HackSpace #75

As someone who grew up watching Inspector Gadget, the ability to create some wacky portable devices was a big part of the reason I grew up loving to build things. To be honest, not much has changed. Gadgets exist in the space between utility, geekery, and fashion – a really good gadget has to have a bit of all three. And our skills as makers can help in each of these areas. We can personalise it to our particular needs, we can nerd-out as much as we like on the technicals, and we can give it our own unique aesthetic. Join us as we take a look at makers building their own doodads and whatsits. Go go gadget … well, whatever. Got a comment, question, or thought about HackSpace magazine?…

braillerap.org Braille, the tactile alphabet used by blind and partially sighted people, was invented almost 200 years ago by Louis Braille, in 1829. It’s still widely used, but if you want to print anything in Braille (actually, there’s no ink involved, so the correct term is embossing rather than printing) it’s going to set you back a few quid. The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) has a few on offer on its website, with prices starting at £1760 for the cheapest model. You can get a roughly equivalent home inkjet printer for under £30. The difference is absurd, and it’s all because of the much more limited market, and the number of moving parts that machines like Braille embossers need. This combination – of high price, established tech,…

community.element14.com The moon orbits Earth every 27.3 days. It doesn’t have leap years; it doesn’t have some months when it takes 30 days, or 31, like our silly calendar months. Give a person (or, in this case, a Raspberry Pi Pico W) a date in time, present or past, and they’ll be able to tell you what the moon looked like on that day using a really simple formula. If you were to take that knowledge and add a hollow, light-up model of the moon, a motor board from Kitronik, and a Raspberry Pi Pico, you might come up with a device like this by Lorraine Underwood. It’s very simple: you just enter a date, and the light inside the moon moves to show the phase of the moon on…

hsmag.cc/KineticPCCase This beautiful PC case was inspired by PC retailer CyberPower’s kinetic PC case. It moves – it looks a bit like the vents of a jet engine opening – but it’s not available to buy. The company teased PC enthusiasts with a glimpse a couple of years ago but, for whatever reason, it hasn’t yet come to pass other than as a concept. Robert, the human behind the Ideal Idea YouTube channel, took this as a sign that he should build his own moving PC case, and, wouldn’t you know, it’s even better than the one that inspired him. The brilliant thing about this build is how open Robert has been in showing his development process. He initially thought of controlling each hexagon with its own linear actuator, but…

Mitxela.com "I was recently fortunate enough to find myself in the pub with some very creative and talented people. The discussion turned to electronic candles, and how one might create something that would look like a flickering candle from any angle. I suggested a persistence of vision display, but the general consensus was that those require too much in the way of supporting machinery to make them work: bearings, and probably slip rings and so on.” So begins Tim Jacobs’ explanation of his brilliant volumetric display. It’s a tiny build (pictured here with a human finger for scale), and it’s also quite brilliant in its approach to an engineering challenge: the problem that you normally get when building anything using persistence of vision is getting power to the moving parts. If…

hsmag.cc/Mailblocks Guy Dupont has a problem: he keeps making brilliant creations that pique the interest of the internet. Every time he makes something interesting on the internet, his phone starts blowing up with notifications. What to do? Well, in a bit of a meta-twist, he decided to make yet another brilliant device, only this time, one that would block notifications until such a time as he’s ready for them. This is the Mailblocks. It’s based on the old-fashioned mailboxes of North America, in the days when you’d have to get up and move your body to receive paper messages once a day from the outside world, and it means that Guy’s Android phone doesn’t bug him with updates unless he chooses to accept them. Guy uses a Raspberry Pi acting…