Table of contents for #52 in HackSpace

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/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.…

ARCADE BUTTON MIDI BOX > hsmag.cc/Pico-midi-controller Adafruit has come up with a great alternative use for arcade buttons: using them as the buttons for a MIDI synthesizer box. A Raspberry Pi Pico sits proudly on show above the pleasingly tactile LED arcade buttons inside the 3D-printed case. The build also features Adafruit’s AW9525 GPIO expander and LED driver. An OLED screen and joystick mean the MIDI box can do dual duty as music maker and game controller. HIS TUNING DEVICE LISTENS TO THE SOUND OF A STRING MINI KEYBOARD > hsmag.cc/Pico-mini-keyboards Maker TEC.IST took up the challenge of making the tiniest keyboard around, reasoning that he hadn’t encountered one “small enough for wearables or extremely small PCs”. As TEC.IST reveals on his Hackaday project page, he built the 59-key board to…

Built entirely from soil, Casa Terracota may well be the largest piece of pottery in the world. Known as ‘the Flintstone House’ to locals near Casa Terracota in Boyacá, Columbia, architect and maker Octavio Mendoza Morales built the 500 sq m sustainable dwelling as an elaborate proof of concept after one of his nieces asked whether the clay pot he’d presented to her could theoretically be used as material for a habitable house. Bricsys (hsmag.cc/ClayPotHouse) reports that construction on the resulting home lasted 17 years and involved clay-soil sections being baked for a month before being left to cool for a further week. Keen to keep the house as eco-friendly as possible, Octavio went on to use local clay to make the dishes, along with upcycling metal and glass for…

@ben_everard This month, Ben has mostly been pondering the question 'how many LEDs is too many?' WLED is firmware for ESP32-based devices that lets you easily control RGB LEDs (such as NeoPixels) over WiFi. This can be really useful because it means you don’t have to have physical access to the controller to change what is playing. In this article, we’re going to connect a 16×16 matrix up to an ESP32 board (the Smôl from SparkFun), load on WLED, and then control it from another computer on the network by playing animated GIFs. WLED has loads of features and can be used to create all sorts of lighting effects that look wonderful, but that we won’t use in this tutorial today. If you’re setting up some LED lighting, though, it’s…

Despite loving all things digital, Mike admits to being a bit of a Luddite, vinyl records and all. On 24 May 1844, a message was sent from Washington DC to Baltimore. Normally it would have taken a day or more for a dispatch rider to cover the 66 km, but this message was received almost immediately. The words of the message – What hath God wrought – conveyed something of the enormity of the achievement and the awe of those observing it. The secret of this momentous event is revealed by the person sending the message – Samuel Morse. Indeed, the code that bears his name was the world’s first code for data transmission. Here we delve into this historic code, and discover that it was a lot more sophisticated…

Stepper motors come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but don’t be fooled into thinking that bigger is necessarily better. Yes, larger stepper motors are generally more powerful, but it is possible for a NEMA 17 motor to have more usable torque than a NEMA 21. For a NEMA 17, the holding torque is generally about 3 kg-cm, for a NEMA 23 it’s normally around 15 kg-cm. It all comes down to the specifications of the individual motor, and also to the controller that it’s connected to. The values for individual motors might be much higher or lower than the examples given here, so always check the datasheet. In the K40, the motor driver is built directly onto the controller board. This is a terrible idea, and means that…

@devinck LEDs, we all love them, right? It’s almost hard to imagine a project that doesn’t include at least one LED as an indicator of power, status of a sensor, or even just for aesthetic purposes. But what happens when you want a lot of LEDs? Not just one, two, or even ten. I’m talking about 50 or more. It can get complicated controlling all of them, and that’s where this Best of Breed comes into play. I’ll be looking at addressable LED strips and accessories that allow you to control an almost unlimited number of LEDs. And not just LED strips that you find at big box outlet stores. Those are fun, and some even have RGB colour control, but it’s limited to preprogrammed sequences. Many are one colour,…

