Table of contents for #66 in HackSpace

Gears scavenged from old toys were useless if they didn’t mesh together, or if you didn’t have a way of holding their axles in the right position When I was young, experimenting with mechanisms could be a really frustrating activity because things needed to fit together, and they seldom did. Gears scavenged from old toys were useless if they didn’t mesh together, or if you didn’t have a way of holding their axles in the right position. Some systems, such as Lego Technic, got you a bit closer, but I often found that I was missing the bit I needed to complete my machine. Thanks to 3D printers, those days are behind us. If I need a gear with 32 teeth and a module of 1, I can just pop…

carlbugeja.com We’ve seen the flexible PCBs of electronics guru Carl Bugeja before – now here’s a semi-rigid PCB that folds up to become a robot rover. Carl has incorporated another of his trademarks, the PCB motor, into the design, with a motor and a driver for each wheel. Control comes from an ESP32, which enables the user to connect to a Sony PlayStation controller via Bluetooth. True to form, Carl’s already working on the next version, ironing out the kinks that he discovered when he folded this up and tested it out. It’s already working as a proof of concept though: check out the video on his site to see just how workable a folding PCB really is.…

We were able to print all the parts for these automata in PLA, but this isn’t necessarily the best plastic for the job. Nylon’s low friction or the toughness of PETG or ASA might make them a better choice for some of the parts. One significant advantage of PLA is that it comes in a wide range of colours, so you’ve got plenty of stylistic choices. That said, if you don’t want to clog up your cupboards with spools of different colours, you can paint your parts. This probably won’t work well for moving parts such as gears, but for some other bits, it’s a quick and cheap way to add more colour. The cat and bat models in this article are painted as we didn’t have a suitable colour…

Even if you don’t know the face, you’ll have seen the work: she used to be the in-house prop maker for the Royal Institution, creating demonstration materials for (among others) the iconic Christmas Lectures. She’s set off rockets with an aluminium finger, she’s set fire to many, many things, and she’s fond of making things explode. We caught up with her to find out how someone with a background in neuroscience ends up in engineering, what it’s like to walk in Michael Faraday’s footsteps, and why it’s right to get things wrong. HackSpace: Morning Fran! You have a background as a neuroscientist, but you’ve ended up exploding things on the TV. How did that happen? Fran Scott: I think engineering was always in me: I just didn’t know it. I…

@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. Last month we looked at surface-mount soldering. We used a soldering iron to attach small components to the top of a PCB. However, this isn’t the only way to attach surface-mount components. While soldering irons can be great for small jobs or one-offs, they’re a bit slow if you need to attach a lot of components, especially if they’re tiny surface-mount components. It can be much faster to use solder paste – this is a gel made up of small balls of solder suspended in a flux. You put dollops of the paste on the pad, pop the components on top, and then heat the…

@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. During a recent refurb of Bristol Hackspace, we found that an Amstrad CPC that had been in a pile of computers assumed broken was, in fact, fully functional. Well, we think it’s fully functional, but we don’t have any software for it, or any way to load software at the moment. It does, however, boot to BASIC. As there’s nowhere to save data, there’s not much point in creating complex programs because they’ll be gone when you power off the computer. There are still a few sources of 3-inch (no, not 3.5-inch) floppy disks around, so we could get some, but to be honest, I’ve…

PIMORONI $71  pimoroni.com Admittedly I took a little liberty when including this in the ‘it’s available’, as the Inky Impression from Pimoroni is available for pre-order and not in stock just yet. Although that will change once this is published, and I hope it stays in stock. I had to include this new display because of just how amazing it looks. No, it’s not super-high definition, but it does have high pixel density, especially for a low power e-ink display. It’s also fairly large at 7.3˝, which is great for e-ink. But the real reason I had to include it in the roundup is because it’s also a seven-colour display. Most e-ink displays are two or three colours – this one really shines at seven. If you have a Raspberry…

Kevsrobots.com Say hello to Bubo, the 3D-printed steampunk owl by Kevin McAleer. Bubo has a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 in one eye, and can recognise hand gestures to take photos and send the results to Twitter or to Mastodon. Gesture recognition is provided by CVZone running on a Raspberry Pi, while each eye has a NeoPixel ring controlled by a Raspberry Pi Pico. Bubo can also blink, thanks to Kev’s own 3D-printed mechanism and a servo for each eye. That’s the technical aspect: artistically Bubo is inspired by the clockwork robot from Ray Harryhausen’s Clash of the Titans, Tik-Tok from the nightmarish Return to Oz, and the Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.…

hsmag.cc/RC-car Do you remember the Tim Burton version of Batman? With the Batmobile that was little more than a big jet engine on wheels? That’s what this build, by Rambros, reminds us of. It’s a radio-controlled car with a 3D-printed chassis, body, steering assembly, and power transmission (including a differential for the rear wheels). Only the electronics, wheels, bearings, and the screws that hold it together aren’t made of plastic.…

