Table of contents for #68 in HackSpace

Most people receive the majority of their information about the world through their eyes. This is great, but they do have a few flaws. You can’t adjust the frame rate on them, they need to be switched off for around eight hours a day, and there’s no record function on them. Fortunately, inventive scientists have come up with a solution for this – cameras. These let you see the world in ways impossible with our on-board faculties. While there are some excellent off-the-shelf cameras available, you can get much more control by building your own, and there’s one standout platform for this: Raspberry Pi. In this issue, we’re looking at how you can combine programming with a range of camera modules to capture the world in ways our primitive face-holes…

bad-dog-designs.co.uk We’ve marvelled at the work of Paul Parry (aka Bad Dog Designs) before in these pages; here’s one of his latest builds. Paul has got his hands on some Cold War-era military field telephones, and, of course, has turned them into Nixie tube clocks. Both telephones are housed in bakelite enclosures; the lighter-coloured one (shown here) is a Russian TA-57 telephone dating from 1968–1975; the darker one is a Polish TAP-67 dating from somewhere between 1968 and 1974. Both phones feature programmable RGB LED back-lighting to show off the Nixies in their best light, four Z570M Nixie tubes, and tell the time accurate to plus/minus one minute per year.…

In the olden days, before we paid for things with contactless cards, we used to hand over little metal discs to shopkeepers in exchange for goods. Unbelievable, right? What’s more, everything used to cost really weird numbers, like £9.99, so you’d hand over your money and get a tiny bit of money back, which used to rattle around uselessly once you got home. Seriously though, we still use coins, and we still have jam jars full of old bits of shrapnel that we really should convert into more useful money. That’s where this beautiful bit of design by Fraens comes in. His coin sorter uses a rotating drum with differently sized holes in it to sort coins in order from smallest (10 c) to largest (€2). There’s a TRCT5000 infrared…

One of the easiest, and yet most impressive, uses for a Raspberry Pi camera is to film a time-lapse video created from a series of still images. Sometimes used for interludes in film and TV dramas, to indicate the passing of time between scenes, a time-lapse video is an impressive and versatile effect that appears to speed up time. Classic examples include clouds passing across the skyline, city traffic moving (a lot faster than in reality), star trails, a sunset or sunrise, and plants blooming/growing. With a Raspberry Pi Camera Module or High Quality Camera, you can easily create effective time-lapses. You just need to set everything up correctly and make sure the camera doesn’t move during the filming period. STEP 1: CONNECT THE CAMERA You will need to connect…

Think of automata, and the image that pops into your head will most likely depend on your age. If you’re a child of the 1980s, you’re most likely imagining the seaside amusement from the film Big that turns a child into Tom Hanks. If you’re a child of the 1880s, you might be thinking of the Mechanical Turk, the machine that terrified audiences by seeming to play chess against a human opponent. Others still may think of the works of Tim Hunkin. He’s been building machines to inspire and delight for decades, and now has two arcades full of his own creations: Novelty Automation in London, and the Under The Pier Show in Southwold. We caught up with him to chat about precision, engineering, and the joy of the mechanical…

@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. Let’s be honest, if you have a 3D printer, you probably generate quite a bit of plastic waste. There are ways to minimise this – and you absolutely should – but you can’t eliminate it entirely. There will always be some failed prints, and sometimes the first version of something you’ve designed isn’t perfect (and neither is the second, third, or fourth). Can we reuse this waste plastic rather than throw it away? This project started because of an off-hand comment in our local hackspace: “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could feed failed 3D prints back into the printer.” This is something that comes…

@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. Achord keyboard is a great way to enter text on the move. You can type in text without having to look at your fingers. This project builds on the chord keyboard described in Issue 46 of HackSpace magazine, adding Bluetooth connectivity, using a custom PCB, and making it easy to create a keyboard that matches your hand dimensions. THE PICO ‘BLUE CHORDS’ KEYBOARD Figure 1 shows left- and right-handed versions of the keyboard. They can be used to enter text, numbers, and symbols. The OLED screen displays the keyboard mode and the last few characters that were entered, along with the…

@devinck I’ve been writing these Best of Breed reviews for a while; at last count, it was over 60 issues covering over 350 products! With so many reviews, it can sometimes be challenging to come up with a new theme. At first it was easy to pick products, from displays and microcontroller boards to barometers and the hundreds of different sensors available for a Raspberry Pi. But when the supply chain issue hit the global economy, and so many developers went into hibernation, new products became much more difficult to find. Good news! Things have finally changed! Only until recently have manufacturers, both large and small, been able to source components like the amazingly versatile RP2040 to create new boards and not worry too much about the supply. And common…

