Table of contents for #65 in HackSpace

Games might seem frivolous, but they play an important role in society. As children, we learn how to navigate the complex world of interpersonal dynamics in the playground. We learn how to lead, how to be a part of a team, how to win, and how to lose. Games provide us with a safe space to experiment and develop. As adults, games can still provide us with a great learning experience, not least because they give us a chance to flex our ‘making’ muscles As adults, games can still provide us with a great learning experience, not least because they give us a chance to flex our ‘making’ muscles. That could be trying a new technique, investigating a new material, or working with a new tool. If things go well,…

hsmag.cc/FlipTetris We all like Tetris – there’s even a feature film coming out soon about it, so if there’s anyone out there who still hasn’t heard of it, they will soon. However, this is the first time we’ve seen Tetris implemented on a flip-dot panel. The visionary behind this work is Owen McAteer, aka Motus Art. His flip-dot Tetris is fully playable, and it makes a wonderful click-clack noise as the solenoids built into the screen make the dots flip from black to white. Like all the best stuff, you can download Owen’s code from his GitHub page.…

In issue 55 of HackSpace mag, we printed a ¾ size guitar. It failed utterly; we assumed that the neck was mostly under compression, and so printed it so that the layer lines were perpendicular to the strings, rather than parallel. It broke within minutes. With that recent failure still burning, we could only look on with envy at Mikoláš Zuza’s amazing Prusacaster. It’s a full-sized guitar that uses the cannibalised parts of a Telecaster-style guitar kit (available for a bargain £79/€89 from hsmag.cc/HarleyBentonT-Style), as well as a 3D-printed body and pick guard. The section of the body that the bridge and the neck attach to has to be strong enough to cope with approximately 50kg of force running through the strings. The default PrusaSlicer settings use just two parameters,…

@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. The first thing you need to know about thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) is how incredibly variable it is. With most other printer filament – say PLA or PETG – you get different brands and different qualities, but they’re broadly similar and generally print the same way. TPU is different. It spans the range from that which is as wobbly as cooked spaghetti to filament that is about as stiff as PETG. TPU is generally known for its flexibility – in fact, it’s often called flex filament. The flexibility is given as a Shore Hardness rating, which can be confusing because there are two scales commonly used…

@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! A free flight rubber band-powered plane is almost a rite of passage for those interested in making things that fly. You can get pretty decent flight times from very affordable, small, and simple designs, and it’s a great way to learn the art of ‘trimming’, tweaking, and tinkering to get the flight characteristics you want. For this ‘powered’ free flight, there are other alternatives, but electric free flight is a nice, affordable, quiet and cheap-to-run hobby. There are lots of designs out there…

@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. 3D printing is part of a set of technologies that are often called ‘rapid prototyping’. This name can often feel ironic when you set off a ten-plus-hour print. However, with a bit of tweaking, you can really start to bring those print times down, especially if you can compromise on strength or aesthetics – as you often can when prototyping something. In this article, we’re not going to look at tuning the printer – that’s very hardware-specific and, while it can have significant speed improvements, it’s a deep rabbit hole that can lead to many failed prints along the way. We’ll be looking at pure…

@robmiles SPINTRONICS £80 inc. VAT upperstory.com One of the difficulties in understanding electronics is that you can’t see electricity as it goes about its business. A flat battery looks exactly like one which is fully charged, and a wire connected to 1000 volts looks just the same as one connected to nothing. It is only when the current flow makes a light turn on, or a motor spin, that we can see electricity at work. Spintronics aim to fix this by creating physical mechanisms that behave in the same way as electrical circuits. They have created mechanical versions of switches, resistors, capacitors, coils, and even transistors for learning electronics. These can be used to build an impressive range of devices, including logic gates, voltage dividers and, if you purchase the…

katzcreates.com 3D printing is great for all sorts of reasons, and one oft-overlooked application is on 3D-printing moulds. This stoneware vase by Allie Katz looks like a traditional glazed, fired piece of pottery but it began life as a CAD design. Allie printed it, then turned it into a mould to remake the design in a more traditional material. Allie’s working on a video about the technique and how people can potentially create their own. Keep an eye out for it on their YouTube channel: youtube.com/@katzcreates.…

tiltedtwister.com Last issue, we brought you a clock with digits that slid up and down to display the time; this issue, we’ve discovered a leap forward from this, with grids of black and white squares sliding up and down over a red light source to make digits. It’s powered by an Arduino Mega that controls eight small stepper motors, and there’s a real-time clock module (DS3231) to keep track of time.…

Kitronik exists to take the headaches away from computer science teachers. If they’re scratching their heads wondering how to teach the computing curriculum, and they want a physical way to show what you can do with a few lines of Python (rather than the oh-so-boring ‘Hello World’), teachers can get whole lessons’ worth of gear to reuse time and again. Its stuff isn’t just for kids either: you may have spotted a few Kitronik products in the pages of HackSpace now and again, proving that you’re allowed to play with smart greenhouses, buggies, motors, and the like even if you’re a grown-up. We spoke to Kitronik’s co-founder Kevin Spurr to find out what they’re about, why making electronics in Nottingham beats having a factory in China, and how the Pico…

