Table of contents for #72 in HackSpace

Raspberry Pi 5 is here! Last month, we chatted to its creators about what to expect, and this month, we’ve been putting it through its paces in a few different projects to find out where it really excels. The Raspberry Pi team has done a great job of increasing performance across the board. That means that most projects will get a speed boost. If your project is running perfectly fine on its existing hardware, there’s obviously no need to upgrade, but if you’re itching to add more things and want them running faster (and let’s face it, we always want more things running faster), there’s a good chance Raspberry Pi 5 will have what you want. ben.everard@raspberrypi.com Got a comment, question, or thought about HackSpace magazine? get in touch at…

hsmag.cc/Hnefatafl Tafl, from the Anglo-Saxon word for table, is a term that encompasses a variety of board games that survive from the early medieval period of northern Europe. There’s the Ard Rí variant, from what’s now Scotland, Brandudh from Ireland, and, among others, Hnefatafl, from Scandinavia. It’s a bit like chess, except that the two players have different objectives: one player uses his forces to try to capture the king, located at the centre of the board, while the other player’s objective is to escape, by getting the king to one of the corner squares. It’s chess, for Vikings. This laser-cut Hnefatafl set, by Leon Reboul, uses laser-cut 3mm plywood rather than the carved bones of Lindisfarne’s monks, but it does capture the Viking aesthetic with some gorgeous artwork by…

hsmag.cc/StarWarsSpeederBike YouTuber and inventor extraordinaire James Bruton has been building a bike based on a hoverboard. That’s all you need to know really – go to the video right now and check it out. He’s taken the electronics from the hoverboard, added a huge number of 3D-printed parts, a stem and handlebar from a bike, an Arduino Uno, some bearings and potentiometers, and has created a mode of transport that doesn’t work – yet! It’s fascinating to watch the journey of experimentation that James is on, as he modifies one thing after the next to get a working prototype. The hoverboard motors, for example, at first struggled with the extra weight of all that plastic, so James just put higher-voltage batteries in. Trial and error has seldom been more entertaining.…

The Raspberry Pi 5 will very shortly be available to purchase (and if you’re a subscriber, you can pre-order from a guaranteed stock of Raspberry Pis, so you’ll get one in the first batch. See hsmag.cc/priorityboarding for details). Its four cores are now the more powerful Arm Cortex-A76, which gives more processing power per clock cycle. The memory is now DDR4X, which gives faster access. Almost every form of connectivity is faster, and there are two new ways of connecting hardware: a UART port and a PCI Express port. This all adds up to a much more powerful and capable machine. And, let’s be honest, we geeks can be attracted to faster machines like moths to a flame. However, this issue, we’re going to take a step back and look…

If you want to cut through the buzzwords and find out what tech actually does, you could do a lot worse than listen to Jeff Geerling. He’s built an utterly wholesome corner of the internet in which he explains, demonstrates, and demystifies the latest thing that everybody else pretends to know about. Linux, single-board computers, open source, developer tools, home automation – Jeff does the lot, and he wants to teach you how to do it, too. We thought we’d talk to him about what he’s been getting up to with his new Raspberry Pi 5 HackSpace Morning Jeff! You’ve done loads of Pi projects over the last couple of years. What do you still have running at the moment? Jeff Geerling Things that are practical, really. I have Pis running all…

GET YOUR RASPBERRY PI 5 FIRST! Want to get Raspberry Pi 5 sent to you as soon as it’s released? With Priority Boarding, you can pre-order your Raspberry Pi 5 (4GB or 8GB) and it’ll be sent out in the first week. Raspberry Pi has set aside thousands of Raspberry Pi 5 computers for The MagPi and HackSpace magazine print subscribers to buy. Enough to guarantee every subscriber can get one without going out of stock. How it works! If you have a print subscription to HackSpace magazine or The MagPi, we will have your email on file. We’ll send each of our subscribers a unique code in the next few days. Along with the code, you’ll get details of how to use it through our partners (Pi Shop in…

Find out how to make a Raspberry Pi Pico W-powered electricity tariff display to help plan your energy use. Along the way, you will also discover how to configure settings in an embedded device using your browser. AGILE ENERGY TARIFFS If you are looking for a way to reduce your electricity bills, you might want to look at the world of agile pricing. The author is presently using an agile tariff and it seems to be working so far, making noticeable savings. The author doesn’t have any solar panels or batteries at his house, but he does drive an electric car. He doesn’t have any special control systems for any of his household devices; the savings have been achieved just by doing things at different times. He is using the Agile…

