Table of contents for #49 in HackSpace

LEGO®. That word alone is so evocative of builds past. Some elaborate builds of my youth – we kept our assortment of parts and bricks in a wooden box that holds so many great memories. Some more simple builds that I’m doing with my daughter as she learns to express her creativity. If someone had never seen LEGO®, it would be hard to express how important it was to me in my development as a maker. It was flexible enough to give me freedom to build what I wanted, yet was still contained enough to make it easy to connect different parts together. Pirate ships blended with castles and racing cars to create robots, spaceships, and more. LEGO® has, of course, continued to develop since my parents passed our set…

charlyn.codes Free-form brass soldering is hard. The brass cools down too quickly to let you get the solder where you want it, it bends in ways you don’t want it to bend, it takes forever to get things that are even functional, let alone aesthetic. That’s why this brass ring, with inset LEDs and a hidden battery holder, is so impressive. The most impressive thing is the tiny magnet fixed to the underside of the ring, closest to the wearer’s palm, which keeps the battery from slipping out and breaking the circuit – that and the fact that it’s perfect.…

MAKER Rob is amazing. He’s also the Features Editor of The MagPi, a hobbyist maker, cosplayer, comic book writer, and extremely modest. magpi.cc Top Tip Installer issues Run the installer as Administrator if you’re having issues, and check if the SD card runs, even if the final checks fail. Android on Raspberry Pi has been a topic of discussion for years in specific spaces, and while there have been attempts in the past to port Android, emteria.OS has been the best way to use Android on Raspberry Pi for a few years now. With some recent great updates, we’re revisiting this great OS to get it working as an Android tablet, and see how it can be used for Android dev. 01 Raspberry Pi hardware You’ll need a Raspberry Pi…

@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. Create a Pico-powered MIDI controller and connect it to a Pure Data digital synthesizer. This works well with the Pico musical cheese box described in issue 48 of HackSpace (Figure 1). THE PICO MIDI CONTROLLER The article ‘Make a Pico musical cheese box’, in HackSpace issue 48, described how to use a Raspberry Pi Pico to make a device that transmits MIDI notes and drum patterns. We used it to control a Pure Data music patch running on a Raspberry Pi, which made sounds from audio samples and sine waves. In this article, we are going to create a ‘crackers’ controller…

JUMPER RC → £65 jumper-rc.com @concreted0g Radio control (RC) transmitters can be large and bulky items, and that’s great if that’s what you are used to. If you are more accustomed to using game console controllers, then there are increasing numbers of transmitters available using that form factor. We decided to take a look at a popular one that we feel has a lot of crossover from radio control into other, perhaps more HackSpace-y, areas of interest. The Jumper T-LITE is available for around £65 and is a 16-channel multi-protocol transmitter running OpenTX. Don’t worry if you don’t understand what that means – we’ll explain as we go on. Firstly, let’s look at the ‘multi-protocol’. Within RC systems there are multiple radio families, and the Jumper T-LITE works across a wide…

hsmag.cc/CircuitSculpture Free-form brass soldering is hard. Working in two dimensions is hard enough, but when you add a Z axis, you suddenly need two hands to hold your workpiece plus another two to hold the solder and the iron. And even when you’ve managed that step, you still have to come up with a working circuit. That’s why, just like the brass ring on page 10, we’re fascinated by this lamp from Edward Agombar. It’s powered by USB-C and uses four WS2812B LEDs to create a soft glow. There’s a Seeeduino XIAO controlling the circuit, and a voltage booster to bring the 3.3 V output by the XIAO up to the 5 V needed by the LEDs.…

hsmag.cc/CassettePlayer Maker Matty has taken inspiration from Instructables user Ananords to mix the now common practice of playing music on solely electronic files with the ancient practice of actually having to pick up a physical object and put it into the machine. What he’s ended up with is a device, built into the guts of an old cassette player, that has two buttons: Play/Pause and Shuffle. That, on its own, makes it a useful build for anyone with limited motor control who just wants to listen to a pre-selected range of music, but Matty’s also added an RFID reader, so the user can select a card with some album artwork and touch it to the device to play a song.…

If you’ve ever programmed anything in CircuitPython and understood the instructions first time, you probably have Anne Barela to thank. She’s a consulting engineer at Adafruit, where she puts her vast array of experience into helping people make cool stuff that ‘just works’. She’s had her work go into space on the Shuttle, she helped make sure the world’s computers didn’t melt when the clocks reset to zero in the year 2000, and she’s a big fan of open source. We got a bit flustered when we spoke to her to be honest – where do you start with a career that’s included Caltech, Hewlett-Packard, NASA, Boeing, and the US Diplomatic Service? So, we started with something we can all understand: CircuitPython. “I’d been tinkering with IBM PCs since the…

