HackSpace #47

Like many people who get a 3D printer, I first got very excited to test it out and print things. The usual novelty things – and some were useful, (I still have some custom-made knobs on my oven that I’m very pleased with). I made some Christmas decorations that year, and had great fun with flat-pack ‘card’-style gifts. For a while, it was one of my go-to tools, whether I needed a jig to help me hold things in place while fixing them, or for creating new designs to solve a problem. However, recently I’ve not used my 3D printer much. That’s partly because I got so exhausted trying to print face masks 24 hours a day, seven days a week during the early months of the pandemic, while also…

hsmag.cc/CyberDeck We’ve only just finished printing a series on building a games cabinet using the RetroPie games emulator on a Raspberry Pi… and now something comes along that makes our plywood, full-size arcade machine look old hat. This mostly 3D-printed cyberdeck features a 5-inch 800 × 480 touchscreen display, as well as the usual ports available through the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ that powers it. Quite how useful the screen’s portrait orientation will be for Sonic The Hedgehog is anyone’s guess, but if you’re playing any sort of top-down shooter, you’re laughing. The maker describes this project as a “video game emulator with some edge” – we think it’s pretty impressive for a project that began as an excuse to learn 3D design.…

hsmag.cc/HoloClock Analogue-display clocks have been around in one form or another for centuries. Now, with 3D printing, it’s possible to design things that just wouldn’t have been possible even 20 years ago. With this circular design (the maker describes it as a halo clock), maker saulemmetquinn has turned clock design upside down. It’s still recognisable as a clock, with a round face, a big hand, and a little hand, but there’s something refreshingly different about this design that we like. The gear shafts are brass rods, cut to size using a Dremel, and the current design has a few exposed jumper wires. The whole thing is driven by an Arduino Uno and a stepper motor, with the frame and gears printed in white and black PLA.…

“I have several audio sources that I need to route into a single auxiliary input in my amplifier, so I used to have to unplug one to plug another source in. For example, if I was listening to a CD and wanted to switch to a DAC/Volumio source, or if I was listening to a vinyl record and then wanted to hear a song from a Bluetooth source, I needed a device to help me with this. “I knew that I needed the project to be able to power up and power off without waiting for an operating system to boot – this made the Pico a far better choice than a Raspberry Pi Zero. “So, to the point; for this project I used a Pico to control two 8-relay control boards,…

hsmag.cc/MiG-29K This tiny soldering kit, with only five components (the PCB, battery holder, switch, and two 3 mm LEDs), is available on Tindie, at the bargain price of just $3.25. It’s your way of getting your hands on a MiG-29 fighter jet – which was introduced in the USSR in 1982 and is still in service around the world – at pocket money price. The kit is 6cm long when assembled. The instructions on the PCB are in Dutch, as it’s designed in Belgium for use in Flemish speaking schools.…

hsmag.cc/IV3TubeClock This clock is an updated version of an older kit by Cambridgeshire-based Neon Things. The update isn’t to the VFD tubes, which are ancient bits of Soviet display kit now found on internet auction sites. The update is instead to the software that runs the clock. Whereas the previous version of this clock ran on an Arduino, this uses CircuitPython, making it considerably more user-friendly for anyone with Python as a first language. Even better, thanks to I2C, you can connect this clock to anything you want, turn it into a temperature readout, stock price monitor, or anything else that uses four seven-segment displays.…