Table of contents for #54 in HackSpace

Got a comment, question, or thought about HackSpace magazine? get in touch at hsmag.cc/hello GET IN TOUCH hackspace@raspberrypi.com hackspacemag hackspacemag ONLINE hsmag.cc https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackspace-magazine/id1315673274?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackspace-magazine/id1315673274?mt=8 Modern computers are a wonder of science and engineering. Highly skilled scientists discover ways of squeezing more and more components into the same amount of silicon. Highly skilled engineers find ways of making the components do ever more things. Highly skilled designers package all this up in ways that fit in with our lifestyles. The computers you use today are the result of nearly a hundred years of optimisations on how you can use electrons to compute. However, like all optimisations, this process has taken something away. As utility, power, and convenience have advanced, understandability, tinkerability, and fixability have declined. There was a time when a…

hsmag.cc/LED-filament-clock This month, Ben tried and failed to produce a Nixie-esque clock, using layers of LED filament to display ten numerical digits. He should simply have made a seven-segment display, as Jay Hamlin did with this beautiful creation. It uses an Adafruit HUZZAH32 Feather board to send data to four sevensegment displays, with each segment being comprised of a length of LED filament (the same material used in the Edison-style bulbs that are so trendy at the moment). The glass tubes just add to the aesthetic.…

hsmag.cc/MusicalPCBTeslaCoil Tesla coils usually entail masses of copper wire to help create their weird and wonderful electrical effects. Canadian maker Edison has taken that idea and replaced the coils of copper wire with tracks embedded in a PCB, in a similar way to that taken by Carl Bugeja in his PCB motors (as seen in HackSpace, issue 52). This musical PCB Tesla coil can play songs over Bluetooth, so you don’t need to source MIDI files, but for no longer than ten minutes. Edison also recommends that you don’t run it in spark mode for more than 20 minutes, and warns that the arcs it produces will not shock you, but may burn your skin. As always, when working with high voltages, take care.…

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 APPLIED ION SYSTEMS Thanks for the interview with Michael Bretti from Applied Ion Systems. I still consider myself a dabbler in open-source hardware. The best I’ve got to so far is printing other people’s designs from the Prusa Printers site, then modifying them if needed, and uploading my changes. So in spirit, I’m an open-source hardware maker just like Michael, but in practice there’s a whole world of difference! Some of the stuff he says is just mind-blowing. And the idea that one man, on his own, can move things around in orbit around the Earth, when just 50 years ago…

LGP-30 Original Launch: 1956; $47,000 hsmag.cc/LGP30Replica The desk-sized (not desktop) Librascope LGP-30 was a 31/32-bit word machine with a 4096-word drum memory. It was used by computer pioneer Margaret Hamilton (of Apollo 11 fame) while doing research on weather forecasting at MIT. Jürgen Müller has created a palmsized replica of this historic machine using a Numato Mimas FPGA (fieldprogrammable gate array) dev board to model the LGP-30’s architecture, along with a custom ‘LittleGP-30’ PCB. While dispensing with the original’s 113 vacuum tubes, it does have the obligatory blinkenlights and adds an LCD screen – it can also be connected to an HDMI monitor. Project files and full build instructions can be found on Jürgen’s website. He has also created miniature working replicas of the RPC-4000 (LGP-30’s ‘big brother’) and LGP-21.…

Electronic hardware One of the main choices you’ll need to make for your replica build is what electronic hardware to use. Here, the main options are whether to emulate the system on a singleboard computer (e.g. Raspberry Pi) or microcontroller, or to model its architecture with an FPGA. “Each project is unique when it comes to the selection of hardware,” advises Michael Gardi. “In general, reproducing the motherboards from the originals and populating them with vintage parts is usually prohibitively expensive.” The alternative is to emulate the original device functions using a modern microprocessor: “Picking what processor is dependent on what you are trying to accomplish,” says Michael. “For instance, the KENBAK-1 has been successfully replicated using an Arduino, but I chose to use a Raspberry Pi 4 for my…