GUITAR The 3D-printed guitar from Prusa looks exactly like how I imagined the future would look when I was young. Unfortunately, for the most part, the future hasn’t quite panned out how I’d hoped: instead of jet packs, we have social media. The world might be falling apart, but at least we can now rock out in suitably cyberpunk style while it does. Jane York Ben says: We heartily agree. For the most part, the future is a bit disappointing. This guitar does indeed look fantastic, and we have a new Prusa printer that needs some testing. Let’s see just how good it sounds. I just need to learn how to play the guitar. SOLDERING I’ve been soldering for years, but always by poking leads through holes in the PCB.…

 hsmag.cc/flyingeagle This machine is frankly a ridiculously complex mechanism for a 3D print. There are detailed instructions on the printables site at hsmag.cc/flyingeagle, but friction is the main enemy on a build like this. You need to make sure that your parts fit together smoothly. A big part of this is the point where your print lies on the print bed – you can get a bulge on the bottom layer known as elephant’s foot. If you haven’t got your bed perfectly level with the right Z offset, you can end up with the first layer spreading out a little more than the other layers. When parts have to fit together snugly, this can cause problems. There are two ways around this: tune your printer, or rectify this problem afterwards…

As a magazine about making things, 3D printers pose a bit of a conundrum. After all, all you need to do is load up the filament, slice the model, and press print. However, that’s not really the full story. There’s also the mechanics of how it works, and you can look at how to design and tweak the model. In this feature, we’re going to cover all these angles, and we’ll start with printing and assembling the models. You can download all the bits you need from Printables at hsmag.cc/automaton. You’ll need one of everything except: • 3 × cams• 3 × cam followers• 2 × axles• 2 × axle handles We’ve taken the slightly odd decision to use square axles. Squares are not generally known for their ability to…

 @AndrewGregory83 Something keeps waking my dog up in the middle of the night. That would be fine, except the dog keeps waking me up in the middle of the night. This is not fine. To find out what this is, I resolved to set up a wildlife camera to monitor the back garden. There’s a range of cameras on the market for Raspberry Pi: I thought about the Pi Camera Module 3, the Raspberry Pi Global Shutter Camera, the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera, and various heat-sensitive modules. But as the visitor comes at night, the logical place to start was the night vision camera module available at Pimoroni et al. I’m starting out with a Raspberry Pi 4, as that’s what I have to hand; later on, when I’ve…

@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! Paper aeroplanes have always remained popular – pretty much everyone has had a go at making one once. They are the simplest and the cheapest way to experience making something that flies, and that cheapness, a cost of just a single piece of paper, often leads to people being creative and experimental. They also are really quite helpful in terms of learning the art of ‘trimming’, which is applying the little twists and tucks to any model aeroplane to get it to fly…

Dr Andrew Lewis is a specialist fabricator and maker, and is the owner of the Andrew Lewis Workshop. Scooters are fun, and can be a good alternative to cars and bikes when considering the daily commute. They can even be useful while at work if your job involves moving between campus buildings several times a day, or travelling back and forth in large warehouses or hangars. Electric scooters are even more fun, but they are also expensive. In this project, you’ll see how to take an ordinary manual scooter and make it electric without resorting to expensive hub motors or conversion kits. This is a two-part project. In the first part, we'll take a look at the components we'll use and how we'll need to modify our scooter to make…

@ben_everard KEISUKE SAKA £9.39 Paper is an almost magical material. In the tutorials section, we’re looking at a childhood favourite – paper planes – and here we’ve been making some far more complex models, thanks to this book. This isn’t a particularly new book, but is one that we’ve only just come across, so we’re going to include it in this month’s reviews section for all the other people who also haven’t come across it yet. Karakuri is a Japanese word for mechanised puppet – not unlike the Automata we’ve looked at in this issue’s cover feature. In this book, Keisuke Saka shows you how to make them out of paper. You might hear the words Japan and paper, and assume that this is a book about origami but, while…