PIMORONI $14.41 pimoroni.com If you have some LEDs strips already, or you are planning your next project and haven’t decided on a controller yet, check out the Plasma 2040 from Pimoroni. The Plasma 2040 is based around the new RP2040 IC. This board allows you to easily control a variety of addressable LED strips in a familiar development environment like C, C++, or MicroPython. The board is programmable via a standard USB-C connection, and since it’s USB-C, it can also power your LED strips with up to 3 A of available power. It also features three user-assignable buttons, a QW/ST connector for plug-and-play with Qwiic or STEMMA QT boards. All these features make the Plasma 2040 an economical and sound choice for your next project. VERDICT Plasma 2040 Simple and…

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/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.…

We’re used to seeing electronics as something that gets added on to a machine to make it work – think of the robot that’s just a pile of servos until you drop a microprocessor and some wires into it to make it function. But there’s another way: instead of building the device, then adding the functionality, Carl Bugeja is an electronics engineer making robots out of PCBs. Two-layer PCBs, twelve-layer PCBs, flexible PCBs – he’s doing fascinating work, messing about with things just because he can, and recording the results. His work is open-source hardware, meaning anyone can copy what he does, but we’re just happy to keep an eye on his YouTube channel (hsmag.cc/CarlBugeja) and see what he comes up with next. We caught up with Carl to find…

At the end of January 2021, Raspberry Pi took many tech makers by surprise with the launch of the Pico, its first microcontroller, given away exclusively with HackSpace, issue 39. At the time of the Pico’s unveiling, there was plenty of excitement about the launch of a brand-new tech toy to keep us entertained and inspire us to get making during the long months of lockdown. There was also both bemusement and approval for the introduction of the RP2040 chip. As well as powering the Pico, the RP2040 was made available as a bare-bones chip from Raspberry Pi, and as part of microcontroller offerings from other companies: Adafruit, SparkFun, Pimoroni, and others. This equitable approach to giving users options over their choice of compatible hardware can lead to a little…

JOKER PHONE > hsmag.cc/Pico-Joker-Phone Pico might be the newest Raspberry Pi model, but it’s got plenty to offer upcycling and retro-hacking fans. Team DIY Champs took it upon themselves to update a rotary dial telephone in order to bring a bit of light-hearted nonsense to proceedings in the form of groan-worthy Dad Jokes (see the API at icanhazdadjoke.com). The Pico Phone project uses a custom PCB with Notecard and a SparkFun 12-button Qwiic Keypad, along with some CircuitPython code and a Twilio account to connect to the Dad Jokes API. Once assembled, dial the Pico Phone’s number, hold the handset to your ear, and press the # key to hear a terrible pun. ARCADE-STYLE REACTION GAME > hsmag.cc/PicoLightArcade If, for you, a day out at the seaside is incomplete without…

AUTOMATIC GUITAR TUNER > hsmag.cc/Pico-guitar-tuner When Guyrandy Jean-Gilles told fellow Reddit users he’d created an automatic guitar tuner, it took a while to dawn on them that his invention does more than confirm that the strings have been suitably tensioned to avoid offending sensitive ears. In fact, the Pico-controlled tuning box contains a motor that actually tweaks the strings to the exact pitch required. His tuning device listens to the sound of a string being plucked and decides which note it needs to be tuned to. It then turns the tuning keys on the guitar’s headstock just the right amount to achieve the correct note. Guyrandy’s tuning device (for which he provides 3D-printable files and source code) takes its cue from the Roadie 3 and uses Pico’s audio recognition function.…

Jorvon Moss is an artist by training. From his workshop in LA, he makes robots – not to do anything like send people into space or fight crime or any of the stereotypical things that comic book fans are supposed to want to do, but just for fun. He’s also an obsessive documenter, so if you’ve ever wanted to know how to build (or how not to build) anything with embedded AI, or servos, or face recognition, he’s a good person to ask. We spoke to him in the early hours one morning, to ask him what he’s been up to recently, how to get into building with artificial intelligence, and how he approaches the creative process. HackSpace So Jorvon, you’re a full-time maker now. How did that come about?…