Jude Pullen is a product designer. We got in touch when we saw one of his recent products, the Good Air Canary. Instead of just sensing particulate matter or C02 in the air and displaying numbers, the Canary speaks to the user, asking you to open a window, complains that it’s getting stuffy, or, if the air quality is really bad, it dies, just like the original canaries that were taken down mines because it was cheaper to replace a canary than a man. We talked about the Canary, and then, all of a sudden, it was two hours later and we were talking about disinformation on Facebook, Tony Blair, Men in Black, using feminism to sell cigarettes to women (apparently they were marketed as ‘Freedom Torches’), and what really…

@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. Microcontrollers are great for understanding and producing digital signals. These electrical equivalents of 1s and 0s power the vast majority of our electrical devices. However, the world is not digital, so sometimes, if we’re interacting with the world around us, we need our digital devices to use analogue signals. These, rather than being on or off, can range over a certain set of values. Most microcontrollers have one or more analogue inputs which let you sample a voltage and see where in a range it falls. However, relatively few have the ability to output an analogue value. Fortunately, this is quite an easy feature to…

Dr Andrew Lewis is a specialist fabricator and maker, and is the owner of the Andrew Lewis Workshop. Without adequate control methods and safety systems, a laser cutter is nothing more than an astonishingly dangerous high-voltage cigarette lighter. In this article, you’ll take a look at the control board for a laser cutter, the essential safety features that prevent the laser from firing accidentally, and how to monitor the laser while it’s running. The first thing most people do when they buy a K40 laser is what several websites call ‘essential upgrades’. This is a polite way of saying that the stock K40 laser is built to the bare minimum functional standard, and is a potential death-trap in its default state. That isn’t a slight against the K40; it’s a…

PIMORONI → $90.06 pimoroni.com PIMORONI → $52.40 pimoroni.com When researching products for this roundup, one of the first things that I found was the all-new Weather HAT + Weather Sensors Kit from Pimoroni. And I have to say, it was a great find! This Weather HAT combo kit not only includes the HAT for your Raspberry Pi, but it also includes all the sensors needed to create a robust weather station. The Weather HAT is Pimoroni’s all-in-one solution for hooking up multiple climate and environmental sensors to a Raspberry Pi. It features an LCD screen and sensors that can measure temperature, humidity, pressure, and light. It also has an RJ11 connector, the same type of connector that a typical landline phone uses, that will let you easily attach an external…

@ben_everard SHAPER → €2890 + VAT shapertools.com We’re not quite sure what to call the Shaper Origin. It’s not quite a CNC – though it is partly computer-controlled – and it’s not quite a hand tool, though you do move it with your hands. To look at, it appears to be a chunky router. There’s two handles and a spindle, much as you’d find on any other router, but there’s also a bit on the front and a screen. Another clue that this isn’t an ordinary router is the black and white ‘domino’ tape that you need to stick on the workpiece. Inside Origin, there’s a computer that you can load your designs onto (as SVG files). You can then scan the workpiece (there’s an on-board camera). Origin can sense…

hsmag.cc/TrackLinkCalendar Months are annoyingly irregular. They come in 28-, 30-, 31-, and sometimes even 29-day lengths, which means a typical calendar will always have some surplus days hanging off the edges (open Google Calendar to see what we mean). Shiura has solved this problem with a mechanical calendar, which he says has several advantages over paper/screen-based alternatives.“It can display all four types of months from 28 to 31 days… When the current month is selected by the top wheel, the day of the week is automatically adjusted. Setting is necessary once a year, on 1 March. Setting is valid from March to February in the next year.” We’ll admit that this hadn’t seemed like a problem to us before, but now we think about it, it’s really annoying, and this…

hsmag.cc/InfinityMacropad This Macropad by Infinity Workshops provides a frankly ridiculous amount of input capability. It uses 20 individual switches, three rotary encoders, and a joystick, held together with 20 switching diodes and a Raspberry Pi Pico. This device is overkill for sending emails and checking Facebook, but for video editing, we can see it saving the right user an awful lot of time.…

