Table of contents for #70 in HackSpace

In the last year or so, AI has been pushing forwards at almost every level. Neural networks have been squeezed down to fit on small microcontrollers to allow them to sift data for interesting anomalies. At the same time, data centres are being loaded up with specialist hardware to craft realistic images (such as the one on this issue’s cover). AI is a constantly evolving topic that has long been the preserve of universities. It has now broken out of academia and is living amongst us. It’s possible to train systems on your own data to think in the ways you want them to, tap into language systems so advanced they almost seem sentient, or pluck fully-formed images from a silicon brain. Some people claim that this AI will be…

hsmag.cc/TinyStirlingEngine Stirling engines provide a way to turn heat into linear, then rotary motion. They were invented around the time of the steam engine, but never took off to the same degree; nowadays they’re making a comeback as a way of turning heat from the sun into something more harvestable. This example, with its incredibly small 0.02cc engine, won’t be powering a sustainable future for us, but it does give us a brilliant insight into just how accurately a skilled machinist can make things out of metal. You really have to watch the video to get a sense of the scale of the engine. We watched fairly unimpressed for a few minutes until a giant pencil hove into view, suddenly giving us a sense of scale and wonder. For example,…

In issue 69, we spoke to artist Uri Tuchman, who told us, among many other things, that certain materials want to be shaped in certain ways. Wicker, for example, wants to be woven, and that’s why people used it to make baskets rather than, say, stone. This Benchy, which, despite its wicker texture, is 3D-printed, goes against the grain of 3D printing. By introducing a texture that would make perfect sense in wicker, this looks wrong in plastic. And, also, very right; it’s a brilliant example of how the maker – prolific 3D artist DaveMakesStuff – goes beyond what the material wants and bends it to what he wants. Also, fans of folklore documentary the Wicker Man will note that this Benchy has come to us of its own free…

Since AI can take the laborious steps out of many tasks, we thought we’d try using it to create STL files for 3D printing. For this, we employed OpenAI’s free-to-use ChatGPT-3.5 chatbot (chat.openai.com). We then fed each resulting STL file into Cura to check the 3D design. PERFECT CUBE You’d think it would be fairly easy for an AI chatbot to construct a regular cube, so we prompted ChatGPT to ‘Generate a 3D model of a cube using ASCII STL format’. However, while the resulting cube was regular, it had three triangular holes in its faces and came up with errors in Cura. So we asked it to ‘Fix this cube model so it has no holes’. After apologising (it’s very polite), the amended STL code still generated a similarly…

Our local community garden held a summer event to raise funds, and in the style of fêtes, fairs, and fests across this fine island, a key part of the fundraising is the tombola. If you’ve not come across such a thing before, the basic idea is that you have a lot of tickets with numbers on them; they’re folded up and put into a cylinder that can spin. You spin the cylinder around a few times, then open up a little door. A contestant then picks out a ticket. Depending on the number they pick out, you may or may not win a prize. You can buy tombola machines, but we wanted to try and build one out of bits from our scraps pile. After all, there’s no point in…

@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. When you talk about fermenting drinks, people often assume you mean making alcohol, but Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the species of yeast used in bread and beer, isn’t the only microscopic organism that is used to ferment drinks. Water kefir (also known as sugar kefir or tibicos, but not the same as milk kefir) is a ferment that’s done with a range of microbes including yeasts and lactic acid bacteria. The result is a tangy, fizzy drink. It's likely to have a little alcohol in it, but not much. The first thing you’ll need is a water kefir culture. This is known as ‘grains’, but they’re more…

@devinck Do you know someone who is ready to get started in the world of DIY electronics? Are they young? And are you unsure of where to even start? Well, that’s where this Best of Breed comes into play. I’ve gathered a series of kits that make for a great progression of learning in electronics. This certainly is not the only path to learning, and some may be too advanced or too simple for your needs, but there is something for everyone, even advanced builders. You will need some simple tools for a few of the more advanced kits. Just don’t be intimidated by having to select the exact right tools like a soldering iron, solder, and wire cutters. There are plenty of beginner soldering kits out there, and lots…