MAKER Long-time contributor to The MagPi, Phil is a freelance writer and editor with a focus on technology. @philkingeditor You’ll Need > DHT11 sensor magpi.cc/dht11 > UV sensor magpi.cc/uvsensor > MCP3008 ADC magpi.cc/mcp3008 > Jumper wires Previously in this series, we have built a couple of alarms: one for fire and gas safety, the other for detecting intruders. This time we’re doing something a little different by using a couple of sensors to measure certain weather conditions: temperate, relative humidity, and ultraviolet light. One of the sensors gives an analogue output, so we’ll learn how to convert that to a digital reading using an ADC. 01 Connect DHT11 sensor The DHT11 sensor measures temperature and relative humidity. We’re using one from the Waveshare Sensors Pack, available from The Pi Hut…

Dr Andrew Lewis is a specialist fabricator and maker, and is the owner of the Andrew Lewis Workshop. In the second part of this series, you’ll be looking at building a gantry for a homemade laser cutter, and the components that you’ll need to make it move under computer control. In the last part of this series we took a general look at the anatomy of a laser cutter, and considered the outer case. In this instalment, you’ll be looking at the gantry and bed of the laser cutter, making a robot that moves in the X, Y, and Z axis. If you’ve looked closely at the K40 laser, you’ve probably noticed that the gantry looks similar to an old MakerBot Replicator. One stepper motor uses a timing belt and…

BLINKINLABS $36.90 tindie.com This might not be an LED strip, but while searching for LED strips, I came across the EightByEight Blinky from Blinkinlabs and just had to include it in the roundup. The board features 64 independently controllable RGB LEDs, an ESP8266, an accelerometer, and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. And all of that is packaged beautifully in this well-designed solid black PCB with gold-plated accents. I love the look of this PCB! So, what can you do with the EightByEight Blinky? A lot! This is because it can be programmed just like an Arduino, and each LED can be any colour of the rainbow, all while reacting with the accelerometer. It certainly looks like a great board for an interactive wearable project! The EightByEight Blinky comes fully assembled, just…

PIMORONI £6.90 shop.pimoroni.com @concreted0g The PGA2040 from Pimoroni is a tiny RP2040 breakout board squashed down to just 21 mm square. In terms of functionality, it’s pretty much identical to a Pico but, actually, despite its stamp-like status, it has more I/O pins broken out for use! In case you haven’t come across the RP2040 specification, in a nutshell, this PGA2040 features a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ which can run up to a speedy 133MHz. There’s 265kB of SRAM on board, I2C, SPI, and UART, plus USB support – more on that later. There are 30 GPIO pins featuring PIO that can be used to create custom hardware interfaces, which are proving a popular approach for some amazing projects in the Pico community. The PGA in PGA2040 stands for Pin Grid…

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.…

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…

Wondering how you might make use of Pico around the home? Wonder no longer: it’s ideal for smart home and home automation tasks, and has already been embraced by those keen to make use of its monitoring and motion detection abilities. WIFI IOT > hsmag.cc/WiFiIOT Tony Smith (aka smittytone) recognised the IoT potential of the RP2040 and experimented with both Arduino and Pico versions of a weather display that pulled data from an API and then displays weather info on an 8 × 8 matrix LCD. Using a £12 Pimoroni Pico Wireless Pack, which adds ESP32 wireless connectivity over the 2.4GHz spectrum (plus a microSD card slot, button, and LED), Tony used CircuitPython and the OpenWeather API. He warns that this API limits the number of calls that can be…

SOIL MOISTURE SENSOR > hsmag.cc/PicoSoilMoisture Andy Warburton knows just how much houseplants are at the mercy of humans – so much so that he made a gorgeous soil moisture sensor that not only alerts him to overly dried out or waterlogged soil, but looks striking too. Adding a SparkFun Soil Moisture Sensor, a USB connector cable, and a NeoPixel ring of lights to a fairly straightforward sensor setup – using Adafruit’s CircuitPython library and his own downloadable code – results in an eye-catching setup. The initially blue NeoPixel lights then need to be calibrated, after which it’s ready to start looking after your little Monsteras. IT’S GETTING HOT IN HERE > hsmag.cc/Pico-Temp-Humidity Whether you’re planning on a humidor to look after your cigars or a thermal and moisture-controlled environment for…

