Table of contents for #57 in HackSpace

When Pico came out in January 2021, there was one feature requested more than any other – wireless networking. The problem is, while there was some spare space on the Pico board, there wasn’t really enough for wireless. There also weren’t any spare GPIOs that could be used to connect the wireless controller. These two obstacles didn’t stop the Raspberry Pi engineers, who ploughed on regardless. This month, we’re putting the Pico W through its paces with three projects to get you started on your own connected projects The result of their hard work is the Pico W. It’s (almost) pin and form factor compatible with Pico – the only changes being moving the debug pins and a change to the LED. This month, we’re putting the Pico W through…

hsmag.cc/RouterPlane Workshop Heaven, the online emporium of woodworking delights, has listed among its wares a hand plane going for £10,560. It’s a beautiful tool, but is it more beautiful than this handmade router plane built out of scraps of wood in the maker’s workshop? We’d say not. This build, by Instructables user WOmadeOD comprises a chunk of hardwood, a square of steel plate, a nut, and a bolt, which is shaped, hardened, and sharpened until it can take off thin slivers of wood.…

hsmag.cc/PowerLoom This issue, we’ve gone into the coding behind knitting and crochet, and raised a hat to the Jacquard loom, which took instructions that could’ve been programmed anywhere, by anyone. It wasn’t Turing-complete, but it was, almost, a computer. This 3D-printed model pays tribute to the power looms that laid the way for the Industrial Revolution and, indirectly, computer science. Fraens has made the STL files available on Printables and Thingiverse, and there’s a full list of materials used on his YouTube page, including screws, ball bearings, and a 12 V motor. Apparently, one of the hardest things to get right was the weight of the shuttle: too heavy and it won’t move; too light and it gets snagged easily.…

SUSTAINABLE MAKING Alex Glow makes some very good points in your interview with her last issue. Whenever I make anything, I must go through a few iterations before I get anything to work – that means multiple PCBs made (with multiple boards shipped from the factory), multiple loads of solder, components, and, even when they do work, everything needs a battery, with all the pollution their production entails, and that battery needs electricity. That all sounds a bit grim, but one thing Alex said stands out: “It’s not our fault, but it is our responsibility”. We can try to do better without feeling guilty about the 60–70 years of oil extraction and plastics waste, because it’s overwhelmingly the fault of a handful of companies. All we can do is try…

While Pico W is very similar to Pico, you will need to get the special wireless version of the MicroPython firmware. You can download this from hsmag.cc/DocMicroPyth. Make sure that you select the version for Pico W, as the version for the regular Pico won’t work. You should have a UF2 file, and this can be loaded onto Pico W. First, make sure that Pico W is unplugged from USB, then hold down the BOOTSEL button and plug Pico W into your computer using a micro USB to USB cable, then release the button. You should notice a new USB drive appear on your computer. You can drag and drop the UF2 firmware file onto this drive. Once it’s copied over, the drive will disappear and Pico W will reboot…

The term ‘BEAM robotics’ is one that would have been familiar to many makers in the early 2000s, but has faded into obscurity in recent years with many of the old BEAM blogs and forums lost to time. ‘BEAM’ does not necessarily describe a specific form or function of any robot, but rather an ethos which is described in part by the name. The most widely recognised meaning of the acronym BEAM is Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, and Mechanics. To me, two further elements define BEAM electronic design: the use of recycled components (which I personally no longer do these days, as new components are so cheap and readily available), and the simplicity of the circuits. These simple circuits are the most striking difference between BEAM and modern robots as BEAM…

Project Link hsmag.cc/BarbedWireTrellis Turning a former fencing material into a gate or decorative trellis might not seem a huge stretch, but there must be several hours’ work involved in unravelling and then artistically bending and rearranging the spiky lengths of wire into a useful form. It’s also arguably a more practical reuse than some of the crafty options we’ve seen. Dan Towell combines the attractive with the pragmatic with his 34-inch-tall trellises, designed to support and show off shrubs and climbing plants. The rusty, rustic look provides a good foil to effulgent foliage and is also the sort of idea a more whimsical gardener, keen to create a unique focal point, could consider emulating.…