LEGO® is one of the gateways into making for many people. These little plastic bricks are the perfect compromise on ease of use and functionality for developing minds to express their creativity in a physical form. Thanks to a programmable electronics system, you can expand your builds with technology to add motion or sensing. LEGO® has created some really easy ways to get started programming these electronics. If you’ve not used LEGO® in a while, you might be surprised to know that LEGO® offers one of the easiest introductions to programming. We’ll look at their Icon Block and Word Block systems that offer drag-and-drop coding to make your bricks light up, beep, or move. You can even take a step further and code your brick-based builds in MicroPython. Microcontrollers are…

Sam Topley is a musician, an electronics expert, and an impressively skilled worker of textiles, in particular wool. Where those three skills overlap in the imaginary Venn diagram of life, you’ll find her brilliant work – circuits that both feel and sound fuzzy, pompoms that both look and sound loud, and a load of new ways to interact with synths. We spoke to Sam to find out what she’s working on at the moment and what’s going on in the DIY music scene, and why electronics, like music, is just another form of self-expression. HackSpace Morning Sam! You work at the Institute for Sonic Creativity. That’s an epic title. It sounds like it should be headquartered in a hollowedout volcano. Sam Topley Oh, it’s awesome. That’s where I’m doing my…

Dr Andrew Lewis is a specialist fabricator and maker, and is the owner of the Andrew Lewis Workshop. There’s a particular sound to a working garage. Ratcheting noises, the clink of spanners, and the unmistakable hiss of air as impact wrenches and die grinders are connected or disconnected to a compressor. It’s a sound that’s not heard very often in the home workshop, but compressed air tools can be an excellent addition to every maker’s arsenal. In this article, you’ll learn how compressors work, their strengths and weaknesses, and how to look after the compressor in your workshop. Compressors might seem a bit old-fashioned to some people, given that they essentially exploit a similar technology to steam-engines. This idea couldn’t be further from the truth, and there are multiple advantages…

@concreted0g Jo Hinchliffe is a constant tinkerer and is passionate about all things DIY. He loves designing and scratchbuilding both model and high-power rockets, and releases the designs and components as opensource. He also has a shed full of lathes and milling machines and CNC kit! Previously, in earlier parts of this series, we have looked at the basics of sketching in the Sketcher workbench and then occasionally looked at other Sketcher features, such as cloning and making multiples of objects (in issue 44). As such a fundamental approach to creating parts, it’s certainly worth looking at in more depth. To begin, let’s revisit an approach we have used previously which we can use as an example. Open up FreeCAD and start a new project, move to the Part Design…

@devinck Wired communications are often overlooked now that wireless communications are relatively simple and affordable to implement in your project. But there are times where wired beats wireless. This is especially true when it comes to the automotive and industrial markets. Many systems still rely on good oldfashioned wires to communicate between machines and computers. Wired communications are typically more reliable, more robust, and can also carry power to remote sensors and devices. And most importantly, so much machinery and technologies that were developed many years prior to wireless technologies are still in service. In this Best of Breed, I’ll be looking at wired communication shields for the classic Arduino ecosystem. Most of us have at least one, if not a lot, of these original form factor Arduinos lying around.…

RASPBERRY PI → $15 raspberrypi.com @ben_everard In February 2012, Raspberry Pi launched its first computer, based on the BCM2835 system on a chip. A lot has changed in the intervening nine years, but the little BCM2835 has remained in the Raspberry Pi line-up. After the Raspberry Pi 2 supplanted version 1 in 2015, the BCM2835 lived on in the Raspberry Pi Zero (and later the Zero W). It’s continued to power projects big and small, providing cheap access to computing around the world. However, after nine years of service, is it time to let this little chip slip into a dignified retirement (though the original Zero will still be available)? The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is a pin-compatible replacement for the original Zero (or Zero W), that brings in a…

hsmag.cc/MiniAmp Tinkercad – great for 3D printing, not so much for woodwork, right? Wrong! Mike Wilds designed the enclosure for this mini amplifier entirely in this free, online software. On the downside, he had to export it into Fusion 360 to be able to put the sign into the CNC router he had available; on the upside, he’s created a video that you can watch and follow step by step if you want to learn how to make smart designs out of wood. Specifically, a few short pieces of mahogany glued together into a block. The electronics for this project all came out of a kit – purists may grumble, but there’s no better way to learn than to follow along with someone else’s instructions, knowing that you have all…