ADAFRUIT → $27.95 adafruit.com After you build your first sewable kit, it’s time to introduce a slightly more complex kit with the Gemma M0 Starter Pack by Adafruit. This kit allows you to create your own customisable LED wearable light show thanks to the included Gemma M0 wearable electronic platform, four Flora RGB NeoPixels, a coin cell battery holder, stainless thin conductive thread, needles, small alligator clip test leads, and a USB cable. Yes, that’s a lot of parts! Awesome! You just need to add a coin cell battery and you’re ready to go. Once you decide what you would like to create, you can then move on to programming the Gemma M0. It’s easy to program in a variety of different environments, including the Arduino IDE, CircuitPython, or even…

hsmag.cc/CrosberryPi We’ve seen cyberdecks built out of Geiger counters, flight cases, and other rugged boxes, all suitable for hacking on the go in the increasingly likely event of a nuclear apocalypse. What we’ve never seen before is a cyberdeck housed in a vintage record player. Enter, the Crosberry Pi. It’s housed in a Crosley portable record player and, brilliantly, it uses the original speakers and tone and volume knobs. Computing power is provided by a Raspberry Pi 4, and there’s a trackball mouse, mechanical keyboard, and a 10.1-inch screen for all your interface needs.…

hsmag.cc/ArcReactorClock We like a Marvel prop, and we like knowing what time it is, so we love this clock built into an Iron Man-style arc reactor. Based heavily on the work of YR3Design, this clock by Jégé l’ingé is a masterpiece of 3D-printed snap-to-fit parts, held together with glue and a bit of decorative copper wire. It’s connected to the internet via an ESP32, and uses an RGB LED ring plus a pair of blue LEDs to light up the clock display in the centre of the ring. It’ll take power either from a phone charger or from a computer’s USB port, and it flashes every time an hour passes. Marvel-lous!…

TRACE IT OUT Thanks for bringing my attention to the Shaper Trace. It looks like a bit of a niche product, but I work loads with laser cutting, and one thing I hate is having to work out where mounting holes for hardware should be. It looks like this will solve my problem entirely. I think I’ll wait until after the crowdfunding campaign to commit, as I’ve heard too many horror stories, but fingers crossed. Julien Cumbria Ben says: We’ve managed to get our hands on a Shaper Trace and have been testing it out. We'll have a full revew next issue. Sounds like it could be just the job for you. That said, it’s never a bad idea to wait until after a crowdfunder to see if hardware and…

Storytelling has always been a huge part of my life; from my dad telling me elaborate bedtime stories to playing D&D with my uncle growing up. After I became a father, it was my turn to tell my kids stories. Eventually, my compendium of tales grew so large that my wife challenged me to start writing them all down. Once I did, I found I couldn’t stop writing. However, as my kids grew up and the realities of parenting sunk in, I found I had little time to write anymore. What made things worse is I developed a competing hobby: tinkering with computers and 3D printing. One day, I realised it had been over a year and a half since I had written anything of substance and decided something needed…

@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! In the previous parts of this series, we’ve worked through the basics of making PCB boards from schematic to board layout, and we’ve learned a variety of skills and approaches along the way. We built on this by exploring how to use KiCad and a PCB assembly (PCBA) service to not only have the PCB manufactured, but to also be populated with components and supplied to us fully assembled (Figure 1). If you’ve worked through the earlier parts, we now have enough skill…

@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 Arduino UNO R4 brings a whole bunch of new features to the Arduino UNO ecosystem, including a switch of the processing core at the heart. We looked at the changes in more detail in the last issue. This issue, we want to focus on just one of the features: the LED matrix on the WiFi variant of the board. On the front of this board is a 12×8 grid of red LEDs – that’s 96 little blinking lights that you can program however you like. They could be used to show a graph, text output, or other really useful addition to your project; however,…

@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. The author picked up the flashgun in Figure 1 at a market stall. Photographers use flash-guns to brighten their pictures. The flash clips onto the top of the camera and provides a burst of light when a photo is taken. A flash like this would have been quite expensive back in the 1970s when it was made. Modern digital sensors are much more sensitive to light than photographic film, so we don’t need the powerful flash-guns of the past quite so much. These days, you are more likely to use a portable light to add colour to a scene, which is…

PIMORONI → $5.40 pimoroni.com PIMORONI → $17.46 pimoroni.com This electronics kit proves that you can never be too young to start learning about electricity. Sure, you might need some adult supervision, but there is no need for a soldering iron or other tools. The Business Beasts LED Craft Kit is perfect for kids three years and older. OK, so maybe you can be too young, like one or two. But still, an electronics kit that, with a little adult supervision, allows kids to explore electricity and light up a colourful LED is fun! The kit includes copper tape, five LEDs, an emoticon binder clip, and four different character cards, and all for a very affordable price. So, grab a battery, your favourite Business Beasts card, check out the simple instructions,…

Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi shows you how to set up a Raspberry Pi to play classic games. Build your own games console or full-size arcade cabinet, install emulation software and download classic arcade games with our step-by-step guides. Want to make games? Learn how to code your own with Python and Pygame Zero. ▪ Set up Raspberry Pi for retro gaming ▪ Emulate classic computers and consoles ▪ Learn to code your own retro-style games ▪ Build a console, handheld, and full-size arcade machine BUY ONLINE: magpi.cc/store…

@ben_everard ARDUINO → €18 hsmag.cc/NanoESP32 If you look at Arduino’s Nano line, you’ll see that many options use a u-blox module for network access. However, the Arduino Nano ESP32-S3 is unusual because it doesn’t have another controller. The W106 Wi-Fi module contains an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with a dual-core processor that can run at up to 240MHz. This is beefy enough to run sketches alongside its connectivity duties. By stripping it back to a single microcontroller, this board is the cheapest Wi-Fi-connected board in the Arduino range, at 18 euros. In fact, only one Arduino Nano is cheaper – the Nano Every. Cheapness is a relative term, and while this may be among the cheapest from Arduino, ESP32 boards are available from other manufacturers for significantly less. Of course, not all…

hsmag.cc/MemoryBox Reddit user Kind-Rope5478 built this video player using a Raspberry Pi 4, a touchscreen, a pair of 5 W 2-inch speakers, an NFC card reader, and a couple of other bits and bobs. Videos are stored on NFC cards, and play automatically when the card is inserted into the side of the machine. We’ve seen this kind of thing before, but what caught our eye is the beautiful oak woodwork and brass screws; apparently the maker only had access to hand tools and an old drill-press, but even so, we think there’s a great mid-century aesthetic here. What makes this build so special, however, is that the code for reading the cards, playing the videos, and displaying the date, time, and a randomly chosen quotation, was all written by…

hsmag.cc/HelmOfEredin Starting with a jigsaw, Oleksandr Hrytsai cuts cross sections out of what looks like 2 cm thick oak boards, then laminates them into the approximate shape of a helmet. Then the magic begins. Using a pleasingly low-tech tool – a small angle grinder – he carves away the steps on the inside of the helmet to make a smooth surface, then switches to smaller grinding machines and hand tools to shape the exterior of the helm. Watching Oleksandr at work is incredibly therapeutic: seeing the shape emerge out of the wood is just amazing. Like so many craftspeople, the tools he uses are cheap and readily available; the rare magic comes from the skills of the maker. We’re in awe of the spatial awareness it must take to turn…

A long-time Raspberry Pi user and tinkerer, Phil is a freelance writer and editor with a focus on technology. Introducing a compilation of cutting-edge AI projects that push the boundaries of technology. From the revolutionary context-to-image AI camera, Paragraphica, to the Robot Nano Hand with its incredible gesture mimicry, these projects redefine possibilities. Witness the Star Wars Pit Droid’s object detection prowess, Ellee the talking teddy bear’s human-like conversation skills, and the Nindamani robot’s weed-detecting and removal capabilities. Explore the Search & Rescue AI UAV, Olga’s fortune-telling with ChatGPT, and the Banknote Counter’s denomination recognition. Meet the K9 replica robot dog, and the Air Hockey Robot, showcasing remarkable computer vision applications, alongside the Package Thief Deterrent’s parcel theft detection. These AI marvels inspire innovation in diverse domains, shaping the future…

Many a home tinkerer has taken inspiration from Nikola Tesla, the brilliant engineer and scientist claimed by Austria, Hungary, Serbia, and Croatia. Not many, however, have taken it upon themselves to recreate his inventions using modern methods to entertain the YouTube generation. One who has (OK, the only one who has, to our knowledge) is Joel Gomes, aka Integza. He’s an unstoppable source of detonations and deflagrations and, thanks to him, we now know the difference between the two. He’s bringing the technology of the 1920s into the time of 3D printing, and we absolutely love it. HACKSPACE Good morning Joel! We can’t help but notice that there are two engineers in your videos: yourself and Nikola Tesla, who’s always looking over your shoulder. What’s so good about this Tesla…