Project Link hsmag.cc/BarbedWireEmu Aboriginal artist Laurie Nilsen’s lifesize barbed wire emu sculptures were inspired by him encountering a fence line that had ensnared more than 40 emus fleeing drough-travaged plains, highlighting the material’s dual role of both fencing off and fencing in. Laurie described having to put the dying emus out of their misery as one of the most gut-wrenching tasks he ever faced, but also acknowledged that he’d used barbed wire himself for fencing in former times. He often drew close-ups of barbed wire, calling attention to its dainty knots. Using satire to draw attention to social issues, several of Nilsen’s emu sculptures are sited adjacent to places where barbed wire is commonly used, such as prisons and law courts. Other artists who use barbed wire for sculpture and…

Coffee-drinking, typewriter lover with a penchant for pencils and paint. Frequently found staring at the sea from the back of a camper-van. nikrawlinson.com Good things are usually worth the wait – unless they come at the end of a long and largely repetitive video. In this workshop, we’ll show you how pairing Raspberry Pi with a Camera Module 2 and a PIR motion detector lets you shoot stills only when there’s something worth watching. Discover how to convert images into a time-lapse video packed with action. We’ve been using this technique to show how time-consuming artistic processes result in a finished image, but you could also use it to see what your pet does when you’ve left it home alone. 01 Enable legacy camera support The functions we need to…

Despite loving all things digital, Mike admits to being a bit of a Luddite, vinyl records and all. Because our eyes are sensitive to that part of the electromagnetic spectrum that we call light, and since the cone cells of our retinas respond differently to the various wavelengths of light, we’re able to see the world in full colour. But beyond the long-wavelength end of the visible spectrum, that’s just after red, we find an area of radiation that’s known as infrared. Our eyes aren’t sensitive to infrared, of course, so we might wonder how different the world would look if we could see this invisible radiation. In other words, what it would it be like to mimic the visual capabilities of some insects, fish, frogs, and snakes? The good…

PIBORG $257 piborg.org PIMORONI $54.12 pimoroni.com The MonsterBorg from PiBorg is a robust robotics platform for your Raspberry Pi. It features a custom motor driver: the ThunderBorg. This allows you to easily control a variety of DC motors directly from your Raspberry Pi. The kit includes four high-torque 300 RPM metal geared motors, a well-designed aluminium chassis, 105 mm off-road tires, and a mount for a Camera Module. No soldering is required. All you need to do is add your Raspberry Pi, almost any standard variant will do, and you are ready to tackle the outdoors. PiBorg claims you will get up to three hours of run time on ten AA batteries. Adding a camera, GPS, and some additional sensors could make for a great autonomous outdoor robotics platform capable…

hsmag.cc/FreddieMercuryThermometer Has there ever been a more captivating rock front man than Freddie Mercury? No, of course there hasn’t. That’s what makes this custom temperature display so awesome. Well, that and the custom PCB that forms the display, and the custom microcontroller based on an Arduino Uno that forms the guts of the build (along with a low-power servo and an Adafruit AHT20 temperature/humidity sensor). All together now: DAAAA-OOOOOOOOH!…

Pakequis.com.br In this age of LED everything, it’s hard to imagine the tiny CRT televisions that were once marketed as ‘travel’ TVs. That’s what this is, only this has been retrofitted to include a Raspberry Pi playing a selection of old black-and-white films. Even better, when you change the channel, it produces an authentic screen of white noise, just like TVs used to do.…