SPARKFUN → $74.95 | sparkfun.com SparkFun has another handy multipurpose breakout board: the DataLogger IoT – 9DoF. It’s a utilitarian board with a utilitarian name. The board comes pre-programmed and will start to automatically output all the IMU, GPS, pressure, humidity, and distance sensors once powered up. You won’t need to write any code, which can be good or bad depending on your background. I think there are lots of people out there who just need the data and don’t want to fiddle around in an IDE. If that’s you, this is a great board. It was designed for users who just need to capture a lot of data to a CSV or JSON file and get back to their project. You can save the data to a microSD card…

Get game design tips and tricks from the masters Explore the code listing and find out how they work Download and play game examples by Eben Upton Learn how to code your own games with Pygame Zero Available now hsmag.cc/store…

hsmag.cc/NanoRobotGeek Mechanical watches aren’t just timepieces: they’re miniature works of art, engineering marvels. They don’t run out of battery power and, if you look after them, they can last for decades. This author has a cheap pocket-watch made to the famously high manufacturing standards of the late USSR, and it’s still functioning to this day. The natural thing to do with an old, useless Apple Watch then, is to replace its obsolete electronics, unsupported software, and drained battery with a mechanism that’ll tell the time without constantly annoying you with updates from social media. That’s what Jack Spiggle has done with this build, augmenting a 42 mm Apple Watch Series 1 in stainless steel with a Seiko NH38 watch movement. Jack’s donor watch had been unsupported by Apple since 2020,…

hsmag.cc/PlanetSpinner An orrery is a mechanism that shows the relative positions of the bodies in our solar system. You can have small ones, showing just the Earth, the sun and the moon, and there are larger ones showing all nine planets (Pluto is still a planet, whatever scientists may say). This is another example of a build that is simple on the surface – it’s comprised of laser-cut plywood and toothpicks – but that’s only because of the hard work and original thinking of the original creator. There are no complex gears on this orrery. Instead, a tiny stepper motor rotates the disc that shows the signs of the zodiac. This has a pin sticking up from it, and this in turn rotates all the planets until the one closest…

ATTENTION ALL MAKERS! If you have something you’d like to get off your chest (or even throw a word of praise in our direction) let us know at hsmag.cc/hello LET US BUILD It feels like we’re on the edge of a transport revolution. Electric motors are (fairly) cheap and (fairly) easy to work with at the size needed for modest personal transportation. They’re even relatively easy to retrofit onto human-powered transport, as Andrew Lewis showed in his e-scooter build in issue 67. However, politicians are dragging their feet on the legislation needed to make them legal. Perhaps we need an orchestrated maker campaign to get Westminster to let us build our own vehicles. We could have a future of personalised machines made specifically for each person’s needs. Want small and…

HOME SECURITY Low-cost and tiny, Raspberry Pi Camera Modules are ideal for home security video surveillance. There’s even a special operating system, motionEyeOS (hsmag.cc/motionEyeOS), that makes it super-easy to set up one or more cameras which can be viewed and controlled via a web interface. Just head over to the GitHub repo’s supported devices page (hsmag.cc/motionEyeOSDevices) and download the relevant version for your Raspberry Pi model (or other single-board computer). The wiki has full instructions for how to configure everything, including a network of multiple cameras/devices – including USB webcams. Numerous features include motion detection to trigger photos/videos, email/push alerts, and time-lapse videos. You could use it to catch porch package thieves. Alternatively, check out Canadian maker Ryder’s custom deterrent system that uses machine learning to recognise packages and people,…

A while back, I bought a four-digit, seven-segment display, hoping to put it into a clock, or perhaps a simple counting device. I’d expected to be able to connect it with power, ground, and two data wires, but this display has 16 pins, none of them labelled. I would not be able to simply plug this into a Raspberry Pi Pico and throw MicroPython at it. Before I even get close to programming with this, I’ll need to wire it up. There are plenty of tutorial examples on the internet of wiring a four-digit, seven-segment display with dots between each digit (8.8.8.8.), but I couldn’t find any for the version I have, with two extra characters and two extra pins (8.8.:8.’8.). Some electrical components are unidirectional, such as diodes (including…

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 this project, you will learn how to detect when someone enters a room using a PIR (passive infrared) motion sensor. You will learn how to use MicroPython to carry out actions based on the PIR sensor. The code can make decisions and set an output. This can be used to turn on LEDs. You’ll also learn about schematic circuit diagrams, making it easier to understand how a circuit works. 01 What is a microcontroller? A microcontroller is an electronic device. It is a type of computer, in that it runs code to determine what actions to take, but it isn’t as powerful as…

@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. We’ve looked previously at how to 3D-print gears, where one gear drives another and the ratios of the two gears determine the relative speed of the two gears. This can work well, but does have a few problems. Firstly, it can take up a lot of space and, secondly, it’s not the most durable system. One alternative is a planetary gear-box. In this system, there are three sets of gears: an inner (or ‘sun’) gear, three or more ‘planetary’ gears that rotate around it, and a ring gear around the outside (see Figure 1). There are three potential inputs into this system – through the…

