Table of contents for #79 in HackSpace

Spending time in nature makes you happier and healthier. However, there’s more than one way to enjoy the great outdoors, and this month we’re investigating whether or not we should take our gadgets and gizmos (whether or not they’re homemade) with us. We don’t mean just taking a laptop and ignoring nature, but bringing the little bits and pieces that can smooth over some of the rough edges of the outside world. I’ll give you a little spoiler, though. We’re not going to pick a winner. This isn’t because we’re copping out, but because there’s no right or wrong here – at least not a universal right and wrong that’s the same for everyone. We don’t want to tell you what to do; we want to help you find the…

Modern homes are great! They can provide an ambient temperature all year round; there’s endless entertainment on tap; food is kept fresh and can easily be prepared in myriad ways. Seats, sofas, and beds provide us comfortable places to be at any time of day. We humans have used our ingenuity to create these little slices of almost perfect comfort. Why, then, do so many of us enjoy leaving this comfort behind and heading outside, sometimes just for an hour or two, but also for days at a time? Our brains don’t process carefully ordered bits as computers do. They’re chaotic processors of vast amounts of sensory information, and they’ve evolved over millions of years to handle the outdoors. While we are now at home inside solid structures, we still…

“Light isn’t just about brightness” When it comes to modern high-tech, we have a huge amount of choice. LEDs and LiPos are now so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget that they’re modern inventions – both originally coming out in the 1990s, but not really reaching the camping public until later. Older readers will remember the constant battle of batteries running out and bulbs blowing. However, we needn’t concern ourselves with the past. You may not be aware of the torch (or flashlight) subculture, but in the last decade or so, some internet users have been on a quest to get the brightest possible light into their hands. It’s become something of a meme to build brighter and brighter torches, and this peaked with the Hacksmith building a monstrosity that…

It’s easy to crack a joke; it’s hard to write a love letter. That’s why we admire Jón Schone so much. While there are a few YouTubers seem to reduce 3D printing to a joke, Jón clearly loves it. Every video he makes, every device he builds, is a genuine attempt to learn something new. He does things with 3D printers that you shouldn’t be able to do, such as printing car wheels. He uses materials that most of us wouldn’t even think of, such as Kevlar. And like the engineer that he is, he gets things wrong until he learns how to do things right. If you’re not aware of his work go right now to properprinting.pro and have a look at some of Jón’s work – then come…

Nicola King is a freelance writer and sub-editor. She’s currently de-stashing some of her craft supplies, and it’s looking like she might actually be able to see the floor in the office very soon! If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at creating some simple pottery, but were put off by the high cost of entry, read on. Experimenting with air dry clay could be the answer – no expensive potter’s wheels or kilns required… the clue is, after all, in the name. Air dry clay is a water-based clay so, when exposed to air, it will dry out and cure as the moisture within it evaporates. An accessible, inexpensive, adaptable, and non-toxic material, it’s easily mouldable and you can blend colours. Best of all, sculpting, smoothing, and manipulating…

In its most basic form, many people visualise clay as a naturally soft and earthy substance, and most clay minerals form over thousands of years, where rocks are in contact with water, air, or steam. There are, however, several different types of clay, with a few discussed below, including pottery and modelling clays: • Earthenware clay – one of the most common and oldest-used types of pottery clay, it’s sticky with a high plasticity and is easy to work with. Mainly composed of iron and other mineral impurities. It’s normally fired in a kiln. Terracotta is an earthenware clay, and needs to be glazed in order to be made watertight.• Stoneware clay – a pottery clay with high plasticity, it’s highly durable and versatile, and is often used for cookware…

Everything in Andrew’s garage is covered in a thin film of orange dust from working with wood. As part of a separate project, we acquired a 12 × 70 × 1200 mm length of meranti wood. Meranti (aka Philippine mahogany) is a hard, resinous wood that’s ideal for outdoor uses such as decking, and building those snazzy boats that zip up and down the Grand Canal in Venice. Naturally, we used ours to build a case for a Raspberry Pi 5. I use my Raspberry Pi 5 as a desktop machine – any time I need to access GPIO pins, those pins are on a Raspberry Pi Pico – and so there was no need to add a hole in the lid of the case. Rather than add hinges, I…

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. Extend your photography and 3D printing skills by getting a classic camera back into action. Minox ‘spy’ cameras are popular amongst camera collectors and those looking for a quirky way to take photographs – this despite their production having ended many years ago. The cameras are very well-made, and it is not hard to find working examples at reasonable prices. There are people who can provide you with film cassettes and develop them for you, but you can also 3D-print tools that let you produce your own pictures with this marvellous machine. In this article, we are going to look at the camera…