Most of the time, it’s a pleasure to mow one’s lawn. It’s a moment of communing with the outdoors, of exerting your mastery over nature. Mowing the lawn is a lovely job – unless you’re stricken with hay fever. Or, you have extensive grounds that you just can’t be bothered to look after (admittedly, this would be a nice problem to have). In these situations, a robotic mower comes into its own – and TGD Consulting has come up with a 3D-printed, Raspberry Pi-controlled solution: PiMowBot. Like the BEAM project featured on page 46, it takes power from the sun, so the whole top panel is a solar panel. You can get the design files from Cults3D below. hsmag.cc/PiMowBot…

Now that we’ve got data from the internet, let’s send some to it and create a button that sends a message to the internet to do something. Do what, you ask? Well, do almost anything! The magic glue in this project is If This Then That (IFTTT), an online service that connects causes to events. This means that you can create a thing that triggers a huge range of possible events. In this example, we’ll use it to control our heating using a Hive thermostat. However, IFTTT works with a huge range of different web-connected devices, so you can easily modify this to work with any device that’s supported. Take a look here for a full range of supported systems: ifttt.com/explore/services. If This Then That lets you create very simple…

Andrew Sink is a shining evangelist for 3D printing. He was there during the 3D printing boom of 2014, and kept the faith while the buzzwords died down and people refocused on what the potential of the technology was. He’s written software to make design for 3D printing more accessible to new users, and his work is on the shelves of big retailers, without you even realising it’s 3D-printed. He’s on a mission: to bring 3D technology to the world in a way that people can understand intuitively. We’re very lucky to have got a few minutes’ worth of his insights to share with you here. HackSpace: You’re obviously not just a guy who uses 3D printing from time to time: you’re an evangelist. What excites you about 3D printing?…

Project Link hsmag.cc/InlaidBarbedWire Woodworking site Lumberjocks showcases interesting timberbased projects, as well as hosting a useful forum. The site’s mixed media builds include this beautifully finished table, made from a pine slab that maker John, from Juniper Canyon Design, rescued and fashioned after discovering the miraculously rot-free stump of a tree that had fallen. He also just happened to have a roll of rusty barbed wire hanging up in his workshop. Just the right size for his uncle’s horse trailer-cum-camper-van, the table was full of sap, making it tricky to work with. He used a belt sander with 100-grit sandpaper to bring out the wood’s grain, before his wife set about routing a groove following the shape of the tree’s outline for the barbed wire. “I pushed the barbed wire…

After a butchery course a couple of months ago, I had a freezer full of meat; that meant I needed to upgrade my cooking facilities. I wanted the option to barbecue, and I also wanted something with a top that I could close too, so that I could use it as an outdoor oven. With this in mind, I trawled the internet for a nearby second hand beer keg that I could simply cut in half and stick legs on. Two candidates presented themselves: a stainless steel beer keg an hour and a half’s drive away, or a barrel made of non-specific material, 50 minutes’ drive away. I chose the nearer barrel. This was my first mistake. But we’ll come to that later. The barrels had been sitting outside a…

@holtonhandmade Nicola King is a freelance writer and sub-editor. She firmly believes that purchasing arts and crafts goodies, and actually sitting down and making something, are two completely different pastimes. Have you ever considered how a knitting or a crochet pattern resembles coding, and the many parallels that exist between the fibre arts (an umbrella term which includes knitting, crochet, spinning, weaving, and yarn dying, to name but a few) and coding? These two seemingly unrelated fields have an interesting history together and, in this article, we will take a look at the fascinating similarities that really illustrate how much they have in common – spreading, we hope, an appreciation of the fact that coding and the fibre arts have many more similarities than you may ever have previously considered.…

