Table of contents for #80 in HackSpace

I spend a lot of time – probably too much – thinking about what makes a particular piece of technology good or bad. There can be a temptation in the technical press to get obsessed over numbers. If the numbers go up, that must mean that something is fundamentally better. However, that’s wrong. All technology is about tools, and a tool is better if it makes it easier to achieve your aim – this month, the tools in question are 3D printers. It is, of course, possible that your sole aim is producing a Benchy in the shortest possible time, but it’s far more likely that you have something else in mind when you get a 3D printer. Perhaps you want to expand your range of gaming miniatures, or you…

hsmag.cc/RotaryPhoneTimer Speak to anyone who’s had a go at up cycling old electronics and they’ll tell you that older is better. The devices were built to last in the days before planned obsolesce, so if you decide to reincorporate original components, there’s a good chance that they’ll still work. The cases are put together with screws, nuts and bolts, meaning you can get into the innards without destroying anything, as you would if they were glued together. And anything built before the 70, when microchips first made their way into consumer electronics, will necessarily be bigger in order to house the chunky old electronics components used at the time. This old phone had already been upcycled by a previous owner before Scott-28 got his hands on it, converting a hand-crank…

hsmag.cc/Linamp For a long time our favourite word was “skeuomorphic” Examples of skeuomorphism include concrete given a texture to make it look like wood; or plastics made shiny and fitted with fake rivets to look like metal. It’s a way of making one material look like another. You can see it all the time in the design of graphical interfaces for computers:” we’ve left 3.5 inch floppy disks behind a long time ago, but they linger on as the Save icon in computer operating systems to this day. One great example of skeuomorphism is the Winamp music player, originally released in 1997, which was designed to look like the control panel of a Hi-Fi. Now the circle os complete, with software engineer and electronics tinkerer Rodmg bringing the aesthetic of…

If there’s a hot topic in 3D printing at the moment, it’s multifilament printing. This is an optional add-on to all the printers we’re looking at, except the Prusa Mini. For all of them, except the Prusa XL, this means that there’s an additional unit that feeds filament into the printer, and can swap this filament in and out of the hot end as you go through the print. There are two big problems with this as a basic technology that affects both the Prusa and Bambu versions. Firstly, it’s very slow. Secondly, it uses a lot of filament. Both of these things are to do with the need to print layers sequentially. If you use, for example, three colours on a layer, the printer needs to load, unload, and…

So, having gone through all those categories, which machine are we going to pick as the best 3D printer available to buy at the moment? The Prusa XL. There are faster printers, there are cheaper printers, but there’s no other printer pushing the field of 3D printing forward in the same way as this printer. It can print things no other printer on the market can. It can print multicolour prints at a fraction of the time and cost of any other printer out there. Of course, it’s not the right printer for everyone. You’ll have to decide for yourself how to balance the different competing factors like speed, cost, software, and open source-ness for your particular needs. Hopefully we’ve given you the information you need to make up your…

One of the joys/curses of being a maker is that when you set out to make a ‘thing’, you often end up making tools instead. We’ve got loads of 3D-printed jigs clotting up our workspace, which were useful once but, alas, are now just taking up space. One 3D-printed tool that we know will see repeated use is this beautiful multi-axis vice by Printables user sdaendi. It’s fair to say that this vice won’t replace our big, heavy woodworking vice, with its ability to hold large chunks of wood while we turn them into smaller chunks of wood; however, for electronics, for your Airfix Messerschmitt Bf 109 that you’ve been working on, or for anything small that you need to drill a hole into at a precise angle, this is…

Meandering around the supermarket on our weekly shop a couple of months ago, we chanced upon a craft-related gizmo in the ‘middle’ aisles, priced at the princely sum of £24.99. This author’s husband, always one for a new gadget, couldn’t resist popping it in the trolley, citing the fact that it would be a great subject for a little tutorial, so we exited the grocery store with our broccoli, cheese, sausages, bin bags, and…oh, a 3D pen set. Now, it’s worth trying to manage some expectations from the get-go on this topic – a 3D pen will never (ever) be able to produce anything close to the quality of output of a 3D printer, but they can be fun to use and are arguably a great way of introducing younger…

We live in a 3D world, and are surrounded by thousands of 3D objects every day. We can use a bit of digital magic to turn these into 3D models. Basically, this involves taking a large number of photographs from every conceivable angle and running these through some clever software that creates a 3D model that we can then use just like any other 3D model. In this article, we will look at printing it out, but you can also use them as assets for games, or other 3D renders. This process is known as photogrammetry. There are some bits of software you can use to do the processing on a home computer. However, they typically require a GPU, and often an NVIDIA one. We don’t happen to have one…

