HackSpace #52

It’s been a year since Raspberry Pi Pico launched on the cover of this magazine, and it’s fair to say that the impact on the hobbyist community has been huge. It’s a cheap board with a powerful set of I/O options that’s easy to work with in a wide range of programming environments. As the RP2040 – the microcontroller at the heart of Pico – was designed from the ground up in-house, it’s got some unique features that make it particularly powerful, including the Programmable I/O interface. Now, a year on, we’re seeing this hardware being pushed to its full capabilities as makers have had time to understand it and get used to its features. In this issue, we’re taking a look at some of the best projects built on…

hsmag.cc/IOTBirdFeeder There’s a lot to take in with this build, so we’ll go slowly. It’s 3D-printed. It’s solar-powered. It’s connected to the Internet of Things. It takes photographs of birds when they land on the bird feeder, and then sends those photographs to your smartphone via a free app. Most of all, it looks great: it’s not a proof of concept or a slightly wobbly prototype. The two solar panels on the roof charge a 4800mAh Li-ion battery, which powers an ESP32-CAM board. This sleeps in low-power mode until a PIR sensor detects a bird, whereupon it wakes up and takes a picture.…

hsmag.cc/HananCumbia Cumbia is a quite brilliant genre of music originally from Colombia, and now popular throughout Latin America. This drum machine by Oficina de Sonido, with graphic design by Yeffry Ruta Mare and screen printing by Los Laberintos, is the sound of cumbia in a box – an open-source hardware box. It has just four sounds: kick, güiro, cow-bell, and conga, with pitch control for cow-bell and conga. Great big click buttons remind you that you’re playing a musical instrument, not programming a machine. More than anything, we love the effort that has clearly gone into this build.…

hsmag.cc/C64DiskDriveEmulator Every obsolete computing platform that there has ever been has a bunch of hardcore enthusiasts, for whom the zeroes and ones of their youth are somehow better than the crude, modern equivalents. We’ve seen loads of Spectrum emulators/re-creations, so it’s only fair that we should show off this piece of hardware that pays tribute to that other titan of 1980s computing, the Commodore C64. It’s a disk drive emulator that enables the user in 2022 to load data into their treasured C64 (or C128) without the need for a clanking mechanical unit. For a certain niche it’s going to be very useful indeed, as the one thing you can guarantee about magnetic disks is that they will degrade over time.…

hsmag.cc/PCB-Heart We’ve been trying our hand at translucent PCBs in recent weeks – see HackSpace issue 51 for more – and so has Arnov Sharma, whose PCB heart pendant uses 36 surface-mounted LEDs controlled by an ATtiny84 MCU. The LEDs are wired in series in six groups of six, so they can’t be controlled individually, but can be programmed to flash in the zones of the PCB they occupy.…

You may be familiar with the work of Ruth Amos and Shawn Brown; they’re the dynamic duo behind the brilliant Kids Invent Stuff YouTube channel. The premise is simple enough: every month they invite kids to send them invention ideas on a particular theme; at the time of writing, they’d just finished accepting entries for a winter-themed challenge. Ruth and Shawn (who are both real, adult engineers with real jobs) then turn the winning idea into a real product. Past creations have included a wearable air bed, a motorised magic carpet, and a saxophone that fires glitter. Check it out for yourself at kidsinventstuff.com. One day, the pair decided to do something different. They’d take the original idea that works so well, and add a musical element. “The whole point…