Table of contents for #46 in HackSpace

Science is the pursuit of knowledge, and there are lots of different bits of knowledge that a scientist can pursue. Some scientists sit in laboratories and run experiments. In these lab-based experiments, they can control the variables and really dive into the mechanisms of how different things work. While this is valuable knowledge, it’s also missing a bit of the messiness of the real world. Lab-based experiments don’t always sync with what happens in the wider environment. The problem with running experiments in the real world is that it’s big and diverse. Getting meaningful results means getting lots of data. That’s where we, as makers, can come in. We can take measurements, set up apparatus, and generally check on the little bit of the world that we’re in. Fortunately, there…

Samantha Snyder @SamanthaSnyder Sam is one of Raspberry Pi’s representatives in our former North American colonies; when she’s not doing that, she’s restoring an old house brick by brick, fuelled by coffee and PLA. Humans are natural tinkerers. When we get our hands on new tech, our first instinct is to push the limits of innovation and see what novel (and often useless) creations we can make. But sometimes the best part of new tools is the ease in which they can accomplish well-known tasks. If you’ve strolled down the lumber aisle of your local home improvement store, you’ll know that the price of lumber has skyrocketed during the pandemic. As someone who is remodelling an old brick Victorian-style home, the thought of possibly wasting expensive wood on custom millwork…

In fields ranging from astronomy to zoology, there are thousands of citizen science projects running worldwide. Many of them can be found listed on zooniverse.org, helpfully filtered into categories. While some projects are limited to a particular locality, others are global in nature. Many projects don’t even require any equipment to take part, such as the RSPB’s annual Big Garden Birdwatch, which asks participants to spend an hour watching their garden and manually noting down numbers of different bird species on a printed chart. Others require specialist kit, such as one of the first-ever citizen science projects, Operation Moonwatch. Established in 1956, at the dawn of the space age, it relied on thousands of people worldwide using specially designed telescopes to monitor the night sky and record sightings of artificial…

Anna Ploszajski (pronounced Por-shyski) is a cross-channel swimmer, a materials scientist, a writer, and a breaker-down of barriers to scientific understanding. 50% of the HackSpace editorial team listen to her podcast, Handmade, from which has arisen a book: Handmade: A scientist’s search for meaning through making. Naturally, we wanted to talk to her to find out why we humans do what we do when we turn object A into object B. That’s a pretty big question, but if anyone can answer it for us, Anna can. HackSpace Hi Anna! You’ve written a book about making. Before we get on to that, though, we’d like to ask you about something you’ve been working on in your non-writing life – 4D printing. A while ago we saw a box with a hinged lid;…

We can use a pseudorandom sequence to generate assets and behaviours in a game. Different values might mean that a location on the map is sea, land, or mountain. Or, we could use the values to control properties of characters in the game. Pseudorandom sequences are a great way to get complex, repeatable environments without having to store any of the data that describes them. Game creators have been using this technique ever since the hugely popular Elite game appeared on the BBC Micro home computer back in 1984. Elite uses sequences of pseudorandom values to generate the names and attributes of all the worlds the player can visit. You can investigate how this works at bbcelite.com. This technique was brought bang up to date by the makers of the…

@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! In last month’s tutorial, we looked at projection as a tool to add geometries or objects onto curved surfaces. In this month’s tutorial, we will discuss the limitations of projection and look at how we can map sketches onto the surfaces of curved objects. Along the way, we will make a geeky maker ring to 3D-print, and we will also explore some more complex uses of the Curves Workbench. Last month we projected objects onto curved surfaces, and this works well in many instances.…

Wouldn’t it be better to connect the cooler to the existing coolant pump and cool the water immediately before it goes into the laser? Although the idea of using the existing coolant pump is tempting, it means the cooler can’t be removed easily from the coolant tank without risking an airlock in the cooling system, and pumping very cold water directly into the laser is a very bad idea. Although the laser needs to be cooled, excessive cooling can cause thermal shock, which can crack the laser tube. Imagine dropping iced water into a pickling jar that’s just come out of the oven – the sudden cold shock would shatter the jar.…

People make things for all sorts of reasons, and we’re not here to tell you the right way to make a project, because there is no universal right way. The important thing is that you’re doing it in a way that’s right for you. If you like having a shelf full of unfinished projects that you can tinker with at your leisure, then go right ahead and continue working that way. If you enjoy having an endless project that will probably never be finished, but is a source of constant tinkering, then again, continue doing this. However, if you get frustrated by never getting to the end of your projects, we hope these tips are useful for you.…

KITRONIK $21.97 kitronik.co.uk PIMORONI $15.52 pimoroni.com What’s not to love about the simplicity and beauty of the Kitronik:KLEF Piano for the micro:bit? The classic grand pianoshaped PCB not only looks great, it allows you to compose monophonic music through its 15 capacitive touchpads. Thirteen of the pads are arranged as a single octave, and the remaining two touchpads allow you to shift octaves up and down. There is also an on-board amplifier and speaker, allowing for a louder playing experience. The board also features a USB plug which passes the power to the micro:bit, so you don’t have to power it separately. Head over to the Kitronik website to learn more and download the demo code. Pimoroni says, “Make your micro:bit sing!” And with the noise:bit, you can. Make your…