PIMORONI → $20.31 | pimoroni.com ARDUINO → $82 | store-usa.arduino.cc Encoder wheels are cool, but RGB encoder wheels are really cool! Pimoroni has done a great job integrating a Nuvoton MS51 microcontroller and rotary scroll wheel to allow a lot of functionality to your project. This encoder features 24 RGB LEDs, directional four-way navigation, centre click and scroll wheel, all with nice clickety clicks. The encoder is easy to integrate into your next Raspberry Pi project thanks to the convenient I2C breakout. The board is fully assembled and works with either 3 V or 5 V boards. It also includes a nice Python library and schematic, allowing for quick integration. The small form factor Nicla Voice for Arduino allows anyone to easily implement always-on speech recognition into their next build,…

hsmag.cc/4ShaftLoom Weaving is a complicated business; so much so that you could plausibly argue that computer programming was invented as a by-product of encoding weaving designs. This design, by architect, researcher, and maker Asli Aydin Aksan, is a more complicated build than some other homemade looms we’ve seen, but the brilliance of that is that it enables the user to create more complex patterns than you would if you were using a simpler loom. What we love about this is that it’s open-source, so anyone can learn from, copy, and modify the design to suit their work. And it’s not a toy; Asli’s woven real, useful bits of fabric with it. It’s also ideal for anyone who doesn’t have a Victorian cloth mill in which to store it: in use,…

extremeelectronics.co.uk What’s the first thing that happens when new computer hardware is released? Someone runs DOOM on it. What’s the second thing that happens? Someone builds a cluster. It’s been over two years since the Raspberry Pi Pico came out, and in that time nobody had built a Pico cluster, so Derek Woodroffe decided that he’d do it himself. Inspiration for the build came from the 1970s Cray supercomputers and, with a little custom electronics and the magic of I2C, Derek’s put together a very small supercomputer that he’s using to calculate Mandelbrot sets. If you like the sound of this, tune in next issue for more details on the hows, the whys, and the wherefores.…

A long-time Raspberry Pi user and tinkerer, Phil is a freelance writer and editor with a focus on technology. Combining the power and versatility of a Raspberry Pi single-board computer with a compact Camera Module – or larger HQ Camera with interchangeable lenses – enables you to take great pictures and videos and do a whole lot more. There’s also the option of 3D-printing or modifying a case to create an all-in-one compact camera. Or, one with an eyepiece tube to fit a telescope for spectacular shots of the night sky. Using the NoIR Camera Module variant, which omits the IR filter, you can even capture images in the dark (with IR LED illumination) – ideal for night vision, nocturnal creature photos, or even a ghost detector. With the addition…

@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 first two parts of this KiCad series, we’ve covered enough to make a basic PCB suitable for simple circuits, or maybe a breakout board. In this part, we are going to look at some next steps that open up the capabilities of what you can make in KiCad. We’ll explore both creating libraries and contents from scratch, but also importing and using component footprints and schematic symbols from other sources. We’ll also improve the quality of the boards by using flooded…

@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 it comes to printing polycarbonate (PC), there’s one basic problem – warping. Warping happens because as the 3D print cools, it shrinks. Different plastics shrink in varying amounts as they cool, but the problem with polycarbonate is not that it shrinks a lot per degree, but that you have to print it very hot, so it’s got a long way to cool. You generally need a nozzle temperature of around 300°C. The bed temperature should be somewhere around or over 100°C. In most cases, hobbyist printers don’t have heated chambers, but at the very least, you’re going to need an enclosure. The aim of…

@holtonhandmade Nicola King is a freelance writer and sub-editor. Her favourite craft changes week by week, with her sewing machine currently in quilting overdrive. Macramé was a very popular pastime back in the 1970s, which was perhaps a golden age of handicrafts of all kinds, when this form of creative knotting was used to fabricate lampshades, plant hangers, wall hangings, and many a bohemian beaded waistcoat with intricate and delicate patterning. This author fondly remembers her mum’s extensive collection of ‘Golden Hands’ periodicals, an informative series of magazines that sought to share crafting goodness with the multitude. Macramé, in some form, always seemed to be in every single issue. However, like many fibre-related crafts, macramé’s history predates that particular era by some time, in fact by thousands of years. For…

@ben_everard playhextraction.com → FREE | voidstar Lots of makers create bits and pieces for games. We’ve seen miniatures 3D-printed, tables laser-cut, and dice created using almost every method conceivable. Hextraction is a little different because you can make the entire game. You can 3D-print almost everything – the only things you have to buy are spools of filament and a handful of 10 mm ball bearings. Some tiles might also require a bit of hardware, such as a bolt or magnet. It takes quite a bit of printing to get started (expect to keep your fabricator humming for a couple of days). It’s a great way of using up odds and ends of filament because it looks great in a riot of colour. The game board is a slanted grid…