What have members of Sheffield Hackspace been up to this two-months?
Let’s find out what else some members have been up to!
- Our busiest open night?
- Nik - cleaning an old keyboard
- Ellie - car repairs
- alifeee
- Tom - making a lamp to celebrate a run
- Rich
- Chantel - 3D printed gingerbread star destroyer
- Will - making a replica Mengenlehreuhr clock
- Lukasz - a clean whiteboard
Our busiest open night?
One of the open nights before Christmas was home to around 20-30 people over the course of the night! That many could never have fit into our old space, but worked great across our several rooms where we are now.
Nik - cleaning an old keyboard
I dug out and cleaned my 20+ year old keyboard that had never been washed the other day, not sure if I feel comfortable showing the before photos 😬
Ellie - car repairs
I fixed my car again!!
I replaced the front brake pads and discs, bled the brake system, and she no longer judders alarmingly when braking from high speeds! Success!!
Bonus: I also replaced the entire indicator stalk when it decided to stop indicating right. Then left. Then it left full beams on constantly. Happy to say that’s fixed as well 😂
alifeee
folding book art
The hackspace already has two copies of “The Art of Electronics: Second Edition”, so when someone donated a third copy, I figured what better to do than book-art?
I’d wanted to try it out for a while. I think it took around 4 or 5 hours for the whole thing.
making Blood on the Clocktower
Over festag, I decided that I wanted to play Blood on the Clocktower, but I didn’t want to buy it for £141. So, I made my own copy using a laser cutter, laminator, and other tools and techniques.
These are a selection of pictures from my blog post: Making my own copy of Blood on the Clocktower. You can read more and use the interactive parts clicker there.
jailbreaking kindles
I’ve been jailbreaking old kindles as gifts for book-lovers. You can read more about that on my website — but at the hackspace I threw together some simple cases in the craft room. I forgot the hem the top of them, so they’re a bit rough, but they’re fine :]
power monitoring at the space
At the space, there is a Shelly Pro 3EM which monitors power usage, and provides statistics over the web. It also sends regular status reports to MQTT, which I plumbed in to Prometheus using a custom exporter.
After building a quick Grafana dashboard, we now have a power dashboard to go with the space state visualiser and the environment monitoring dashboard.
Mostly all it does is make it obvious when the heaters are turned on or not ! :]
3D printing a small remote holder
I haven’t done much 3D printing – I struggle to think of great uses for it. But, after a remote kept getting lost in my house, I decided to try out OpenSCAD and model a simple holder which can be attached to the wall. It came out quite well!
tiny shelves for the craft room
I found some tiny shelves at Scrap Dragon in Sheffield, which go great in the craft room to hold a lot of small supplies. I like shelves like this a lot better than boxes — it might get a bit dustier, but at least you can really easily see what you’ve got available!
sending images to old transport signs
Continuing my adventures in old transport signs (last time: sending commands over the Internet ), I modified the code to interpret the data as an image, which lets me send arbitrary images to the signs. I’d like to to re-write the C++ code on the Arduinos to be more efficient to allow for larger images to be sent, and to avoid edge cases.
Part of this was also fixing the Arduino Ethernet library, which didn’t use
SPI.beginTransaction()
– the modern way to send an SPI message. Because it didn’t use it, it broke my SPI
communication to the transport sign. I patched the library to make it compatible.
replacing a watch strap
I was given a watch with a broken strap and dead battery and asked to replace it.
I replaced the battery okay, apart from not being able to get the back back on – but my local cobbler popped it back on for me for free.
After losing the little double-ended screw which kept the old strap on, I found a small nut and bolt, and combined with a small strap I found in a charity shop – which was part of a luggage tag – I replaced the strap so that the watch is wearable again.
Here’s a step by step of the strap assembly, which is from top left downwards: the watch, the strap bottom, a small sew for stability, the strap top.
I then sewed a small cushion so the watch fit presentably in a small box, so I could gift it back to the person who gave me it originally :]
More ConnectedLittleBoxes
Building on what I was working on last month, I set up a server (code) and configured two ConnectedLittleBoxes to speak to each other.
Each minute, they both send a heartbeat. This is the short red flash you see.
The longest video shows the other feature, which is that pressing the button on one box lights up the other box. Pressing the button on the other box turns both boxes red.
The eventual idea is to put each box in a separate house. If your box lights up, the person with the other box must have pressed the button. You can let them know you are close to your box by pressing your button, which they will find out when their light turns red.
The final touches I have to add is to make a nice enclosure for the boxes. Probably laser cut for now. Eventually, it would be nice to make out of hardwood.
Tom - making a lamp to celebrate a run
Designed up, and then 3D printed and laser cut a lamp.
It’s the elevation profile and route from my partners run of @dragonsbackrace in 2024.
Rich
putting up a hardwood shelf
The hackspace still has some spare hardwood left over for members to use or purchase, and Rich decided it would make a good shelf.
That bit of hardwood looks pretty good as a shelf!
I used the belt sander and table saw at the hackspace and had help from several members :)
3D printing a stocking
In absolute terms it might not be impressive, but it represents a lot of firsts for me. I managed to copy a design on paper, scan to inkscape, import to Fusion and build a model. Also managed a dual colour print from Prusa Slicer. And I think it came out quite well. I’ve also uploaded the design so you can personalise your own.
https://www.printables.com/model/1525351-personalised-christmas-stocking-tree-decoration
Chantel - 3D printed gingerbread star destroyer
I recently printed a gingerbread star destroyer, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out
Will - making a replica Mengenlehreuhr clock
Model of the “Mengenlehreuhr” clock in Berlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengenlehreuhr - showing the time 18:41 (in the last pic). Oak base from our wood pile which came up really nicely when sanded and oiled.
Original clock and code https://www.instructables.com/3D-Printed-Berlin-Uhr/ — and ported to ESP32-S3 on “M5stack Atom Nano Lite” with a bunch of changes.
Printed on my brand new Bambu P2S, I think the rough PEI bed did a good job with the translucent filament (Bambu PETG Translucent Grey) front pieces, took quite some fiddling around before I settled on a continuous up-down pattern which refracts the light nicely. The rest of the plastic is PLA Metal “Iron Grey”
Printed some TPU feet but I’m not mad happy about them (a bit slippery compared to rubber), it will do for now.
Lukasz - a clean whiteboard
The large whiteboard was recently mounted to the wall, and still had stuff from the old space on it. It’s been cleaned and ready for anything – probably more electronics diagrams…!
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 :)