If you’ve ever experimented with MIDI, you’ll either adore or be infuriated by the way that you can tinker with everything. Sound-waves are really just applied mathematics, so generations of geeks have poured their hearts and souls into the pursuit of the perfect wobbly tone. This 3D-printed foot pedal for MIDI is relatively simple by comparison with a lot of MIDI projects. It entails just one 100K linear potentiometer, an Adafruit QT Py RP2040, some M3 fixings, and a USB-A to USB-C cable. That, and a beautifully designed and executed foot pedal chassis, designed by Adafruit’s Ruiz brothers. As always, the source files are available for anyone with space on their printer bed – in this case you’ll need at least 210 × 210 × 100 mm. hsmag.cc/MidiPedal…

Apple II (1977) The first home computer to attain mass success, it sold around 5 million units in total. Mike Willegal created a replica of the original Revision 0 motherboard to replace a failed one in his original Apple II (hsmag.cc/AppleIIReplica). Sinclair ZX80 (1980) This ultra-low-cost computer featured an NEC 780C-1 CPU, 1kB of RAM, membrane keyboard, and monochrome TV output. Cees Meijer’s superb replica is made from 3D-printed parts and based around a Raspberry Pi Zero (hsmag.cc/ZX80Replica). BBC Micro Model B (1981) Anyone who attended a UK school in the 1980s will remember Acorn’s bulky microcomputer. If you’ve got an original model, you can enhance its capabilities with PiTubeDirect on a Raspberry Pi (hsmag.cc/PiTubeDirect). Or you can even emulate a BBC Micro on a Raspberry Pi Pico (hsmag.cc/BBCMicroPico)! The…

Bamboo turns up in all sorts of unexpected places, from T-shirts to transport. Its speedy growth and biodegradability make bamboo attractive to anyone keen to make planet-friendly products – furniture, flooring, musical instruments, and even sunglasses. It’s a popular choice in the consumer accessories world, where the eco credentials of bamboo speakers, tablet cases, and earphones provide a notable contrast to the rare minerals used to make smartphones. If you like the idea of making your own speaker, bamboo-focused maker site Elegant Experiments has a straightforward walkthrough: hsmag.cc/BambooSpeaker. Bamboo scaffolding, fencing, and hedges make use of bamboo’s hardiness and reliably straight hollow shoots, as well as its low cost. Its use in gardens as privacy-providing sustainable fencing is not without its issues, due to some bamboo varieties’ fast-spreading rhizomes that…

MAKER James Robinson Senior Learning Manager, Pedagogy and Training at Raspberry Pi. Ex-Teacher, spaceenthusiast. raspberrypi.org MAKER Mark Scott Marc is a former computer science teacher, and manages informal learning content for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. raspberrypi.org Over the course of this tutorial, you will construct a robot face from a combination of LEGO and electronic components. You’ll then use an existing machine learning model to help your face recognise different objects and react to them. You should build your robot face using whatever LEGO and other materials that you have available. We have used the LEGO SPIKE™ Prime kit (magpi.cc/spikeprime). This tutorial can also found online on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s website (magpi.cc/legorobotface). 01 Get started Before you begin, you will need to have set up your Raspberry Pi computer…

@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. Cura slicer is one of the most powerful tools in the 3D printer user’s arsenal. It lets you control a lot of different facets of how your designs will 3D-print. We’re going to take a look at some of the lesserknown features of Cura that you can use to save filament, speed up your prints, or just make them look a bit funky. Not all of these will be visible to the user by default. You can see all the slicing options by going to Preferences > Configure Cura > Settings, and clicking the Check All button. Now, if you go to the print setting…