Phew. The time has come to write up our electric guitar build. It’s been a rollercoaster of mistakes and inefficiencies, but somehow – mainly because we took it slowly and carefully – we’ve not made too many mistakes. Of course, if we were to ever make another one, the mistakes are what we’d pay the closest attention to, so we wouldn’t make them again. And that’s what we’re doing here. Guitar design is a complicated subject full of myth and magic, but we’ve tried to simplify things, so if you give it a go yourself, you’ll find loads of different avenues to explore. WOOD The first thing to do is buy wood. If you’re lucky enough to have a local timber merchant nearby, there will most likely be something affordable…

RASPBERRY PI $12 hsmag.cc/m2hat+ When the Raspberry Pi 5 came out, it had a new port on the bottom that enabled you to attach a flex cable. This rather unassuming port opened up a wide range of possibilities as it enabled you to connect PCI Express (PCIe) devices. This high-speed protocol is commonly used for connecting hard drives as well as other add-ons (see overleaf). However, for a long time, this remained tantalisingly out of reach because the 16-way connector needed an adaptor to work, and that adaptor hadn’t been available. The most common adapter for PCIe is M.2, and this board converts the flat flex cable to an M.2 port. Since storage is likely to be the most popular use for this, we’ll look at this first. Non-volatile memory Express…

3D design is hard. There’s one more dimension than you have on your screen. Frankly, it’s one more dimension than we can hold in our head. At the same time, it’s easier than ever to make 3D things, and hugely useful to be able to capture 3D objects in the silicon confines of a computer. On page 66, we take a look at photogrammetry, which uses some clever computational tricks to convert a bucketload of 2D photographs into a 3D model. Using this, you can borrow designs you find in the real world. Use them just as you would any other 3D design, whether that’s for 3D printing, or anything else.…

hsmag.cc/CybertruckClock Ah, the Tesla Cyber Truck. Its angular, low-poly bodywork means that it’s unlikely ever to pass the Euro NCAP (European New Car Assessment Programme) safety standards that govern what we can drive in the UK. Apparently Europeans have soft, fleshy bodies made out of meat, which deform unfortunately when wrapped around angular stainless steel objects build without crumple zones. What these faceless Brussels Eurocrats don’t understand is that human life isn’t that important compared with looking really cool. The maker of this project, gokux, reckoned the Cyber Truck’s flat planes would make the perfect case for a desk clock, and by golly, they were right. The Cyber Clock can not only tell you the time, but also the humidity and temperature thanks to its onboard DHT11 sensor, displayed on…

hsmag.cc/ApocalypticTerminal We’re not quite at the level where we can walk into the house and control our home appliances with voice commands – though thanks to Pete Warden and Useful Sensors, who we speak to this issue on page 38, that day is getting closer. Instead, the tech enthusiast has to come up with their own bespoke way to control their lights, music, heating and suchlike. One such device is this wall-mounted terminal by Rick Pannen. We can almost hear your incredulity through the page: “Wall mounted! But that’s a CRT screen. It’ll weight a ton!”. Although this looks it uses a heavy CRT screen, Rick’s achieves a similar effect by using a 7-inch LCD screen in the back with a fresnel lens in front. It’s a brilliant visual trick,…

After years of lots of companies putting out almost identical 3D printers, it feels like the 3D printing community world is starting to centre around just two brands: Prusa and Bambu. Yes, there are still plenty more on the market, but if you’re after a replicator in 2024, the chances are you’re going to start with one of these two brands. We’re going to look at three printers from each… BAMBU A1 mini (£269) – The cheapest printer on test, and it’s often reduced from this price. As the name suggests, its print volume is smaller than most 3D printers, at 18×18×18cm. P1P (£679) – the printer that made Bambu famous. It’s a CoreXY machine that really brought this kinematics model to the mass market. There is also a P1S…

The Bambu printers we tested used a lot of filament. Partly this is through their design – they cut the filament and ‘poop’ out the spare. It’s also a software choice–they primed the nozzle with far more filament than any other printer we’ve used. Bambu Studio also has fewer features for minimising filament usage. How big an impact this will have depends a lot on what you’re doing. In some cases, we’ve found the Prusa printer using half the filament of Bambu. In some multi-material prints, the differences can be huge when compared to the MK4, and staggering when compared to the XL. At £20 per roll, you’re effectively paying an additional £20 for every roll of filament on the Bambu printers–that means that forevery £100a of filament used in…

