means that the CPUs run completely different instruction sets but, thanks to the magic of emulation, this tiny PC still runs old DOS programs. Cool-factor alone is enough to make this project worthwhile but, to David, nostalgia was also a motivator. “A big driver in my personal projects is the connection I have…

hsmag.cc/succulent Stained glass work might sound like an exotic form of making, but when you get down to it, it’s really just fancy soldering. Once you’ve formed the glass into appropriately shaped pieces, you pop some copper tape on the edges, then solder them together. Yes, we’re glossing over the details a bit here, but the basic technique isn’t too complex. Jason’s been experimenting with stained glass and noticed that plant designs are common at the moment. However, he couldn’t find a suitable downloadable design to start with, so he decided to create one and share it on the Instructables website. The design is based on a succulent – a type of plant that grows in arid regions and its drought tolerance makes it popular with people who forget to…

Whether it is tracking stratospheric weather balloons, mapping out radio beacons or receiving weather images from satellites, RF (radio frequency) continues to fascinate me. What seems so far is always within reach. Many of my activities in this field require dedicated setups and separate equipment, which adds some logistical overhead, and hence I started pondering the idea of having an all-in-one tool that I can use to navigate the RF spectrum for any possible application and use it in the field. It would make use of software-defined radio (SDR) to allow using it for different purposes, ranging from listening to voice transmissions from the International Space Station and other satellites, to worldwide amateur radio traffic on the short-wave (SW) frequencies between 2 and 30MHz, for instance. “THE UNIT NEEDED TO…

AUTOMATIC MAKING I’m just getting started on my journey as a maker and I can’t decide what my first ‘big’ machine should be – a laser cutter or a 3D printer. I know 3D printers are much more common, but I’ve seen some cheap laser cutters online, and they look like they can do some impressive work. Any advice? Anuj Birmingham Ben says: Laser cutters are much more serious than 3D printers. We’re pretty concerned about the huge number of unenclosed laser cutters that are on the market at the moment. The laser beams that come off these can blind instantly. Yes, they usually come with goggles, but these typically leave gaps around the eye. Not only that, but anyone passing by a window is at risk. And this is…

Jo Hinchliffe (AKA Concretedog) 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! Urumbu is a mechanical concept created by Neil Gershenfeld of MIT, which concerns creating multi-axis machines simply, sidestepping some common approaches, and leveraging the development of computers. The go-to standard for many machines for many years is to feed them G-code line by line, using some kind of G-code sending application to stream the lines into a controller. This, in turn, drives the individual stepper motors to move the relevant axis. It’s a solid system, but it harks from an era where…

Phil King is a freelance writer and sub-editor specialising in technology. The former books editor for Raspberry Pi, he is also the author of Chromebooks In Easy Steps. While you would typically power a single-board computer or microcontroller through its USB socket (whatever the type), it is also possible to power most boards from a source wired directly to their 5 V power and GND (ground) pins. This includes all the Raspberry Pi SBC models, along with microcontrollers such as Arduino, Pico, and ESP32/ESP8266 boards. That’s what we are going to explore in this tutorial, looking at the pros and cons, including the risks – you don’t want to see that magic smoke! WHY DO IT? Depending on your project, there may be various reasons why you would want to power…

XTOOL £1799 hsmag.cc/xtools1 Laser cutters are great tools for makers. They let you cut shapes out of – or engrave images into – sheet material quickly and accurately. By piecing together different shapes, you can build up 3D objects much faster than you can with a 3D printer. If you’re after a laser cutter, there are a few things to consider. Let’s take a look at some of the key things you have to think about, and take a look at how the xTool S1 stacks up. The first big decision to make is safety. Many budget machines aimed at makers are unenclosed. That means there is nothing to stop the laser beam from being reflected back towards the operator. Exposed lasers are dangerous. Very dangerous. A beam powerful enough…