FREE | librepcb.org PCB design is fundamentally a deceptively tricky thing. It’s deceptive because the end results aren’t usually particularly complex – you just create a few vector images to send off to a factory and, compared to most vector images, they’re pretty simple. There aren’t that many traces on a PCB compared to, say, brush strokes on a painting. However, the complexity comes not from the amount of detail needed, but the correctness needed. There are thousands of different electrical components, all with slightly different requirements. There are also different limitations and considerations of the various different manufacturing processes to go through, and there are the considerations around the physics of moving electrons through a substance. In other words, there’s a lot that can go wrong on a PCB,…

hsmag.cc/Diablo Here we have another one of the many robotics projects to use ROS, the Robot Operating System, running on a Raspberry Pi 4, and programmed in Python. What makes this one special is that it balances on two wheeled legs, can move at 2m/s, can carry up to 80kg, and can balance all by itself. It can jump down a couple of stairs and land on its feet like a cat – it’s a little unnerving, but it points the way to a future where delivery robots won’t be scuppered by having to go up stairs.…

hsmag.cc/Soft-robot Hydraulic actuators work the way they do because the fluid under pressure performs uniformly: move a piston 50% of the way along its length, and the connected arm, leg, or whatever, will also move 50% of the way it’s built to. This robot, built by researchers at Cornell University’s College of Engineering, uses a different approach. By using viscous fluid, which behaves unevenly, the team were able to get the actuators in the robotic legs to move more smoothly. The difference is akin to that between a jointed limb on a mammal and the movement of a caterpillar or worm; the clever thing is that by utilising the properties inherent in a viscous fluid, the hope is that robots using these actuators will need less computing power to perform…

The world of high-end audio is baffling. There are a million expensive options, with a million ways of expensively buying the wrong thing. There’s some absolute rubbish on the market – we shudder at the thought of a cheap steel stylus, rather than a diamond one, going anywhere near our original 12-inch copy of Blue Monday – and, at the other end, you can pay an arm and a leg to get the absolute best out of your pristine recording of John Cage’s 4’33”. Because audio geeks love to experiment, upgrade, and tinker with things, we’re surprised we haven’t seen a 3D-printed turntable like this before. Designed by FilatoneInstruments, this turntable kit includes a lightweight carbon fibre tone-arm; built-in spirit levels, and stroboscope to ensure perfect levelling; brass bushings; a…

Most microcontroller programming environments have a way of making beeps, and even if there’s not an in-built method, it’s a pretty simple thing to do – just flick a pin on and off quickly (but not too quickly) and you have an audio signal that you can send to a speaker, headphones, or other audio devices. CircuitPython, however, has just gained a complex audio synthesis module called synthio. This lets you not just create beeps and boops, but control these sounds in a variety of ways. Let’s take a look. You’ll need a board that supports synthio. RP2040 boards, such as Pico and Pico W, are a great option for testing things out and having a play using headphones; however, a board with dedicated audio hardware (such as the Adafruit…

One of the biggest complaints that people have with the K40 laser cutter is that it doesn’t speak proper G-code. It speaks a sort of proprietary language that isn’t really compatible with anything except for the software it ships with. A couple of open-source packages like K40 Whisperer have managed to learn to speak K40 and, while these packages are great, they don’t have the features and the polished interface that a commercial product like LightBurn can offer. In this project, you’ll find out how to replace the controller of your K40 so that it speaks a more conventional dialect of G-code and can interface with applications like LightBurn. ”The stock controller is built to be the cheapest possible functional option” NEVER TRUST A LIVE LASER Like every other component…

Being able to read bar-codes isn’t just reserved for big box stores for quickly looking up a price, or giant warehouses tracking the flow of their inventory. There are plenty of other use cases for using bar-codes; even small electronic kit makers can use them to track limited inventory and the steps in the manufacturing process. I’ve also seen some really creative uses for bar-codes and QR codes that include interactive art, musical instruments, and even as a discrete set of instructions for robotics. There are plenty of small manufacturers out there that need a custom solution where the typical handheld scanners available just don’t work. This is certainly a very niche topic for this month’s Best of Breed, but I found the whole ecosystem of how they work, and…