Some time ago, I had an idea to create a treasure-hunt using RFID (radio-frequency identification) cards and an MP3 player module. Answers would be hidden until the cards were scanned and the order of reading could be controlled. While the concept seemed achievable, an early problem was how to create the clues as MP3 files. I experimented with recording myself and tried using Amazon Polly, an online voice synthesis service, but neither was quick or straightforward. I parked the idea until I read Make interactive greetings cards with NFC tags in HackSpace magazine, issue 67. My interest in this project was revived. What if I could store the clue on the card as text and use the microcontroller to read using voice synthesis? I stumbled on the Gravity DFRobot Speech…

YOUTUBE Youtube makes me sad sometimes. Like many people, I watch quite a few videos, and many of them are about 3D printing, but I’d never come across the work of Jón Schone before. I think it’s because he takes his time and produces good content rather than constantly feeding the algorithm with huge amounts of mediocre tat. I wish the AI that decides what to feed into my eyeballs took this into account and gave me his content. George Glasgow Ben says: The algorithm isn’t aiming to show you what you want to watch; it’s aiming to show you what will make you keep watching. This subtle difference is what means, trash, hate, and misinformation flourish while nuance and education can struggle. I wish I had an answer to…

Whether you’re considering converting your Sonos Play:1 or perhaps upcycling a vintage radio, you should have a project in mind by now that’ll fill your room with sound, Raspberry Pi-style. Previously, we walked through the hardware build of our super-smart speaker project but so far we have only been able to play ‘white noise’; where are the tunes? Now that we know the audio is working, we can focus on what we want to listen to and how to control it. We’ve selected some common uses for smart speakers, but feel free to explore your own ideas! 01 Wired for sound We start off with a small stereo problem. The Sonos Play:1 only has a single speaker and it’s not a great idea to wire it to both outputs of the…

I’ve always been interested in photography, and I’ve played around with a few DIY photography projects, including building an intervalometer from an A555 timer, integrating an old webcam into an even older camera body just for fun, and an outdoor camera for capturing the critters that were roaming around my yard at night. I’ve also covered cameras in a previous Best of Breed, but there are a lot of products out there, so it warrants a second look. Also, the last time I looked at the various photography-related electrons, things like the AIpowered Arducam PiNSIGHT weren’t even in existence. Things really are developing fast! (Pun intended.) In this Best of Breed, I’ll be taking a look at some photography-related products that you can integrate into your next project. Some of…

TINDIE $36 tindie.com The PAA3905 Optical Flow Camera designed by Pesky Products isn’t exactly a high-resolution camera used for photography, but that doesn’t mean it’s not awesome. This little camera can identify motion in extremely low light in the x/y direction. It’s what you would find on an optical mouse, but ready to integrate into your project. The PAA3905E1 sensor uses an 8-bit 35×35 pixel imager that can sense both visible and infrared light. It automatically identifies features within its field of view, and creates a pixel map to track the movement and calculate the velocity. The sensor uses standard SPI for communications, making it a great solution for your next robot project using almost any microcontroller or Raspberry Pi. I picked up a similar board a few years ago…

RASPBERRY PI $70 hsmag.cc/aikit In case you’ve missed the news, AI is poised to be the next big thing in tech. Actually, scratch that, it’s already the current big thing in tech. The only slight problem is that no one can quite agree what it is. While the latest headlines are being grabbed by large language models, including ChatGPT, which have a habit of lying to users and writing uncompilable code, AI models have been quietly working away in the background. They generate captions for our videos, help us take better photographs, help scientists identify things in photographs, improve quality control in factories, and generally help make our lives progress a little smoother. The neural networks underpinning these are running everywhere, from server rooms to the phones in our pockets. Neural…

hsmag.cc/FMRadio CB design has come a long way since everything was green. This FM radio is pretty much just a PCB, with the controls and even the speaker mounted directly to the one printed circuit board. This device is designed not just to be simple, but to be affordable too: the components are all easily obtained, and include a 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller, a 128 x 32 pixel OLED display, and a Li-Ion battery charger. The 3W speaker isn’t going to give you the best sound quality, but is just the job if you want to listen to the cricket commentary on Radio 4 (or even baseball, if that’s what floats your boat). This design is barely more than a single PCB — there is a 3D printed case, but to…

hsmag.cc/VFDCalculator If you love the look of Nixie tubes, but are scared by high voltages, VFD tubes could be the retro display device for you. They work using the same logic as nixies, with a connecting pin for each segment of the display plus three pins to provide power, and you can get hold of them at reasonable prices from online auction sites. Maker Oskar wanted to build a project incorporating IV-12 VFD tubes as a display, and chose to build this beautiful calculator. It uses an Arduino Nano, Cherry MX Brown switches, key caps bought off Ali Express, and a custom PCB to allow the 1970s Soviet technology of the VFDs to work with an Arduino Nano. Programming in Arduino’s custom version of the C programming language can be…