@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. Through-hole soldering has long been a staple of the maker community, but the rest of the world has moved on. Electronics products that you buy in stores have very few – if any – through-hole components on them, and it can be hard to find modern parts in through-hole packages. If you work with electronics, sooner or later you’re going to need to solder something without legs. Surface-mount soldering has a reputation for being hard, but it really needn’t be. In fact, we’d argue that in some ways it’s easier because nothing’s hidden halfway through the board as it can be in through-hole soldering. Yes,…

@holtonhandmade Nicola King is a freelance writer and sub-editor. Lately she’s discovered the very relaxing aspects of hammering, stamping, and also prodding things with needles. Hand stamping metal is a fantastic way to get creative, and to make bespoke, personalised gifts in a jiffy. In this accessible craft, in terms of both required skill level and the cost of entry, you can soon learn to impress your nearest and dearest (and even potential customers) with your metal stamping skills. With just a few basic and inexpensive tools, you can customise pieces with names, dates, and initials, as well as adding patterns and textures with specialist hammers if you so wish. Great results don’t take long to achieve, even as a beginner. In this tutorial, we will take you through some…

@devinck Will your next robot be a little less humanoid and look a little more like your best pet friend? I think most people imagine robots in a human-like form, or even just as a mechatronic arm, slinging parts around a factory floor, but there are other forms that may not be as functional, but certainly more adorable. Enter the dog-bots! And cat‑bots too! Over the last few years, small dog- and cat-like, robots have shown up everywhere online. There used to be only a few, but after Boston Dynamics and its masterful marketing team launched the dog-like robot called Spot, it seems like a whole army of similar-looking robots have hit the market. But, unlike that famous dog-bot, which costs upwards of six figures, most of the other models…

@ben_everard RASPBERRY PI LTD $12 hsmag.cc/debugprobe Debuggers let you see into the heart of your program. You can watch it execute line by line and watch it change the variables, or leave it running to a particular point, then make sure everything is correct before kicking it off even further. They can do this because they’re wired into a special bit of control hardware in the processor. The downside of this is that you need an extra bit of hardware to tap into this. Raspberry Pi Pico – like most Arm-based microcontrollers – has a Serial Wire Debug (SWD) port which gives you access to the debug controller in the processor. To use this, you need something that can communicate via SWD. On a Raspberry Pi, you can use the GPIO…

hsmag.cc/ModellbahnWerbedisplay The world of model railways is full of creativity. This is the latest idea we’re seen to come out the model railway world, perfectly executed by Christoph Ketzler. He’s used tiny screens (0.96-inch (80×160px) or 1.14-inch (135×240px)) as advertising hoardings in his model transport systems, and connected them via WLAN so that the user can upload their own PNG advertising images.…

driesdepoorter.be/shortlife Life is short! Why not buy a clock that counts down until your expected death, paralysing you with fear and indecision as you watch what’s left of your time on Earth drain away? Or you could see the countdown as a warning and use it to motivate you to get out and do the things you’ve always wanted to do. It’s up to you. When you buy the Shortlife clock, you supply your date of birth, country of residence, and sex; from that, Dries will calculate your estimated life expectancy based on data from the World Health Organization (WHO); the user just needs to add the time and date. We like the idea of this; it’s a little like having a voice on your shoulder saying, “remember you are…

Many projects are fun to build, but making your own electronics-based game or toy means you can continue to enjoy playing with it afterwards. We’ve rounded up a wide array of fun-filled projects to inspire you to get building. You could even create your own mini amusement arcade with a pinball table, air hockey, claw machine, coin dozer, and multiplayer whack-a-mole game – useful for taking out your frustration on if a project isn’t working right! Not to mention adding a mini arcade cabinet or something more esoteric like a Dutch shuffleboard with built-in beer dispenser. Alternatively, have fun making an automated chessboard, a plastic tags game, or an interactive TTRPG board – and spice up your tabletop gaming with accessories like electronic dice and light-up poker chips. Or why…

@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. The humble serial terminal is one of the easiest ways of finding out what’s going on with your microcontroller. Almost all languages have something like a print function that will send text to your computer, and there’s usually something like receive that takes text in the opposite direction. This is all great while you can wiggle a cable through the enclosure and plug it into a suitable port on your controller, but what happens when you’ve fully enclosed your project? What if it’s buried deep inside the guts of your latest invention? Thankfully, this method isn’t limited to USB connections. It’s not even limited to…

@ben_everard ADAFRUIT $14.50 hsmag.cc/Scorpio You may well have used WS2812B LEDs (aka NeoPixels) in your projects before. They can be really easy to use, as they just need three connections – power, ground, and signal – to drive lots of LEDs. You can put ten together to drive a bar-graph output, or even a matrix of 64. They’re generally well-supported by almost all hobbyist microcontroller libraries. However, while in theory you can drive an unlimited number from your microcontroller, in practice, the more you try to connect, the more problems you’re going to have. The Scorpio is designed to solve a few of these issues: • The 3.3 V output on most modern microcontrollers is below the minimum voltage for WS2812B LEDs. In most cases, you’ll get away with it,…