HackSpace #60

The Internet of Things is, in theory, full of promise. It can mean our devices talking to each other and creating a seamless user experience – your alarm clock and coffee maker working together, your heating and car’s navigation system making sure your house is warm when you arrive home, your washing-machine and solar panels making sure you clean your clothes when there’s free electricity. However, somehow it never quite ends up like this. At least, not with off-the-shelf equipment. In this issue, we’re taking a look at some of the best, most useful, and most innovative DIY smart home gadgets and gizmos Never fear, though. We are makers, and if we can’t buy what we want, we’ll make it. In this issue, we’re taking a look at some of…

github.com/tomverbeure In our interview with Debra Ansell, on page 50, we briefly discuss some of the challenges of making an LED sphere. Debra solved this by arranging surfacemount LEDs on a flat plane, then diffusing the light through curved 3D-printed parts. Tom Verbeure has gone down a different route with this creation, using larger through-hole components placed into a 20-segment, 3D-printed sphere. There’s always more than one way to do it, and no one way is better than any other, as this build shows.…

bhoite.com Individually cut brass rods must be a pain to work with. Unlike copper sandwiched between layers of PCB substrate, copper wires aren’t obliged to stay where you put them; just a single wobble, a single component out of place makes the whole thing look wrong. Knowing that, and how hard it is to produce a freeform circuit sculpture, makes us appreciate Mohit Bhoite’s work all the more. This tiny model lunar lander does nothing but display the temperature, but it does it with such panache that we’ve got to include it here. Components, as well as function, are minimal: he’s used an ATtiny861A microcontroller and a BME280 sensor, powered by a CR2032 coin cell.…

twitter.com/CannonFodder Before we invented television, humans were grasping at moving images for a while. One forerunner to the idiot box, which uses persistence of vision and a series of slightly different images to create the illusion of movement, is the zoetrope. Prolific maker Brian Corteil has made this beautiful digital zoetrope, which uses 20 Pimoroni Badger E Ink® screens to display the images, a Raspberry Pi 4, and a beautiful body fabricated from laser-cut 3mm and 5mm plywood.…

youtube.com/c/PlasmaChannel Ion thrusters are fascinating things, producing tiny amounts of thrust that are pretty much useless on Earth (with our inconvenient gravity). They’re far more useful in space however, as they’re smaller than rocket engines, and they don’t need atmospheric oxygen like a jet engine. Ion thrusters are old technology, having been used since the 1950s, and now Jay Bowles, of the fascinating YouTube channel Plasma Channel, has demonstrated a way to make it better: multiple stages. By varying the input voltages and spacing between stages, Jay’s been able to experiment and produce a claimed exhaust velocity of 2.3m per second.…

hsmag.cc/SawtoothOrgan Electronic music is a fascinating hobby. You learn an awful lot, you spend a fortune on components and, in the end, you get a small box that makes a wobbly noise that’s barely different from all the other circuits you’ve spent hours putting together. Jokes aside, the learning curve for homemade analogue synths can be incredibly intimidating. So this circuit, which is priced at $9.99 on Tindie, is an inviting breath of fresh air. It’s a sawtooth organ, which uses just a handful of components to make notes when the user presses a stylus onto a keyboard. That’s it, and the simplicity means that anyone with a soldering iron will be able to put it together and bash out simple tunes.…