@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 and follow him on Twitter at @robmiles These days, no big social occasion is complete without a photo booth where guests can take instant pictures of themselves. Now, you can make your own device to do the same thing. It will detect when subjects arrive and offer them the chance to immortalise themselves on 57 mm-wide thermal paper with the touch of a button. The camera and the printer are connected wirelessly over Bluetooth, and both devices are battery-powered. So, you can turn any event into a picture party. The picture quality is not the best, but it does provide a…

hsmag.cc/RFID_RecordPlayer When teacher Jean Noël showed his students a record player upgraded with an Arduino to read RFID tags on record sleeves, we can only imagine their befuddlement. Kids these days don’t use physical media; they don’t even download anymore. At least, that’s what we’re told. We don’t actually know any kids. The students in question – Ibrahima, Scott, Antoine, and Arthur – did recognise that the underlying technology is RFID, and they’re working on making their teacher’s project even better, upgrading the user interface to make it easier to use. Most significantly, instead of uploading a new Arduino sketch to update the playlist (something that requires coding skills), the user will be able to do it by renaming MP3 files on the SD card (something that does not require…

By Kevr102 hsmag.cc/BikeLight After ‘do not crash’, our one golden rule of riding a bike is that you can never have too many lights. That’s what inspired Kevr102 to design and build this auxiliary bike light for when his existing front light runs out of battery. It’s a 3D-printed enclosure for a Kitronik 5 V LED lamp kit, with the addition of a buck converter to drop the 6 V from the AA batteries down to the 5 V required by the LEDs. And as the maker notes, the square version “looks a bit like the weapon the Predator has on its shoulder”.…

Every two years, the British summer is lit up by Electromagnetic Field (also known as EMF Camp). This maker festival brings people together to show off makes and talk about the things they’ve been doing. Since 2018, this has been held in Eastnor Castle just outside Ledbury in Herefordshire (a county forever blighted by Robert De Niro’s mispronunciation in the film Ronin: for our international audience, it’s pronounced approximately hair–re–ford–shire). “For some, it’s about how they built a particular project; for others, it’s about a technology they’ve been working with” The bulk of the festival is taken up by talks. Across three stages, people from the makersphere give talks about almost any topic. For some, it’s about how they built a particular project; for others, it’s about a technology they’ve…

The Pico W is, rather predictably, a Raspberry Pi Pico but with added wireless networking. For just $6, you get a dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ microcontroller running at up to 133MHz with 264kB of RAM and 2MB of flash storage, and on top of this is an Infineon CYW43439 which adds wireless networking (the chip also supports Bluetooth Classic and Low Energy, but at present there’s no firmware support for this). All the things we’ve come to know and love from the original Pico are still there. There’s still a huge bundle of input and output options, including Programmable I/O. In fact, the only slight change is that the on-board LED is now attached to the wireless chip rather than the main microcontroller (see box on page 35). Not only…

So far, we’ve looked at getting data from the internet and sending data to the internet, but in both cases, we connected to an external server. However, there are times where we don’t want to send data to an external system, but use a wireless connection to send data from one computer to another. In this case, you can go via the internet – for example, use one machine to send data to Adafruit IO and another to read data from the same feed. Doing this is reliable and you can keep a trail of data, should you need to restart one of the machines. However, it’s also slow, and there are times when you might not want to trust your data to the internet. Fortunately, there is a solution.…

@RosieHattersley Rosie Hattersley writes tech, craft, and life hacks and tweets @RosieHattersley. “IT BEGAN AS A GAME-CHANGING AGRICULTURAL MATERIAL THAT COULD BE USED TO FENCE OFF HOMESTEADERS’ LAND” If you want to seem ‘alternative’, introducing barbed wire into your decor is a handy short cut. The practical, low-cost means of demarcating your territory is visual shorthand for both unashamed attitude and keeping those you dislike at bay. No wonder it’s beloved of warmongers and absolutists, as well as punks and edgy fashionistas. These days, specially produced barbed wire is often found artfully holding up displays of dried flowers rather than the original ‘razor wire’ type being deployed for more straightforward practical purposes. Although we associate barbed wire with keeping people or animals at bay or interned, it began as a…

