What have members of Sheffield Hackspace been up to this two-months?
Of course, a lot of effort was put towards moving to the new space!
Let’s find out what else some members have been up to!
R
Custom sunglasses
R found some glasses frames, and some too-big sunglass lenses, so shaped the latter to the former and ended up with some new sunglasses.
Rich
Laser-cut Skadis board
My laser cut Skadis board is finally up. I think the natural MDF looks is quite good. Plastic offsets are 3d printed of course
Tom
Gauges
As part of an ongoing project to create an interactive display based around the CubeSatSim that I have been lent I thought it would be nice to display the Solar Panel and Battery voltages in a way that was more than just ‘numbers on a screen’.
Initially I thought I’d use something like the analog dial gauges, either the voltmeter or ammeter variants.
[…] continued on https://blog.howrandom.net/37g-servo-analog-gauges/
Nik
Pinhole camera
Nik had a go at making easy swap pinhole lenses to experiment with:
The lenses
The pictures
alifeee
Adding bench supports
two videos from a recent blog post – check out the difference in wobbliness before and after I added supports.
Painting a wall-board
After getting help attaching a board to the wall, I primed and painted it in what has accidentally become the “hackspace motif”. Over time I hope to put some of the craft tools up on there.
Toying with the bus sign
I turned on the Hull Bus Sign for the duration of a gamejam, where we made the game “Penumbra” in 48 hours.
Making a hat better
I needed a hat for a holiday. I found one, but it looked ugly. So I added a nice ribbon to it instead.
Creating a light up logo
I found a bunch of bases for these “laser-cut LED lamps” at a car boot, so I’ve been cutting my own designs for them. Check out the on- and off- picture of the Sheffield Hackspace logo.
Setting up environment monitoring
With another member, I set up a Raspberry Pi with InfluxDB and Grafana, for recording and displaying data from environment monitors. I also set up an environment monitor that measures carbon dioxide levels.
There’s more information on the monitoring wiki page.
Adam
Blackstar Amp
I have picked up Blackstar Amped 1, which is a 100W amplifier with a USB-C audio interface, but also line out / speaker out. But what is VERY COOL, is that it has 2× +9V outputs for pedals. The power source is also very quiet. As a bonus I have 3d printed myself a stand that allows me to add a front pass-through of all relevant I/O ports from back of the unit. In the end this has greatly reduced the footprint of things on my desk.
As a bonus for the bonus. I’ve generated STL-s for this stand using OpenSCAD, which is an open source piece of software that allows one to render 3D objects as code. It is fairly inconsistent with commands and some things aren’t as polished as Autodesk Fusion. However, it has a bonus of being able to keep the fairly simple code in the Github and not having to pay for it.
Food thermometer hacking
Food thermometer no longer needs an app and an account in the cloud.
Food processor repair
How long does it take food graded grease to become solid? 14 years. We’ve disassembled a kMix, ordered replacement parts, and will be spending tomorrow trying to remove all that grease from the insides.
But also: You can still get all the replacement parts for this 14 year old kMix, and they’re dead cheap.
2 days later, the kMix mechanism is completely dismantled and all of its old grease has been removed. I am now letting it vent out all the petrol, before I will re-grease and assemble it again.
The only souvenir I got is the main cogwheel that I replaced just in case as it was advised online. It works. It stopped grinding and the faint grease compacting noise on the video is now gone as well.
Parametric EQ
Parametric EQ became an actual product prototype. The white square is to hide the branding, as it is not yet decided nor registered. I have ordered the case from Tayda Electronics and I managed to make everything aligned correctly with version 1.
I have since been ironing out a lot of kinks:
- Can I get a footswitch of the right length, so I don’t have to adjust the inner stopper with every pedal? (Yes)
- Can I speed up assembly of the footswitch connection? (Yes, I used JST XH and bought precrimped wired)
- Can I create a soldering jig to align potentiometers and LED fast? (Yes)
- Can I get an LED stand-offs, so I can solder them the right distance from the PCB each time and improve their rigidity? (Yes)]
BTW: Temple Audio Pedalboards have quick mount plates that you glue to the back of your guitar effects so that you can easily attach them to the board. Which is fine if you are very precise with aligning them, or you’re not bothered by them being uneven. I on the other hand, have printed a set of alignment tools.
Tube Screamer Topology Prototype
Tube Screamer topology prototype. I have moved away from 2 transistors + 2 opamps, to 4 opamps design, so I can put the whole effect in one TL074. The 2 transistors were there as an input and output buffers so it was fairly easy to switch to OpAmps with gain 1 without change in the voicing.
I am now adjusting values of some high / low pass filters on the way more to my liking, and later I will mod the tone section a bit.
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 :)