SPOTPEAR $11.89 hsmag.cc/picoscreen @ben_everard The snappily named Raspberry Pi Pico display 1.54-inch LCD by Spotpear brings in a 240×240 pixel IPS screen and ten buttons in a joypadlike arrangement. There’s four for direction, four for action, a select, and a start. At least, they’re labelled like this. You can use them for anything you like. To help you get started, there’s a short manual at hsmag.cc/SpotpearGuide, which includes example code for MicroPython and C. This example code is easy enough to use, but it is a little messy. The mechanism for controlling the hardware isn’t separated into its own module, so you’re left with either the task of building the library yourself or having slightly untidy code. Not the biggest inconvenience, but compared to how neatly some maker hardware companies…

GIGA PRINTER I’ve never been a big fan of the phrase 'nobody wants to see how the sausage gets made', mostly because I very much do! Seeing the unglamorous bits that go into a creative process is fascinating, and it makes the final product even more impressive. So the best bit of your chat with Willow Creative last issue wasn’t the costumes that she makes – it’s the 3D printer hack. Anyone can order a few bits of extruded aluminium online and swap them for other bits of extruded aluminium with the same profile, meaning you can make the things you own bigger or smaller to suit your needs. It’s a simple concept, but seeing a concrete example really helped me get my head around it. David Bury Ben says:…

we-count.net In order to learn more about traffic flow and create better routes to avoid congestion, city planners need to know how many vehicles are being driven past a particular point, what type they are, and how fast they’re going. While one rather laborious way to gather such data is to have people stand on the pavement and count vehicles manually, some governments have used expensive technology to monitor traffic, often limited to a narrow set of locations such as highways. The WeCount citizen science project offers an affordable alternative to gather data from a wider range of locations using inexpensive traffic sensor units powered by Raspberry Pi. Currently operating in six European cities – Madrid, Barcelona, Ljubljana, Leuven, Dublin, and Cardiff – WeCount is in the process of expanding…

@AndrewGregory83 Andrew dabbles in Raspberry Pi, music and woodwork. So far his most impressive build is a pile of sawdust and a load of very sharp chisels Of all the connectors that we use to join one bit of wood to another bit of wood, the simplest is the nail. Like its close cousin the dowel, nails have been used for thousands of years. Although we’re used to seeing steel or iron nails, nails have been around for far longer than we’ve been using iron: early nails made of bronze have been found in Egypt dating back to around 3400 BC. That makes them significantly older than their functional equivalent, screws, which had to wait for iron, files, and other tools to be invented before they could be made. Nails…

@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. MIDI – Musical Instrument Digital Interface – is a protocol that lets, well, musical instruments interface digitally. Basically, it’s a way of sending messages back and forth between keyboards, synthesizers, computers, and other noise-making machinery. It’s been around since the early 1980s and is supported by a huge range of hardware. While it is standard, there are a few different physical connections. We’re going to be using USB here, but there is also a specific connector just for MIDI that some older hardware may expect. There are quite a few different types of messages you can send, but the ones we’ll look at are note…

Pseudorandom number sequences play a big part in keeping the internet secure. Sensitive data streams can be protected from prying eyes by using successive values from a pseudorandom number generator to encrypt the contents of a block of data. The data can be decoded if the reader has the same random number generator code and knows the seed value. The random number generator that we are looking at was built for speed, not security. There are ’crypto secure’ random number generator routines that you can use if you are really serious about keeping your secrets.…

@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. Let’s be honest: there’s a good chance that you have a half-finished project sitting on your shelf, or in a box right now. And there’s a good chance that it’s accompanied by several more halffinished projects. Sometimes it feels like unfinished projects are the curse of the maker. But do they need to be? Is it possible to be a maker and actually finish a significant percentage of your projects? We ran an entirely unscientific poll on Twitter to find out why people aren’t finishing their projects. The answers are: 1. Lack of time (43%)2. Lost interest (29.1%)3. Deciding how to make it (19.9%)4. Waiting…

It’s common to feel some form of imposter syndrome in making. Many projects require working across a range of disciplines, and it’s usual to not be an expert in all of them. It’s easy to look at other projects and want to be an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, a programmer, a woodworker, and an artist. However, you’re (probably) not all these things. Nobody is. A good project can use pre-built modules rather than homedesigned circuits. It can use off-the-shelf mechanics; it can use code straight from example files. It can be a jumbled mess of glue and wires. It can be housed in an old ice cream tub rather than a custom-designed enclosure. If it works for you, then it’s a good project.…

Matthew Read is a conservator of the world’s earliest computers (clocks) and the world’s earliest robots (automata). He’s worked at the Royal Observatory Greenwich (where time was invented); on several objects cared for by the National Trust, and the Silver Swan, an incredible 18th-century automaton housed in the Bowes Museum in the charming County Durham market town of Barnard Castle. More than that, he’s also an advocate for using modern technology, such as Arduinos in conservation, to take the strain off old, irreplaceable parts that are inevitably wearing away. We spoke to Matthew to find out what goes on when an expert fixes a broken clock, and learned a whole lot more than that. “When you approach any broken object, I believe the important first step should always be the…