MAKER Also known as Penguin Tutor. Maker and YouTuber that loves all things Raspberry Pi and Pico. Author of Learn Electronics with Raspberry Pi. penguintutor.com twitter.com/stewartwatkiss In the world of computers, data is stored as digital values with electronic switches that turn on and off. The real world is analogue, with different levels of brightness throughout the day or different temperatures. This tutorial will shows one of the ways of taking analogue values from the real world and converting them to a digital signal that a Pico microcontroller can understand. Knowing the value of the analogue inputs, these can then be converted into colour values which are used to light up NeoPixel LEDs. 01 Potentiometers Potentiometers are a type of variable resistor, a resistor that changes in value. They have…

@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. While the 3D printer is probably the most iconic tool of modern making, it’s the laser cutter that’s the workhorse. It’s far faster than 3D printing, more consistent than hand tools, and can use a wide range of materials. It’s relatively easy to put together a design that can be laser-cut – it depends a bit on your software, but the starting point is usually a vector image, something like an SVG. Software, like Inkscape, makes it easy to create functional designs. However, we’ve often found it hard to make things that look great. With the advent of AI tools, a new realm of creative…

Dr Andrew Lewis is a specialist fabricator and maker, and is the owner of the Andrew Lewis Workshop. The ability to apply repeatable designs to a surface that isn’t paper can have a massive effect on your making and prototyping process. Glass, metal, fabric, wood, and other materials can all be printed onto if you have the right bits of equipment. In this article, you’ll learn the basic tools and techniques needed for sublimation printing – a transfer printing technique that will let you produce vibrant and resilient designs on a huge range of materials. Sublimation printing is a multistep process. You begin by creating and printing your design using special ink and special paper. Normally, you will reverse the image when you print it out, because you are going…

WILEY → $24.12 pimoroni.com Adventures in Raspberry Pi is a great way to get started learning about how to program the ever-popular Raspberry Pi. And you might think, ‘Sure, but can you get a Raspberry Pi?’ And the answer is Yes! Pimoroni, at the time of this writing, has plenty of Raspberry Pi 4 Model Bs in stock. The book, written by Carrie Anne Philbin, allows anyone, even those with no programming experience, to get up and running quickly. You’ll learn the basics of the Raspberry Pi, and move on to program games, code up some music, and even build a jukebox. The book was designed specifically for kids aged 11 to 15, but I bet both younger and older kids could learn a few things, too. ADVENTURES IN RASPBERRY…

ADAFRUIT → $17.50 adafruit.com Once you have honed your soldering skills with the Drawdio kit, it’s time to make another fun kit! The MiniPOV 4 Kit is a great ‘next step’ introduction to soldering. And once completed, you’ll have another interactive toy to enjoy. Many years ago, about 20, I think, the first kit I soldered together was, in fact, the MiniPOV by Adafruit. But that original version was only red LEDs and had a serial port for programming. Oh, those were the days! The MiniPOV 4 is a much different kit than the original. It features full-colour RGB LEDs and a USB port for programming, and they have even developed a program to allow you to easily design simple colour graphics and text to wave in mid-air, and display…

@ben_everard £ varies omenie.com/pipistrelles.html The pipistrelle is a type of bat, and the Pipistrelle (sometimes styled π•pistrelle) is a tool for listening to ultrasonic sounds. Obviously, it’s one thing to add an ultrasonic microphone to a project, but you still need to do something with the signal it generates in order to make it audible to humans. Traditionally, most bat detectors are what’s known as ‘heterodyne’. In this style of detector, the ultrasonic signal from the bat is combined with another frequency that’s very close. The two signals interact and make a signal that’s the difference between the two. This generates a sound that’s sort of like a series of pops and clicks that you may well have heard associated with bats. It’s a reliable way of hearing bats, but…

From $99 groupgets.com Delivery: September 2023 Microphones don’t perfectly capture audio. They are tuned to their specific function. A laptop microphone might be tuned to someone speaking. Musicians have different microphones for different purposes. AudioMoth has been a popular device for picking up a wide range of audio frequencies, both those within human hearing and ultrasonic ranges. It can either save these as WAV files or stream them directly to a PC (much like a regular USB microphone). The μMoth (pronounced ‘micro-moth’) is the same hardware as the original AudioMoth but shrunk down. At just 25×36 mm and 4g in weight, it should be possible to jam this just about anywhere you want to capture audio. In most cases, this is going to be some kind of environmental monitor, but…