Free | Kalumajs.org Programming languages are strange things. In a very real sense, they’re all exactly equivalent – you can write equivalent programs in just about any modern language. However, at the same time, they’re entirely different. Learning a programming language – not just the basics, but really taking the time to become fluent in it – affects the way you program, and even the way you think. Kaluma is a port of JavaScript to RP2040-based devices (currently Pico and Pico W are supported). It might seem a little strange to port JavaScript to a microcontroller. After all, this is a language that started out as a way to add widgets to webpages, and superficially, that’s got little in common with blinking LEDs and reading temperature sensors. JavaScript programs tend to…

hsmag.cc/Zvychai-One Inspired, in part, by Zack Freedman and his lovely Pi 400 cyber deck, and, in part, by the potential need for a post-doomsday communication device, maker mkdxdx has made this, the Zvychai One. It’s a cyber deck, comprising an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4, a 5-inch Eyoyo TFT display, a backlit keyboard, several LEDs, and a beautiful 3D-printed clamshell case. It was the winner of the Hackaday cyber deck competition, and will be just the thing in the event of apocalypse.…

hsmag.cc/PicoAirQualityBoard Free software and open hardware have enabled a boom in citizen science. This is just the latest device to add to our knowledge of the world around us. This board comes with a Raspberry Pi Pico W, and adds a Qwiic connector for I2C devices, breaks out a few GPIO pins for 3.3V, ADC, GND, and four more pins. Most usefully though, is the built-in MQTT client and built-in HTML server, so it can easily transmit the environmental data coming in. It comes with a connection for a PMS5003 particulate matter sensor, which you’ll have to buy separately, along with a power source. Other than that, it’s a one-stop device.…

RP1 I was kind of sad when Raspberry Pi 4 launched. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great computer, but it dropped the Raspberry Pi-embossed can on the Wi-Fi chips. I’m not sure why, but that just made me smile. While the Wi-Fi remains plain on the Raspberry Pi 5, I do like that there’s a logo on one of the components again – the RP1 chip. I’m sure there’s lots of clever reasons for this chip, but it’s the logo that makes me smile. George Carlisle Ben Says: It is an excellent logo, and deserves to be used more widely. I’ve put in a suggestion that, for Raspberry Pi 6, they arrange the components in the shape of the logo. It’s going to take some pretty serious engineering work,…

ALEXATRON An Amazon Alexa with a little bit more personality Give a man a standard home assistant and he’ll ask it the weather forecast, the football results, and whether the traffic’s likely to be bad on the commute into work. But give that home assistant a pair of animatronic eyes and a CRT mouth, and suddenly you’ve got a robotic person. Kind of. That’s what Thomas Burns did with his Alexatron. Thomas reckons it’s the coolest thing he’s ever built, but don’t take his word for it: watch his build video at hsmag.cc/Alexatron, get excited about building your own, and wonder why more robots can’t be a little bit more human. HackSpace: What was the inspiration for the Alexatron? Why did you feel the need to make an Alexa more…

In this tutorial, we will create an interactive true or false quiz game using a Raspberry Pi Pico and an LCD display. Whilst doing so, you will learn about some of the pitfalls when connecting to devices running at different voltages. You’ll discover ways to increase voltage output using a simple buffer, and how to make a bidirectional level shifter. The level shifter is then used to convert between 3.3V for the GPIO ports on a Pico to 5V used by the LCD display. The game is programmed in Python, with a text file for the questions. The game can be installed inside an enclosure for a complete game. 01 LCD character display This project is based around an LCD display. Our display has 16 characters across two lines and is…

Last month, we looked at linkages – ways of joining together moving parts using solid bars. This month, we’re going to design one. We want to create an arrangement of rods and joints that can only move in one way, and that’s to make a pair of hands clap. We want both hands to move toward each other. Alternatively, hands can be on rods that rotate around a point. However, we need one to rotate clockwise and one to rotate anticlockwise. ‘Bell (crank) linkage’ is a name for an L-shaped rod attached at the angle in the middle of the L. This linkage gives us a way to transfer motion between different directions, because pushing the base of the L up makes the top of the L move sideways. In…

FREE UPGRADE | prusa3d.com Back in issue 67, we reviewed the Prusa MK4. At launch, we found it to be a good printer, but it wasn’t quite as fast as some of the competition. Lingering behind that was the promise of improved firmware to speed it up. The limiting factor in how fast you can 3D-print is usually not the actual speed the motors can move, or even how fast the processor can go, but how much the frame shakes. Because 3D printing typically involves lots of short moves, increasing the speed only really has an effect if you can increase the acceleration and deceleration as well. To a certain extent, you can mitigate this by making the frame stronger. However, increasingly, the most effective way of mitigating this is…