PIMORONI → $32.75 pimoroni.com Pimoroni has another great addition to their environmental sensing lineup called Grow. This little HAT features a beautiful on-board IPS colour screen. You can display data from any of the sensors you connect via the JST connectors, or the integrated light sensor. The board gets even more interesting when you plug in the included capacitive moisture sensors. Once you take a soil reading, you can also use the Picoblade 2P-compatible connectors for switching low-current 5 V devices on and off. It’s a great way to get started with some simple automation and control logic. Just add a Raspberry Pi and you are off to automate your indoor garden. And if you don’t have any plants, Pimoroni also sells a kit that includes everything you need to…

@concreted0g PIMORONI → £12 (£19.50 with accessory set) pimoroni.com E-ink is an amazing technology. Its contrast and visibility, even in high sunshine, are great. Fabulous viewing angles and the fact that it can keep an image crisply held when powered down make it a versatile display technology. However, whilst this makes it sound incredibly serious, as we write this review we have the long time internet meme tune ‘Badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger / Mushroom, mushroom’ washing around our heads. Supplied fully assembled, the Badger 2040 from Pimoroni looks, at first glance, like an e-ink breakout board, but it’s really much much more than that. It’s a lovely 2.9” black and white e-ink display that’s fully programmable with its onboard RP2040 microcontroller. It can be powered and programmed…

hsmag.cc/StepperMotorDisplay Electromechanical seven-segment displays look amazing, but not everyone is in love with the click-clack sounds they make. David McDaid decided to solve this problem by getting rid of servos and replacing them with stepper motors. In his own words: “The goal here was two-fold; create something stylish that would look good when hung up on a wall, and ensure that all movements were as quiet as possible! I was inspired by some great existing projects (see link, above), but most had used noisy servos. Using my idea to retrofit silent stepper drivers from 3D printers, I built, tested, and coded my clock completely from scratch over two to three months of my spare time.”…

hsmag.cc/LegoShredder The normal goal when using gears in a build is to transfer power smoothly and efficiently. This build, by the brilliant Brick Experiment Channel, aims to subvert that. By purposefully misaligning the gears in this LEGO-built shredder, the device grabs the paper and shreds it as it’s going through the mechanism. Early versions of this device merely crumpled the paper – watch the video to follow the build process, which concludes with a fully functional device.…

We’re well used to the idea that, nowadays, if you want something that the market doesn’t provide, you can build it yourself. Free design software, cheap PCB prototyping services, and online tutorials mean that anyone can design a simple electronics project. But high-performance computers – surely that’s something that’s best left to the big companies with money to spend on design, testing, and scaling up production? You’d think that, but Ivan Kuleshov is having a go himself. He’s developed (or should we say, ‘is developing’ – more on his incremental approach to design later) the Compute Blade: a carrier for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 that enables users to easily build their own compute clusters, potentially putting previously out-of-reach amounts of computing power into many, many more hands. First…

Want to learn more about the roots and evolution of computing? Fed up with software bloat on modern PCs? Longing for a golden age when machines were simpler? Welcome to the world of classic computers. Large machines with blinking LEDs and toggle switches for programming and debugging are a far cry from the polished, user-friendly interfaces of today’s computers, but they have their own charm. “A big part of the attraction is the aesthetics of a blinkenlight front panel, and how close that brings you to the lowest-level hardware of a computer,” explains replica kit designer Oscar Vermeulen. “That is the part where I think there is educational value too. “The design of a super-early computer like the LGP-30 is at the same time so easy to understand and so…

Michael Gardi Michael has built scale replicas of the KENBAK-1, Sol-20, and VT100 Terminal, as detailed on his website, mikesmakes.ca. In addition, he has made two Turing machine demonstrators and a tribute to the Digi-Comp I mechanical computer from the 1960s. “I’m sure that a lot of it is nostalgia,” he says, as to why so many people have a fascination with early computers. “Part of this is that classic computers were simple enough that you could completely understand everything that was going on with the machine. “Another factor is that fabrication technologies like 3D printing, CNC, and PCB manufacturing, plus the availability of cheap computing power like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, make it possible for motivated individuals like myself to make these reproductions.” He admits that he wasn’t much…