Let’s start in the traditional place with a baseline for how fast these printers can print a Benchy test. Take a look at the table and you’ll see that the P1P and X1C are the fastest printers, capable of spitting out a tiny (and highly detailed) boat in just 39 minutes using their standard 0.2mm layer height profile. We’re going to be testing all the printers using their default profiles. Yes, there are probably some speed gains to be had by tweaking profiles, but then it’s very hard to make it a fair test, and we suspect that few people these days print with anything other than the defaults. The others range from a respectable 42 minutes for Prusa’s MK4 to a relatively sluggish 51 minutes for the Prusa Mini.…

Pete Warden used to be the technical lead of the mobile and embedded TensorFlow group, in Google’s Brain Team. You might have heard of TensorFlow – it’s a machine learning platform, and it’s open source, which means anyone with the right hardware can download it and get to work on building it into their own gadgets. And the right hardware is now cheaper than ever. Pete’s been banging the drum for embedded AI for years now, arguing that the right place for your data is on a device that you own, rather than a data centre somewhere. And, with his company Useful Sensors, he’s ready to bring AI – secure, easy to use, and yes, useful – into the home. HackSpace Introduce us to Useful Sensors; what do you do?…

Once again, the rolling fields and grounds of Eastnor Castle have been the epicentre of the UK hacker, maker, tech, and geek scenes, playing host to EMF Camp. For those who haven’t been, it’s an amazing volunteer-run camp with an astonishing amount of talks, workshops, events, raves, art installations, performances, and more. Around 3000 attendees all camped on-site, and generally hacked and relaxed in this vibrant pop-up community. It’s quite hard to write up as, from every square centimetre of the site, you can see something that’s probably worthy of an entire article for HackSpace magazine. Let’s start with talks. Probably the most eagerly anticipated and discussed was Tim Hunkin’s ‘A Short History of Electric Shocks’, which was indeed excellent, and lovely to see such a pivotal UK elder statesperson…

There are some tools that pretty much everyone has in their toolbox. Hammers, screwdrivers, and spanners are ubiquitous in modern society, and most people know what they are. There are other tools that are relatively specialised in nature, or are just not very well known outside of a certain job. We are not talking about the typical Christmas gift gadgets that get buried in the cupboard; we are talking about tools that are used widely and can be massive time-savers. While you don’t need to use them every day, they are valuable tools that can save hours of work when you do need them and will leave you wondering how you ever managed before you had them. One of these tools is the hot stapler, and you’ll find out all…

Off-grid‘ networks like Meshtastic are becoming fashionable. They provide free connectivity (once you’ve bought the devices), and can be used in regions where the cellular phone signal is poor or non-existent – such as distant Alaskan lakes or a market town near where the author lives. Meshtastic devices could also be used in ‘post-apocalyptic’ scenarios, although perhaps keeping up with gossip might not be the first thing on your mind after the end of the world. We’re going to look at how Meshtastic works, how you can connect to it, and what you can use it for. MESHTASTIC Meshtastic (meshtastic.org) is an open-source, community-driven project. It provides software for radios (which connect everything together), and client devices (which connect to the radios to send and receive data). There is almost…

ARDUCAM $99 arducam.com ARDUCAM $69 arducam.com The Arducam PiNSIGHT is what got me started thinking about writing another camera-related roundup for this Best of Breed. At the heart of the add-on board is the OAK-SoM and 12MP camera, which creates a powerful AI camera for your Raspberry Pi. So, what exactly can you do with this AI module? A lot, including face recognition, object recognition, anomaly detection, and pose estimation. The website has a lot of demo videos showing exactly what this camera is capable of recognising. It’s very impressive! However, although Arducam does provide a fair amount of documentation and examples, it’s not for a beginner programmer. That being said, if you are up for the challenge, and need to integrate some AI into your project, this is a…