Minox cassettes were last sold in the 1990s, nearly 30 years ago. Fortunately, there are still quite a few around, and you can find ‘new old stock’ Minox films. The cassettes can be reused, and you can even obtain metal versions, at a price. Search for ‘Minox cassettes’. However, what we really want to do is 3D-print our own cassettes. There are some designs online, but these don’t fit the author’s camera. He has made a remix of a design with improved take-up spools. He is also working on a cassette which has a take-up spool on each end, to ease loading. Rather than having to wind the film into a small roll by hand, you will be able to just wind it directly into the cassette. The cassettes can…

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. Raspberry Pi Connect is a new service from Raspberry Pi that lets you connect to your Raspberry Pi from another computer on the internet. You sign in via the Raspberry Pi website and, from there, you can access the desktop session on your Raspberry Pi and control it as though you were sitting in front of it. It’s similar to how VNC works, with one big difference: Raspberry Pi Connect will help you route your connection through the internet. This means that you can connect to a Raspberry Pi on your home network when you’re in a completely different place. Provided the Raspberry Pi and the…

THE PI HUT $114.60 thepihut.com TINDIE $40 tindie.com The Naturebytes Wildlife Camera Kit is what really inspired this Best of Breed. I wanted some kind of trail camera, but I didn’t just want an off-the-shelf variety because I have some customising that I want to do. So, naturally, I looked for a Raspberry Pi-based system, and this kit really impressed me. At the core of the Naturebytes kit, you’ll find a Raspberry Pi A+. Couple that with a PIR sensor, camera module, SD card, and well-designed, waterproof enclosure, and you’ve got yourself a very customisable and easy-to-use wildlife cam. The case is IP55 certified, has a Fresnel IR lens for optimising any motion detection, a padlock loop, and no soldering is required. Just keep in mind that this kit does…

hsmag.cc/ColumnClock We’re used to seeing creative ways to display the time in these pages, but most of the time, that trends towards complexity. The marble clock we featured in issue 78, for example, was a masterpiece in needless complexity. This clock by ReallySrry takes the opposite approach. It has just two moving parts, just like an old-fashioned analogue clock. In fact, the maker has repurposed an off-the-shelf clock mechanism bought for under $10, so there’s no need for fancy microcontrollers or anything that needs programming. As it’s built on a standard clock assembly, this device works in a pretty familiar way. The time is displayed on two concentric cylinders, with the outer white cylinder showing the hours and the inner blue cylinder showing the minutes. And that’s it.…

In the GPS era, navigation is, in many ways, a solved problem. While there might still be some challenges, in most cases, you can simply follow a line on a screen until you reach your destination. The question isn’t really ‘what’s the best way to navigate’, it’s ‘what’s the most entertaining’. For some people, this might mean following the line on a screen. For others, it might mean using a map and compass, but there is a big area in between where we can have some fun. One of the great things about high-tech stuff is how easy it is to modify software to create a new use for your gadget or gizmo. We’re now going to have a play with one such device – the Bangle.js 2. This is…

3D printing gives us a lot of control over the things we make, from picking exactly the colour (or colours) that you want something to be, to adjusting its size. You can even start your design entirely from scratch. Whether you’re downloading existing models, or creating your own, no other manufacturing technology gives makers quite so much control over the things they build. We set up our 3D printer and created a few bits to ease our camping adventures. Tent-pegs are one of those things that seem simple but actually are incredibly nuanced. Most tents come with bent wire pegs that work OK for ideal ground, but once you meet with reality, you very quickly find that they either bend in hard ground or pull out of soft ground. For…

Clay is recognised as the oldest known ceramic material. Its defining property is its plasticity when wet – you can stretch it out without it breaking or tearing – and this is due to its high content of clay minerals. Clay is highly mouldable – a hands-on material which, when you have time to literally potter about with, can bring a great sense of mindfulness and stress relief. (Additionally, manipulating clay is also a great way for children to develop fine motor skills.) When fired or thoroughly dried out though, clay hardens, and it’s this attribute that has led to it being used for making pottery for thousands of years. Once our ancestors discovered that clay could be formed into objects, and then fired to produce useful items, the pottery…

Air dry clay starts to harden as soon it it’s exposed to the air, so it’s prudent to use some ‘slip’ to keep the clay soft and to prevent cracks from forming. So, what exactly is slip? Slip is a liquid mix of small pieces of clay in some water and it can be used as a form of glue to connect clay pieces together. It’s your best friend when it comes to fashioning your air dry clay forms and figurines, and it’s really useful to have some slip pre-made, on hand so that you can quickly turn to it when needed. We found that mixing a ratio of approximately three parts clay to one part water worked very well to create a usable mixture, and the finished consistency resembled…

