What have members of Sheffield Hackspace been up to this two-months?
Let’s find out!
- Workshops
- Dave - machining toe clamps
- alifeee - fixing my bike mudguard bracket
- Jon - creating board game “puzzle boxes”
- Nathen - laser-cutting an arcade stick from acrylic
- alifeee - sewing repairs
- alifeee - creating a laser-cut map
- alifeee - jailbreaking a kindle
- James - creating a smart home letterbox
- Adam - fixing a hall effect sensor
- Adam - creating an oscillator
- Nathen - practicing cable lacing
- Kieron - painting miniatures with an airbrush
- alifeee - making a ribbon cable to breadboard connector
- alifeee - testing laser-cut stamps
Workshops
As well as our Dice-Casting workshop, we have had a workshop about making personal websites, and we’re soon due one about MicroPython.
Keep an eye on the workshop-wall in the space, and in the Discord for upcoming events!
Dave - machining toe clamps
Slowly making myself a few toe clamps. I was doing them in aluminium but decided to try my luck in steel.
Essentially ran the same tool path but swapping to a 3 flute end mill and it came out within +-0.05 🥰🥰
alifeee - fixing my bike mudguard bracket
Bill graciously helped me measure, cut, and bend a new bracket to hold my mudguards in place. For a while now, it’s been rattling as I bike down the street (a good stand-in for not ringing your bike bell), but more annoyingly, the panniers keep falling into the wheels.
Hopefully, this incredibly shiny new piece stops some of that.
Jon - creating board game “puzzle boxes”
Some of you may have seen me in the space spending forever making “Puzzle Boxes” for my wedding… Well I’m pleased to say that they are finally complete!
As far as our guests are aware, they are the table name markers and also designed to hold a bottle of wine to function as gift boxes for various people afterwards.
HOWEVER, in the middle of the speeches we will ask guests to lift the boxes from the base, because inside the box is where we have hidden their wedding favours!
Unfortunately for them, they will find the boxes locked with a combination padlock.
In the bases are hidden a series of puzzles, which when solved will give them the padlock code in order to open the main box.
Nathen - laser-cutting an arcade stick from acrylic
From a pile of laser cut acrylic, I have a custom arcade stick. Just playing with that stupid stuff people put on their windscreen as a design for the stick.
alifeee - sewing repairs
I used the sewing machine to both fix some bag straps for a tote bag, and to hem some trousers.
alifeee - creating a laser-cut map
I used the laser cutter to make a gift map-frame of a journey to Europe of mine and someone’s.
First, I downloaded a Shapefile of the world’s geography from https://www.naturalearthdata.com/, converted it to an SVG with https://mapshaper.org/, and cropped it to an appropriate size.
Then, I collected traces of the trains, buses, and boats we’d taken following my own instructions, and then overlayed the two SVGs, and had to hand-stretch them to match up properly.
Finally, I played around with laser cutter settings with a smaller image to get a nice engrave depth and tested different types of wood. I was also playing around with painting it, but I think the unpainted version looks nicer.
alifeee - jailbreaking a kindle
It doesn’t take much to install custom software on a kindle. There are guides out there and a wiki about it. Doing so lets you install KOReader, an open source document viewer for e-readers, with many more features and accessibility options than the kindle’s default reader.
James - creating a smart home letterbox
A custom arm for ZigBee door sensor on letter box.
Using Home Assistant it provides a push notification (using Pushover) when the post has arrived.
As a bit of ironic fun, I set the alert sound to the old AOL “You’ve Got Mail” sound.
You can download the files on https://www.printables.com/model/1291168-indoor-letter-mail-post-box-zigbee-wifi-door-senso!
Adam - fixing a hall effect sensor
I fixed the hall effect sensor in my wife’s electric bike’s motor.
Adam - creating an oscillator
I have made myself an oscillator using DaisySeed DSP. “Made” is an overstatement as I basically merged 2 examples (an oscillator and how to use a pot with the device).
It now lives on a fancy breadboard.
Nathen - practicing cable lacing
Trying to learn cable lacing. Annoyingly the “waxed” cable I bought isn’t waxed and has some stretch to it.
Kieron - painting miniatures with an airbrush
I finished painting a couple of Space Marines which I airbrushed today, my very first time trying one and the iridescent paint came out beautifully.
alifeee - making a ribbon cable to breadboard connector
For an old project (Hull Bus Sign), I wanted to revamp the hardware, so I made these breadboard connectors. Beforehand, I’d haphazardly soldered some wires to the back of a circuitboard, which were bound to come off.
alifeee - testing laser-cut stamps
I got a few ink pads as a gift a few months ago, so I’ve been playing with laser-cutting stamps. The first attempt was with MDF, which worked “o.k.”.
Then, I bought some laser-cuttable rubber for £5 per sheet from https://laserply.co.uk/, and tried that, which worked pretty great.
That’s all
That’s all for this month! Remember, you can:
- come and visit the space! https://www.sheffieldhackspace.org.uk/calendar/
- add your own items to next month’s month update: https://github.com/sheffieldhackspace/month-updates
Until next time :)