HackSpace #72

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/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/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/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/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…

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.…