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. If there was a prize for the most intimidating sounding 3D printer filament, poly cyclohexylenedimethylene terephthalate glycol-modified would probably win it, but in use, PCTG as it’s more commonly known, is a straightforward plastic to print with. We printed the filament at 265°C with the bed at 90°C. While we do print inside an enclosure, it’s not heated. We just slightly modified a PETG slicer profile and it worked. This should be within the range of most home 3D printers. Chemically, as well as symbolically, PCTG is very similar to PETG, and shares many of the more famous filament’s properties, including durability and resistance to temperature…

The author has bought many items (including Minox cameras) from ‘the world’s favourite online auction site’, and considers himself familiar with the ways of buying and selling things (mainly cameras). He therefore presents these handy tips for anyone thinking of venturing online to get some gear. 1. Buy things for fun, not profit. It is hard work to buy cameras and make money from them. Much better to think of it as a hobby you are spending a bit of cash on. Many years ago, the author used to spend quite a lot of time and money on video games. These days, he is more likely to spend the price of a video game on an old camera and then have a bit of fun trying to make it work.…

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. Build on the Raspberry Pi-powered telephone created in HackSpace magazine issue 73 to add voice input. Then create a Raspberry Pi 5-powered large language model (LLM) telephone exchange for the phone to talk to. Figure 1 shows the author’s ‘Red Telephone’. To the left of the phone is ‘The Exchange’, a device which uses an LLM to answer questions. The user can pick up the phone, dial a number, ask a question, and put the phone down. After a while, The Exchange will call back with an answer which may not be correct, or even rational, but is always interesting. You can…

Perhaps the most useful extension to this would be to mount the camera on a pan-and-tilt arm so that you could move it around. Typically, these use two servos and brackets to let you move the camera in two axes. There are a few kits available with this, or you can go the DIY route. If you want to take things even further, you could add some way to interact with your pet. For example, you could mount a laser pointer on a servo so you can wiggle it, or perhaps move a string with a cat toy on it.…

TINDIE $36 tindie.com Not everybody has the space to garden outside, or maybe you just start your seedlings early in the year and live in a colder climate, so a little indoor growing is required. And that’s where the GPOD Controller comes into play for your indoor plants and seedlings. It uses an Arduino Nano and 5 volts to illuminate some multicolour LEDs, giving your plants 14 hours of illumination throughout the day. You can order just the bare PCB, a full kit, or even fully assembled. This is a great place to start learning about controlling smart LEDs and programming. And, for those wondering, how can an RGB LED be a proper grow light? You’re right, they might not be the 100% perfect grow light for plants, but just…

PLOOPY approx £75 plus tax and shipping hsmag.cc/ploopy Open-source – check. 3D-printed – check. Self-assembled kit – check. These headphones tick a lot of boxes for us. They’re open-source all the way down – that means there are Gerbers for the electronics, STLs for the 3D-printed parts, source code for the software, and full instructions on how to put it all together. However, before we dig in deeper, there’s one part of this review that’s so overwhelmingly large that we might as well get it out right at the start: these headphones don’t work with phones. Well, not reliably. While they use USB-C – like most modern phones – they draw too much current. They do work as long as you keep the volume down; however, the volume has to…

hsmag.cc/DNALamp Kostiantyn uses a laser cutter to score the inside of two wooden strips of walnut veneer, making them flexible enough to wrap around a cylinder. He brushes them with resin, so when the resin dries, it holds the shape of a spiral – do this twice, and you’ve got the beginnings of a DNA double helix made in wood. Add a plywood base, a strip of addressable LEDs and a PAJ7620U gesture sensor, plus an ESP8266 controller, and you’ve got a unique gesture-controlled desk lamp. What we love about this project is that the woodworking element is just about possible to recreate without the laser cutter. All you need is a hand steady enough to cut hundreds of tiny lines to the same thickness, direction, and depth, and then…

hsmag.cc/SolderScroll Soldering anything, especially small components, needs at least three hands: one to hold the solder, one to hold the soldering iron, and one to hold the component. A small vice can help you here, or one of those devices with multiple flexible arms with crocodile clips to hold components in place. Despite that, soldering is still tricky. We tend to hold the spool of solder between the palm and ring and little fingers of our right hand, and thread solder toward the joint we’re working on with our thumb and index and middle fingers. It’s ungainly, and that’s why the world needs the Solder Scroll. This brilliant device makes soldering more ergonomic by allowing you to dispense any diameter of solder out of an object you hold like a…

