HackSpace #79

Spending time in nature makes you happier and healthier. However, there’s more than one way to enjoy the great outdoors, and this month we’re investigating whether or not we should take our gadgets and gizmos (whether or not they’re homemade) with us. We don’t mean just taking a laptop and ignoring nature, but bringing the little bits and pieces that can smooth over some of the rough edges of the outside world. I’ll give you a little spoiler, though. We’re not going to pick a winner. This isn’t because we’re copping out, but because there’s no right or wrong here – at least not a universal right and wrong that’s the same for everyone. We don’t want to tell you what to do; we want to help you find the…

hsmag.cc/ColumnClock We’re used to seeing creative ways to display the time in these pages, but most of the time, that trends towards complexity. The marble clock we featured in issue 78, for example, was a masterpiece in needless complexity. This clock by ReallySrry takes the opposite approach. It has just two moving parts, just like an old-fashioned analogue clock. In fact, the maker has repurposed an off-the-shelf clock mechanism bought for under $10, so there’s no need for fancy microcontrollers or anything that needs programming. As it’s built on a standard clock assembly, this device works in a pretty familiar way. The time is displayed on two concentric cylinders, with the outer white cylinder showing the hours and the inner blue cylinder showing the minutes. And that’s it.…

hsmag.cc/DNALamp Kostiantyn uses a laser cutter to score the inside of two wooden strips of walnut veneer, making them flexible enough to wrap around a cylinder. He brushes them with resin, so when the resin dries, it holds the shape of a spiral – do this twice, and you’ve got the beginnings of a DNA double helix made in wood. Add a plywood base, a strip of addressable LEDs and a PAJ7620U gesture sensor, plus an ESP8266 controller, and you’ve got a unique gesture-controlled desk lamp. What we love about this project is that the woodworking element is just about possible to recreate without the laser cutter. All you need is a hand steady enough to cut hundreds of tiny lines to the same thickness, direction, and depth, and then…

hsmag.cc/FalloutCyberdeck If things keep going the way they are, humanity might be reduced to living underground, eking out a subsistence living and waiting for the radiation on the surface to reduce to such levels as we can repopulate the earth. Let’s cross our fingers that this doesn’t happen – but if it does, this cyberdeck, built by Eric B and inspired by the video game (and now television series) Fallout. The active electronics are housed within two layers of conductive insulation, acting as a Faraday cage in the event of an electromagnetic pulse caused by a nuclear explosion. Battery life is an impressive 14 hours, and the device is loaded with tons of information for offline consumption – useful stuff, like medical information, Wikipedia, wikiHow and perhaps less usefully, TED…

hsmag.cc/LockpickRobot We’ve had a little look at lock-picking back in a past issue of HackSpace (Issue 48). The most important thing we remember from that tutorial is that you must never pick a lock that isn’t yours. The next most important thing is that a Yale-style lock has several pins that must be pushed into place before you turn the lock. Normally you’d do this with a key – the irregular surface of a key is like that because each pin has a different amount of travel before it clicks into place and the barrel of the lock can turn. To open a lock without a key, you need to apply some gentle rotational force to the barrel (usually with a thin piece of springy metal called a tension wrench),…

hsmag.cc/SolderScroll Soldering anything, especially small components, needs at least three hands: one to hold the solder, one to hold the soldering iron, and one to hold the component. A small vice can help you here, or one of those devices with multiple flexible arms with crocodile clips to hold components in place. Despite that, soldering is still tricky. We tend to hold the spool of solder between the palm and ring and little fingers of our right hand, and thread solder toward the joint we’re working on with our thumb and index and middle fingers. It’s ungainly, and that’s why the world needs the Solder Scroll. This brilliant device makes soldering more ergonomic by allowing you to dispense any diameter of solder out of an object you hold like a…