From $899 crowdsupply.com Delivery: October 2023 Laptops seem to have taken over the computing world. While this does mean that you can take your computing on the go, upgrades are typically very limited. This means that if you want a faster processor, you have to chuck away your keyboard, screen, battery, and everything else. Not only is this expensive, but it’s also unnecessarily wasteful. The MNT Reform is a laptop that bucks this trend. It’s a portable computer that’s easy to take apart to modify, or fix if something goes wrong. The MNT Pocket Reform is a new product in this line that’s a small, ultra-portable machine. It’s powered by a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 running at 1.8GHz with 8GB of RAM. It supports Debian Linux, so there’s a wide variety…

hsmag.cc/Haxophone The Haxophone is an electronic take on the weird brass/woodwind chimera, the saxophone. Its maker, Javier Cardona, modestly reckons that it’ll never be a substitute for the sound of a saxophone, but it is a lot more portable, and is likely to be a hell of a lot cheaper than a decent sax. It’s also OSHWA-certified open-source hardware, so if it breaks, you can just 3D-print a replacement part. The Haxophone is a Raspberry Pi HAT programmed in Rust, and will be appearing on Crowdsupply.com soon.…

hsmag.cc/CircularKnittingMachine We’re always fascinated by the application of new technologies to old crafts, and this 3D-printed knitting machine is a perfect example of that. More than that, it’s absolutely mesmerising to watch. Mr Innovative, its creator, designed the machine in two parts: the stator and the rotor. The rotator spins, winding the yarn around the needles, and pushing the needles up and down within the stator. Just like knitting with needles, it’s hard to get your head around, but that makes it all the more satisfying when you see it in action.…

Generations of mechanically minded folk have played with automata. These are mechanisms that – in some way – move by themselves, and the term is usually reserved for things that aren’t electronic. They can be powered by springs or gravity, but in the case of the 3D-printed ones we’re looking at, they’re operated by turning a handle. The automata consist of some form of mechanism to transform this rotation into the animation for a scene. We’ll see flying animals, hunting felines, and ocean waves. These automata can show how relatively simple mechanisms can create quite lifelike movement. As well as being fun little games, they give the maker a safe space to explore different tools, techniques, and materials. In this feature, we’re looking at 3D-printed automata. It’s common to think…

@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! KiCad is an amazing piece of free and open-source software that allows anyone, with some time and effort, to make high-quality PCB designs. Couple this amazing software with numerous PCB fabrication companies and even PCBA services – companies that will make and assemble your PCB designs – and there’s never been a better time to get into this aspect of making. PCB design can be a steep learning curve. With that in mind, we wanted to start this series of tutorials with a…

@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. Nylon has two slightly separate reputations in the 3D printer world. Firstly, it’s supposed to create high-quality parts, and secondly, it’s supposed to be hard to print. Are either of these true? It is an ‘engineering’ filament? What does this even mean? Let’s take a look inside the slightly confusing world of 3D printing nylon. While most 3D printer filaments are unheard of outside the makersphere, nylon is a household name. Perhaps that’s because it was one of the earliest plastics available – released in 1938, it was the first synthetic thermoplastic polymer. And perhaps it’s because nylon fibres have found extensive use in the…

@devinck Stock levels. It’s been an issue for all of us for a while now. Cars, appliances, and anything that has some kind of electronics, especially microcontrollers, seem to have experienced a supply chain issue at some point over the last few years. But, then again, even paper towels or general commodities have been hard to come by at times. It’s been a rough few years trying to acquire parts for your projects, but that seems to be getting a bit better. All is not lost, especially if you are looking for microcontrollers, rather than a single-board computer. Raspberry Pi started selling the RP2040 integrated circuits to manufacturers so they can continue to support, develop, and innovate in that ecosystem, and it’s been great! And the most important spec: they…

@ben_everard ARDUINO €68,70 hsmag.cc/giga The new Arduino Giga WiFi Rev 1 is the latest board from Arduino in the Mega form factor. This extends the classic Uno form with extra I/O options. It’s a bit longer, but allows Arduino to pack a lot more onto the PCB. Firstly, there are a lot of pins – 76 of them. Honestly, we’re not completely sure what to do with 76 pins, but if you need them, they’re there. You could – if you so wished – control 5775 non-addressable LEDs, or – for a more colourful look – 1925 RGB LEDs. Pins that don’t fit into the old-school Mega format are available both above and below the board, so you can still access them if you put a Mega shield on it.…