It all started with a free solar panel. I came across it in my late father-in-law’s wardrobe, so I added it to the pile of things-I-might-never-use in the boot of my car. I knew he would approve of any way I could put it to use. Little did I know that it would be the start of a project that would become a mildly unhealthy obsession, starting small, but evolving into something… well … big and heavy! But awesome! After bringing the panel home – an outdated, 20W, 2.6kg slab of silicon and aluminium – I started to think through what I might do with it. I decided to buy a battery and charge controller, and put it in the sun… just to see how it would go. I propped…

Air dry clay (hsmag.cc/AirDryClay) Clay modelling tools set (optional) (e.g. hsmag.cc/ClayTools) A craft knife Clay/cookie cutter(s) Pre-made ‘slip’ if attaching clay pieces (see box) A craft rolling pin (hack: something cylindrical such as a dowel or barrel of a pen) Scissors Superglue Water Fine-grain sandpaper (hack: nail file/emery board – handy for small nooks) Acrylic paint Acrylic paint brush(es) Sealant/glaze Paper towel Texture wheel (hack: search your home for textured items) Images to transfer (optional) Hemp/string for hanging (optional)…

MAKER PJ is a writer, software engineer, and tinkerer. His Play:1 now plays endless Rick Astley. mastodon.social/@mrpjevans Upcycling and the right to repair are hot topics right now. Just because an electronic device has failed, or is no longer required, it shouldn’t mean instant landfill. When we came across a sad Sonos Play:1 that was more of a ‘Silence:1’, we decided to investigate the possibility of repurposing the high-quality speaker and enclosure. The result was a new lease of life with plenty of options within its capabilities. This tutorial shows how to do it and is not just for a Play:1, but more of an example of how you can give dead tech a new purpose. 01 Build your stack Let’s start with Raspberry Pi itself. We selected a 3A for…

Back in issue 60 we tested out PHA filament which promised to be a truly compostable 3D-printable filament. Unlike PLA, which requires very specific conditions to break down – so specific that in reality it’s not possible for most people to compost – PHA, it is claimed, will break down in normal home compost. We placed a test print in a home wormery for over 18 months, and there’s no noticeable degradation. While there may be conditions that it will break down in home compost, it’s clearly not as simple as just putting it in with the rest of your compost and waiting. Our wait for a truly compostable filament continues.…

The Minox camera was designed in the 1930s by a German engineer with the wonderful name of Walter Zapp. It was one of the earliest ‘system’ cameras. Along with the camera, you could get a special tripod to stand it on, an adapter for binoculars, a film developing tank, and even a briefcase-sized enlarger you could use to create prints of your images. In the 1970s, the Minox B was replaced with the Minox C, which added automatic exposure and was even smaller (although the lens was fixed focus, which reduced the image quality slightly). However, by the end of the 20th century, digital cameras were becoming cheaper and able to compete on quality, leading to Minox camera production ending in 1996. The Minox name lives on, but these days,…

Figure 10 shows all the ‘helpers’ in the phone application. You can use these in your JavaScript applications. There are helpers for hardware input-output, the LLM, and audio and speech input and output. The entire phone is controlled by an instance of a phone object. When the phone starts running, it creates instances of all the helpers it needs: The statement above brings the speechInput module into the program. A module contains a JavaScript object that you use to interact with the helper services. The statement above creates a speechInput helper object for the phone. The helper is passed a reference to the phone object (that’s what the this keyword means) so that the helper can send messages to the phone by calling methods on this object. When the phone…

We’ve circled the sun one more time! Daylight hours and the temperatures are increasing. Spring has finally arrived. You’ve survived a long winter building your projects and keeping warm, but now it’s time to think about what to build next. And it’s a perfect time to start thinking about your garden, and how you might build something to make it a little smarter, easier to understand, or just capture the wildlife that visits. I’ve looked at gardening products before, and I’ll certainly look at them again, because I just love to revisit the topic every spring. Having recently moved, I’ve been planning a new garden. And, unlike our other gardens in the past, this one has access to some power and a little more space, so a few automations might…

MUSTAFA SULEYMAN £25 the-coming-wave.com There’s something comforting about reading a book about an impending human-made disaster that isn’t global heating. Maybe a rapidly-becoming-inevitable climate catastrophe won’t be the thing that finishes off civilisation after all. Maybe, if Mustafa Suleyman is to be believed, artificial intelligence (AI) or biotech will get us first. Suleyman makes the argument that AI is developing at such a rapid pace and is applicable to so many things that it’s very soon going to have the potential to do very harmful things to society, from empowering despotic regimes to enabling terrorists to perform ever-more horrific acts. Also, he throws in some things about bioengineering, but this always feels vague and like an afterthought. Quantum computing is also occasionally mentioned. Suleyman starts by saying that containment –…