HackSpace #81

In the past five years or so, both the price and ease of use of microcontrollers have plummeted. It’s now at a point where popping a small programmable board into a build is something you can do almost without thinking about it. A few quid on parts and a couple of dozen lines of code can turn something static into something interactive. In this issue, we’re looking at 50 different ways you can do this. Some might be familiar to you, and hopefully some will encourage you to try something new. Let’s get electric. It’s easier and cheaper than you might think. ben.everard@raspberrypi.com Got a comment, question, or thought about HackSpace magazine? get in touch at hsmag.cc/hello GET IN TOUCH hackspace@raspberrypi.com hackspacemag ONLINE hsmag.cc https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackspace-magazine/id1315673274?mt=8…

hsmag.cc/ArcReactorAlarmClock We are – or at least, we used to be – huge fans of the Marvel cinematic universe and all the props and cosplay that it has given us over the years. One classic of the genre is Iron Man’s arc reactor — the glowing power source that sits in Tony Stark’s chest and powers his special suit. It’s almost a cosplay rite of passage to build your own arc reactor, so here’s our favourite implementation: an arc reactor that’s also an alarm clock. As an arc reactor is basically a round, glowing thing, it should come as no surprise that Jéjé starts with an off-the-shelf NeoPixel ring, powered by a Mini ESP32. The structure that holds the electronics is printed out of black and transparent PLA, and there…

hsmag.cc/EPiPod The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the French say. We’ve seen the return of vinyl as an audiophile way of consuming music; now it looks like digital files are making a comeback over streaming services. At least, they are in one small corner of the internet. Inspired by maker Bram Rausch’s PiPod, the ePiPod by drhatch takes a homegrown iPodlike music player, based on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, and adds an e-paper screen, rather than the PiPod’s 2.2-inch TFT screen. The screen drhatch chose is a $6.99 display from Waveshare; the maker had to change the power supply from the original PiPod using Waveshare’s reference design; the software also had to change, to incorporate the Waveshare driver library and the Pillow Python…

hsmag.cc/SolarWaterBottle According to the World Health Organization, there are at least 1.7 billion people in the world today who drink water contaminated with faeces, putting them at risk of diseases including diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and polio, with diarrhoea alone causing around a million deaths per year. If you live in a country where this isn’t a problem, it means that the generations before you invested massive amounts of time and money into building sewers, wells, water treatment plants, reservoirs, and all the rest of the infrastructure that we should be grateful for every time we turn on the tap. Where this infrastructure doesn’t exist, there are other solutions. One of these is to treat water using UV light to kill harmful bacteria. This solar water bottle by Aarav Garg…

hsmag.cc/UselessRobot You’ve probably already seen some incarnation of the ‘useless box’ mechanism: it’s a machine that turns itself off. More than that, it’s a machine that mechanically, deliberately turns itself off: you flick a switch, then an arm appears from out of the box to flick the switch back and turn the machine off. This version, by Toby Chui, has a couple of added features to the basic machine that turns itself off. First of all, there’s that gorgeous little face, which is inspired by the Japanese ‘Kawaii’ aesthetic (Kawaii means ‘cute’). Second, every time the user turns the machine on, the face gets a little more annoyed, until it’s had enough, and the machine will run away. If it were up to us we’d implement this with a Raspberry…

hsmag.cc/VintageSmartRadio There are loads of upcycling projects that involve taking a cool old enclosure, ripping out the original electronics, and replacing them with a microcontroller – and don’t get us wrong, we love that sort of thing. What makes this build different is that Tsuryx has kept all the original features of the Sony TFM-9450W radio, and added new ones without taking anything away. The magic ingredient in this build is the audio signal mixer, an example of which is currently available on AliExpress for the princely sum of £1.19. This is what enabled the maker to retain the functionality of the radio – you simply unsolder the wires connecting the original radio to the speaker and route them via the mixer. Adding the Amazon Echo Dot requires some disassembly…