Jo Hinchliffe @concreted0g 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! YOU’LL NEED → Computer with Inkscape and FreeCAD → Access to a laser cutter or 3D printer Gears are all around us. These clever interlinking drive systems underpin many mechanical wonders, but they have always been quite difficult to make. With modern maker tools like 3D printing and laser cutting, they are now commonly available and customisable for you to explore and use in your projects. Gears come in many different sizes and flavours, but they are often used for the…

We’ve been playing with flexible LED filament for a few weeks. It’s basically exactly what it says it is – strips of LEDs that are encased in flexible silicone, and wired up in parallel so you can run them at 3 V. They’re designed for making fancy lamps, as you can bend the filament into all sorts of shapes. We decided to try something a little more ambitious – a clock. By bending a filament into the shape of each number, and stacking the digits 0 to 9 on top of each other, we thought we could make something approximating a Nixie tube but with a bit more of a neon glow. A test with the digits 0,1, and 2 looked great and worked well (we only had three spare…

Despite loving all things digital, Mike admits to being a bit of a Luddite, vinyl records and all. ‘Father of radio’ – many of us have heard the phrase, and it refers to the Italian electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi, right? Not according to the residents of the small city of Murray, Kentucky. They claim the title for one of their own sons, melon farmer and inventor Nathan B Stubblefield. His inventions didn’t really involve radio, as we now understand the word, but he did demonstrate wireless communication, in the broadest sense of communication, with no wires between the transmitter and receiver. Stubblefield experimented with a wireless technology called inductive communication, although our subject here is another of his inventions. It’s been given various names – including ground conduction and earth…

@devinck Spring has arrived! And it’s time to get your outdoor projects started. I’ve covered some outdoor-related projects in a previous springtime Best of Breed but, as the category has so many cool products, I thought I’d take another look again this year. There are, of course, the common IoT-related items like smart switches, plugs, and other connected devices, but I wanted to narrow down the category and dive a little deeper into a specific topic – gardening! In this Best of Breed, I’ll be looking at indoor and outdoor gardening-related products. Things that will make you and your plants happy! Automation, sensors, controllers – it’s a mixed bag of products that have the common bond of keeping your plants alive. There are a couple of brand-new products too! Spring…

ADAFRUIT → $49.50 adafruit.com If you have a greenhouse, exotic plants, or even a vivarium, then measuring CO2 accurately may be critical to your ecosystem’s success. And that’s where the Adafruit SCD-40 breakout board comes into play. Unlike the typical ‘gas’ sensors out there that approximate the amount of VOCs in the air, the SCD-40 is a photoacoustic, ‘true’ CO2 sensor that can tell you the specific CO2 PPM composition of the surrounding ambient air. It’s a true measurement of CO2 concentration. The board also features Adafruit’s STEMMA QT form factor which allows you to wire it up quickly, without soldering, via their QT connectors and cables. And, if you need even more range in measuring CO2, typically only in industrial situations, they also sell a version that features an…

PLAY & CODE GAMES! Set up Raspberry Pi for retro gaming Emulate classic computers and consoles Learn to code your own retro-style games Build a console, handheld, and full-size arcade machine BUY ONLINE: magpi.cc/store…

@concreted0g PIMORONI → £48 pimoroni.com It’s a great time for people to get into building robots – there’s no end to the recipes and tutorials online. You could choose to totally scratch-build, or go for something more off-the-shelf to get you up and running fast. Firmly at the latter end of the spectrum sits the Pimoroni Trilobot kit. Definitely looking like a trilobite, the Trilobot kit allows the robo-curious to build a gorgeous little bot sporting two driven wheels at the front and a castor at the rear to allow quick, responsive turning. It comes in two different kit options; a base kit where you need to add a Raspberry Pi 4 and a USB-C power bank to get it up and running, or a full kit which includes a…