Project Link hsmag.cc/BarbedWireBall YouTube often comes up trumps for ideas about what to recycle and what you might reasonably produce from said scrap item. There are plenty of helpful video tips on how best to unfurl, stretch, and use (or roll up your unused) barbed wire rolls, but tutorials on how to achieve a barbed wire makeover are scarce. Melinda’s, aka Scrapmetalsheila, (scrapmetalsheila.com.au) excellent videos are an honourable exception. Armed with 100–200 m of barbed wire, engineering gloves rather than leather ones (since they catch on sharp objects), and a bolt-cutter, Melinda demonstrates how to create a beach-ball-size barbed wire ball. Having cut the wire into five 5-metre-long pieces, corralling the raw materials and tying it in place with flexible wire help you form the basic shape. After this, it’s…

Dr Andrew Lewis is a specialist fabricator and maker, and is the owner of the Andrew Lewis Workshop. A properly trained welder can earn a good living from their trade, and putting that money into good-quality equipment like a welding helmet is a sensible move. For the weekend welder who spends more time holding a grinder than an electrode holder, it’s harder to justify spending a large chunk of cash on an item like a welding helmet. In this article, you’ll learn how a few simple helmet upgrades can make a big difference to your comfort without costing a fortune. Welding can be an uncomfortable hobby. There are times when you’ll find yourself hot, sweaty, and cramped into an uncomfortable corner, while you’re struggling to see the joint you need…

Dr Andrew Lewis is a specialist fabricator and maker, and is the owner of the Andrew Lewis Workshop. Even the most highly engineered products need to be configured correctly when they are installed, so it’s no surprise that a homemade piece of kit based on a K40 laser will need some finesse and a few well-placed hammer taps before it will perform properly. In this article, you’ll learn some tips and tricks that will get your machine levelled, trammed, and generally calibrated in the safest way possible. DON’T LOOK AT THE INVISIBLE LIGHT The most obvious set of calibrations that you need to do with a laser cutter is aligning the mirrors. Ideally, this should be done after you’ve calibrated the gantry, or you’ll risk having to start the whole…

@devinck The Raspberry Pi made waves when it entered the market, and for good reasons – it was affordable, powerful, and relatively easy to use. We have come a long way since the introduction of the original Raspberry Pi back in 2012. Now you have a choice of small form factor Raspberry Pis such as Raspberry Pi Zero W and the incredible power you can unleash from Raspberry Pi 4. But there is one issue plaguing the Raspberry Pi community, and that’s availability. Although I can’t say exactly how many Raspberry Pi boards have been sold, I can say it’s a lot! But as of lately, they have become difficult, but not impossible, to find in stock. And it’s not just Raspberry Pis that have become hard to find, it’s…

ADAFRUIT $12.50 adafruit.com This one is a little different from the other reviews in this Best of Breed. No, not because it isn’t a full robot, but because it’s not the typical Raspberry Pi. This motor controller features the relatively recently released RP2040 microcontroller, not a Raspberry Pi-based single-board computer. Either way, it still makes for a great central brain for your next robot build. The Maker Pi RP2040 features a dual-channel DC motor driver, four servo motor ports, and seven Grove I/O connectors. It can control two brushed DC motors or one stepper motor, providing up to 1 A current per channel. It also has an array of LEDs, so you can quickly check the status of various digital I/O states. It also has an on-board piezo buzzer and…

@robmiles Waveshare £14.50 inc VAT waveshare.com Making a connected device just got a bit easier and cheaper with the launch of a module that allows a Raspberry Pi Pico to use the LoRa network. LoRa – short for ‘long range’ – is a great way to send data over considerable distances whilst operating from tiny batteries due its low power requirements. You can use LoRa to pass small messages between devices, but it is much more useful to make a device part of a LoRaWAN application. In an application, messages are sent to a local gateway which provides a connection to a LoRaWAN service running in the cloud. You can set up your own LoRaWAN infrastructure, but most people use ‘The Things Network’ (thethingsnetwork.org), which is free to access and…