What have members of Sheffield Hackspace been up to this two-months?
Let’s find out what else some members have been up to!
- Repair Café !
- Adam - hacking train and bus signs
- alifeee - train sign content cycle
- Robin - woodworking vice \& plane
- alifeee - LED coffee table
- Adam - bathroom renovation
- alifeee - ConnectedLittleBoxes
- Louise - rocketry
- alifeee - a trip to FOSDEM
- Matthew - a mini macro pad
- alifeee - lino cutting
- alifeee - Internet usage metrics
Repair Café !
In February we held our first Repair Café!
From their blog post about it:
The first Repair Cafe to run through our partnership with Sheffield Hackspace went off smoothly today :)
We had the help of lots of volunteers - Adam, Hannah, Steve, Robin, Brik, SImon, Bill, Elizabeth, Alfie and Van who did a great job on 15 repair requests. We had 2 Robot Hoovers, a large wooden giraffe, a blender, an air fryer, a food processor, a bag, some secateurs, lots of knives, an estension lead, a toaster a leopard lamp and some trousers that needed hemming!
The next cafe is on the 3rd Sunday of March, 2 to 4,30 pm so if you’ve something you’d like help repairing you’re very welcome to bring it along and see if the expertise of our repairers can help you get it fixed!
Adam - hacking train and bus signs
train signs
Adam has been hacking into the old train sign (previous mentions include: 1, 2, 3)
Firstly, he massively increased the update speed by using a different microcontroller, and some other firmware updates. Check out the speed improvement!
That moment when you cleanup 13yo library and manage to get 10fps instead of 2.
I present to you: ludicrous speed.
It is now running on XIAO Seeed ESP32C3. Same size as the pot controlling the contrast.
He also added an HTTP API so it can be updated over the Internet:
Update on the big clock:
- it connects to wifi
- it exposes a http server
- it presents 10 last messages sent to it in rotation
- it has a custom font made out of a font I found in the Adafruit repository
- it can scroll messages that are longer than the display
Update on the big clock:
- It now has a JSON based API with options to control:
- message
- vertical and horizontal alignment
- text wrap (controls the direction of scroll of the overflowing text)
- scroll speed
- colour invert
- vertical scroll.
- horizontal scroll.
- flash
some formatting tests
some effects tests
the sign installed in-situ in the space
bus signs
So alifeee brought me a new offering and just like a caffeinated squirrel I have immediately started a new project.
I have:
- removed the power source 240V 5A AC -> 5V 30A DC as the display seems to be driven okay by the 5V output of the Arduino
- Switched to 3V3 power without issues
- Made a general cleanup of the orignal wiring
- Took the driver library and made it compatible with Adafruit GFX, so it can be run by the same software
- Found the bottom row of pixels that was deemed unaddressable (have you tried looking in the high bits of the other rows?)
Todo:
- Extract the widget server library out of train signs
- Implement it in the bus signs
- Migrate to ESP32C3
- Split communication lines to two separate instances
The code is on https://github.com/sheffieldhackspace/bus-signs
alifeee - train sign content cycle
Of course, you can’t have a train sign with a nice API without having anything to put on it!
I drew a cute 24×24 version of our logo, and some other scripts (source code in https://github.com/sheffieldhackspace/train-sign-controller), which are cycled around on the sign.
Here’s a video of the content… cycling!
Of course… it looks best in the dark ;]
Robin - woodworking vice & plane
In a continuing attempt to improve the woodworking facilities in the Hackspace, I have been working on a few small projects to hopefully make it easier to make a lot of sawdust and noise on your next project.
Recently I have affixed a removable mounting for a vice on the table saw outfeed table, bringing the total number of usable woodworking vices to 2!
Additionally, I have taken a rather neglected Milbro #4 smoothing plane and converted it to a pretty spiffy scrub plane, by widening the plane mouth and adding a pretty heavy camber to the plane iron!
This is now suitable for heavy stock removal, giving users of the space another option when it comes to woodworking hand tools.
alifeee - LED coffee table
A couple of weeks ago I went to Scrap Dragon in Sheffield, and saw this coffee table which had an LED array built into it. Wonderful!
I bought it and we moved it to the hackspace ;]
There is much left to do, but I managed to connect a BBC Microbit to light up the LEDs… looks sweet ;]
and here are some pictures and videos of it so far!
Definitely looks the best when you can’t see the LEDs.
We have plans to add a frosted perspex cover, maybe some buttons and… maybe some other bits. Watch this space ;]
Adam - bathroom renovation
Saphy Belle and I made a loo window still out of the wood purchased and processed in the hackspace
😂 Put that on the website.Yorkshire Water sent us a letter back in November, to say that we have a leak. It turned out to be a leaky cistern. So as we do, we overreacted, stripped down the old loo completely and rebuilt it.
alifeee - ConnectedLittleBoxes
This month(s), I finished a little project, which is two little boxes.
When you press a button on one box, the other box (which can be anywhere across the world so long as it’s connected to Wi-Fi) will light up — and vice-versa.
Here’s a breakdown of the box hardware:
And a video of them working. The first video shows what happens if both boxes ‘respond’ (they both go red).
The second video shows what happens if there is no response (the light goes off with no effect).
Code and more information is on https://git.alifeee.net/box-server/about/.
Louise - rocketry
I finished building a 4” LOC EZI-65 which I modified to add an AV bay and slightly shortened it. It’s flown twice now.
The first flight on an I216 which got my level 1 Cert and a new UK record for handicapped rockets.
The second on a H225 without the AV bay and just an altimeter in the nose cone. Which ticked off my L2 qualification flight for motor deploy and tried to grab the H handicap record but it he altimeter didn’t record the flight. Im still gunning for the H record and have a H500 so 🤞 the weather is good for the next launch event.
alifeee - a trip to FOSDEM
I went to FOSDEM for the first time this year. Having been once each to EMFCamp and Chaos Computer Congress, I guess FOSDEM was next on the list. I nearly went last year but I had basically just got back to the UK by the time it started.
This year, I’d been meaning to go on a trip to Paris anyway, so I bought a couple of Eurostar tickets and organised a two week trip (FOSDEM, visiting a friend who in France, and a few days in Paris).
Overall, I enjoyed it a lot! As ever…
…read more on the blog post I wrote: https://blog.alifeee.net/2026/02/fosdem/
From that post, here are some stickers I picked up.
Matthew - a mini macro pad
Got the Keybow mini to work with two layers, giving me a whopping extra key, from 3 to 4.
https://gitlab.com/RincewindLangner/keybow_mini_2_layers_basic(the key on the right also changes layer but didn’t show it).
alifeee - lino cutting
I tried out a bit of lino cutting and printing of my favourite dog.
alifeee - Internet usage metrics
In January, there was an endpoint added to our router that showed upload/download bytes.
I put this onto our Grafana, and now you can see it on the display. It’s not actually that useful as it shows internal traffic as well as external.
That’s all
That’s all for this month! Remember, you can:
- come and visit the space! https://www.sheffieldhackspace.org.uk/calendar/
- learn more about on joining on the wiki: https://wiki.sheffieldhackspace.org.uk/
- add your own items to next month’s month update: https://github.com/sheffieldhackspace/month-updates
Until next time :)