niklasroy.com/graffomat One of the many, many cool things about Berlin is the quality and quantity of the graffiti art there. This 2 × 2.2 m plotter build by artist Niklas Roy is the latest addition to that noble tradition. It’s controlled by an Arduino Nano, and uses a pair of electric drills to move the plotter head (actually a can of spray paint and an actuator to press the paint nozzle) along the X and Y axes. Electric drills aren’t meant for precision; they have no way of knowing how far they’ve rotated for, so Niklas had to add black and white encoding strips to each axis, read by an optical sensor, to give positional feedback. So why use electric drills, when the natural choice for something like this would…

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 PICO PLEASE A request: please let’s have more Pico stuff. When I first got my hands on one of these little boards (which I found on the cover of HackSpace magazine, no less), there weren’t any projects about that I could copy. Obvious, really, given that it was new. But I thought, fine; there will be some more along in a minute. So give us more! My Pico is sitting in my desk drawer and I feel guilty for not doing more stuff with it! Dave Chappell Pennsylvania Ben says: Well, last issue’s How I Made featured a Pico being used…

@RosieHattersley Rosie Hattersley writes tech, craft, and life hacks and tweets @RosieHattersley. Fill ‘em up and start again is the most obvious way to reuse empty glass bottles, but there’s probably a limit to how many you can make use of so easily. While glass is an uncontentious item to put in your recycling bin, reusing what you’ve already got is an even better approach if it means you then don’t buy something new. Practical options here include using glass bottles as indoor planters, upcycling them as striking lamp bases or pendant lights, or simply halffilling one with water and using it as a vase. But since HackSpace readers are rarely content with something so straightforward, we’ve tracked down some more creative ways to make use of sturdy glass repositories.…

Project Maker JAMES MCGEHEE Project Link hsmag.cc/GlassKazoo The song Ten Green Bottles clearly describes sitting targets just waiting for someone to take aim at them, but if you have an array of empty bottles, you could do worse than use them to create some tunes of your own. You’ll get eco-entertainment simply by turning them into wind chimes. Among the more whimsical musical instrument ideas is this one for a kazoo, which involves using a candle-flame to heat up the glass near the neck to make it easier and safer to remove. You also need to remove the bottle’s base and, once the edges have been sanded, glue a snugly fitting plastic cap in place with holes cut out for different notes. Blue Peter and Bill Bailey have both been…

@concreted0g Jo Hinchliffe is a constant tinkerer and is passionate about all things DIY. He loves designing and scratchbuilding both model and high-power rockets, and releases the designs and components as opensource. He also has a shed full of lathes and milling machines and CNC kit! Making your own tools for locksport is great for many reasons, but there’s two that stand out. Firstly, it is incredibly satisfying to open a lock using homemade tools. Secondly, you can make a specific tool for a specific lock that might not be available to purchase. Finally, this is a cheap activity; many manual tools can be made on a budget, which means you can learn and experiment for very little cost. Let’s look first at making some tension wrenches. There are actually…

Despite loving all things digital, Mike admits to being a bit of a luddite, vinyl records and all. To a photographer, 3D can mean so many different things, which isn’t too surprising because our eyes and brains use so many different ways to perceive depth. Much of the information we use – like perspective – is present in ordinary photos, but one important element is missing. That’s something called binocular disparity, and it means that our two eyes see a scene from two slightly different viewpoints. The additional information this provides is processed subconsciously by our brains to enhance the feeling of depth and usually, when TVs, movies, or cameras are described as 3D, it means they provide binocular disparity. However, you don’t have to buy a special camera to…

SUNKKO → £169 hsmag.cc/sunkko @concrete_d0g If you are interested in building your own Li-ion battery packs, perhaps for drone use, e-bikes, hacky racer or for a power wall project, you have probably considered a battery spot welder. Like many tools, there’s a range of offerings available, from cheap PCBbased spot welders you run from a well-specified car battery, through to very automated high-end battery production systems. Sat toward the budget end of the spectrum, you quickly find SUNKKO branded machines with a range of features. We opted to take a look at the SUNKKO 709A machine, which isn’t the cheapest model at £169, but offers the range of features we wanted. The 709A is primarily a spot welder designed to spot-weld thin nickel strips to steel battery terminals. The 709A also,…