@RosieHattersley Rosie Hattersley writes tech, craft, and life hacks and tweets @RosieHattersley. Soil has been around for 450 million years and has been used for farming and construction for many centuries. Although soil ultimately results from the weathering of rocks, it didn’t exist as we knew it until plants began growing on land rather than only in the sea. This helped stabilise the atmosphere, removing carbon dioxide and helping cool the Earth, making it suitable for life. Soil has been integral to our own and other creatures’ lives ever since. As well as being a medium for growing crops, soil is a natural filter, cleansing water of pollutants, and making it safe for drinking. As with water and minerals, however, soil is a finite resource, as artist Kirsten Kurtz’s video…

@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. LEDs are one of the first components people use when they start electronics, and now most houses are lit by LED bulbs. Does that mean it should be easy to make your own lights? Not just building an assembly for light bulbs, but completely from scratch? That was the starting point of this project. We wanted a filament effect, and it’s been possible to purchase LED filament – the sort they use in light bulbs – for a long time now. However, it’s difficult to work with. The filament is fragile, and the power supplies are a bit tricky to get right if you’ve not…

@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! YOU’LL NEED A computer with FreeCAD 0.19 In this sixteenth, and final, part of the FreeCAD series, we thought it might be a good idea to look at some areas that you might like to explore now that you have a good grasp of the basics. You probably have some intermediate skills if you have followed through this series fully, so let's look at other areas of FreeCAD that you might explore. For the sake of consistency throughout this series, we have…

We are really pleased to announce that Raspberry Pi Press is collating this 16-part FreeCAD series into a free-to-download book. Having all the articles in one place makes it a little quicker and simpler to work through the series, and means you can jump back to a previous chapter to check something more easily than, perhaps, digging through the pile of magazines! It is slightly rewritten, as a few small things changed in FreeCAD since the early articles were written. We hope that it will be really useful to everyone trying to learn FreeCAD. We're putting the finishing touches on it as we go to press and it should be available to download from our website shortly.…

There are three main types of rail to consider when designing your laser cutter. The first and most obvious is the bright steel bar. It’s common to see 8 mm bright steel bar inside desktop 2D and 3D printers. It’s cheap and easy to work with, but has a couple of limitations. Longer lengths of bar can sag, and so larger diameter material is needed as you increase the distance that you’re trying to cover. The bar is also heavy, which can be a problem if you’re using it to build a moving rail for your Y axis. If the weight is going to be an issue, you could consider using surface ground tube instead of solid bar, although it may be more expensive. Bar stock relies on linear bearings…

@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. People make PCBs for many reasons. I make them mostly because I like the look. Almost all the projects I work on are simple enough that they could be done on protoboard, or even ‘dead bug’ style without any form of board at all. The reason I design my PCBs is because I like things to look interesting. Not neat and tidy – that’s not my aesthetic – but something that makes you want to peer closer. Something that invites you in to look at it. There are lots of ways of doing this. The choice of components, board outlines, and silkscreens all play a…

ADAFRUIT from $9.95 adafruit.com @ben_everard ESP-based microcontrollers from Espressif have, more or less, defined the DIY IoT scene for longer than HackSpace magazine has been around. ‘Stick an ESP on it’ has been a standard phrase for adding internet connectivity to a device. While the classic ESP32 devices aren’t really difficult to use, they’re not as easy as some other microcontrollers that have drag-and-drop programming with CircuitPython. This changed a couple of years ago with the introduction of the ESP32-S2 which lacked some features of the original, but added native USB support that allowed easy programming. Essentially, this means that in ESP32-class devices, at the moment, there’s a trade-off. The original is more powerful and has both WiFi and Bluetooth, but is slightly more complex to program. The S2 is…