From $76 kickstarter.com Delivery: November 2021 Diamonds are forever, or so the De Beers marketing team would like you to believe. While not technically indestructible, they are very hard and wear-resistant and also have a few other useful properties. They have very low friction and very high thermal conductivity (actually, they have the highest thermal conductivity of any known material, and this is commonly used by jewellers to distinguish between real diamonds and imitations). All this means that diamond is a great material for 3D printing nozzle tips. Obviously, the big question is the price. At $76, it’s not cheap. You could get over 100 brass nozzles for this if you shopped around (they wouldn’t be good nozzles, but they would be nozzles). What you’re getting for your money is…

@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. In this article we are going to look at randomness, and discover how to create it using software. Then we’ll investigate different flavours of random numbers, and finish by using managed randomness to create a light that displays colours which can be synchronised worldwide. Figure 1 shows the light-boxes that we are going to make. Each one contains a strip of NeoPixels and an ESP8266 device. They are running the Connected Little Boxes software, which you can find here: connectedlittleboxes.com. You can also use the software to control chains of LEDs, as well as names with lights in. Let’s discover how…

DOWNLOAD THE FULL CODE: magpi.cc/rpipullupfix MAKER K.G. Orphanides K.G. is a writer, maker of odd games, and software preservation enthusiast. Their household can now hold very retro Street Fighter II tournaments, and that’s beautiful @KGOrphanides Last month, we used Recalbox for our main arcade cabinet operating system, but it’s not your only choice. In this final instalment of the ‘Build an arcade machine’ series, we’ll use the RetroPie distribution, currently at version 4.7, to provide extra features such as Steam Link support, as well as taking a longer look at where to buy arcade games and how to get them onto your system. This tutorial assumes that you already have a fully assembled and wired arcade cabinet. 01 Install and prepare RetroPie Fire up Raspberry Pi Imager, connect your microSD card…

Dr Andrew Lewis is a specialist fabricator and maker, and is the owner of the Andrew Lewis Workshop. Laser cutters generate a lot of heat, and if that heat isn’t carried away quickly enough, it can permanently damage your laser tube. This project lets you use your existing kitchen-based cooling infrastructure (your fridge-freezer) to cool your kit with some recycled beverage cans. If you don’t supply your laser with pure water to cool it, then you’re going to have a bad time. That’s why your laser tube is designed with a water jacket. If you’re a home hobbyist living in a moderate climate and you only use your laser occasionally, then you’ll probably find that a pump and a large water reservoir is enough for your needs. However, if the…

Many of the points regarding time also apply to budget. Simplifying a project also usually makes it cheaper. Having features that you can skip if you don’t have time also means there are features you can skip if you run out of budget. Using parts and techniques that you are familiar with means that you can properly plan the cost better. Using anything unfamiliar increases the risk of finding that you need extra parts or tools that you didn’t initially budget for. Ultimately, it comes down to picking the right project. At the start, you need to be realistic about the time and money you have available, and make sure that your project fits into both.…

@devinck It’s been over five years since the BBC, in collaboration with a few dozen partners, launched the Make It Digital initiative. From that program, they created the micro:bit, the open-source electronics learning tool that was distributed to over a million students in the UK by 2016. Around the same time, the Micro:bit Educational Foundation was created, which expanded the mission statement to include all students from around the world. It’s been a great success which has been embraced by the DIY electronics community, further expanding its popularity. The original micro:bit didn’t include a speaker, and although making music with the board was possible, the first thing you would need to do is add some kind of speaker. The latest version of the board adds the ability to detect sound,…

@ben_everard CIRCUITMESS £71.98 circuitmess.com Jay-D is a DJ mixtable. Basically, it enables you to control two songs at once – speed them up, slow them down, add effects, and control the volume of each independently. This means you can create a seamless blend of two songs. There are two slide potentiometers at the top that control the volume of each of the two tracks, and one in the middle that controls the balance between the two. Each side also has three rotary encoders for controlling various effects that you can apply, such as the speed, high/low pass filters, and bitcrusher. The interface is reasonably intuitive, but there’s also a guide at hsmag.cc/JayDGuide to help you get started. Really, the challenge isn’t controlling the device, but understanding how to use it…

MINIWARE £75 miniware.com.cn @concreted0g The name Miniware may sound familiar, as it is the company that produces the excellent TS100 and TS80 soldering irons. Building on those products, they have recently released a mini hot plate, the MHP30, suitable for populating small single-sided SMD boards. After seeing the MHP30 featured in Adafruit videos and elsewhere in the community, we decided to grab one and take a look. Available for around £75, the MHP30 arrives in excellent packaging that is good enough to be used as a storage case for the device when not in use. Inside the box, the MHP30 has a silicone cover over the hot plate, and tucked away in the box base is a rather lovely one-metre-long silicone USB-C to USB-C cable. It really is tiny –…