HackSpace #58

Most people eat around 1000 meals a year. Anything you do that frequently is a good candidate for hacking. Spending a little time optimising the time to make food, or the enjoyment you can get from it will pay you back every day. What’s more, food offers almost endless possibilities for getting creative, yet conventional kitchens rely on just a few methods. This issue, we’re taking a look at how to use your maker skills to make your life a little more delicious. Spending a little time optimising the time to make food, or the enjoyment you can get from it will pay you back every day Of course, it’s not all about edible delights, a personal highlight for me is Jo’s article on vinyl cutting. These versatile machines are…

hsmag.cc/3DPrintICEngine As mechanical engineering students, Aseesh Paul Bandaru and Vaishnavi Dabhade needed to demonstrate their skill with CAD to design an object with a series of moving, interlocking parts: an internal combustion engine. There’s a DC motor and a crankshaft to make the engine work, and the whole thing took over 1kg of filament. More than that – just look at it: it’s so clean!…

hsmag.cc/PKE-Meter This project really combines a few of our favourite things, with MicroPython, 3D-printed parts, and a load of electronic goodies from Pimoroni: a LiPo Amigo Pro charger, a DS-959MG servo, a Display Pack 2.0 for Pico, a 400mAh battery, and a Pico Proto prototyping board. Oh, and a Raspberry Pi Pico W. Just like in the film Ghostbusters, the PKE meter raises and lowers its arms as a response to the strength of a nearby signal, though in the case of this build, it’s looking for WiFi signal rather than ectoplasmic activity.…

hsmag.cc/KeplerCasio The Casio F-91W is a design classic. It’s inspired a few remixes since its release in 1989 (or more accurately, since hardware became cheap and small enough that home tinkerers could replace its innards with something more useful). The latest maker to turn this classic timepiece into something with more functionality is Pegor, who has replaced the watch’s innards with a load of modern equipment, including a Texas Instruments CC2640 Arm Cortex-M3 chip. Pegor’s watch is Bluetooth-capable, has a notification bar, lets the user know when they’ve got a text, and has a battery life of roughly 15 days. It’s by no means finished – we came across this project because Pegor is burned out from working on it, and is looking for collaborators. If you think you can…

hsmag.cc/DSKY We’ll admit, we first liked this project because of how gloriously retro it looks. Then we delved a little deeper, and now we love it even more. Bill Glasford has built a functioning replica of the display keyboard (DSKY) used on the Apollo Guidance Computer, the space-age avionics system used by NASA on its moon-landing equipment between 1966 and 1975. It’s a beautiful build, comprising two LCD screens, a Raspberry Pi, and three Arduinos, and featuring an array of 3D-printed parts. What’s more impressive is that it runs the assembly code that the original computer ran all those decades ago.…

hsmag.cc/TableTopArcade This head-to-head tabletop arcade machine is perfect for those occasions when you need to win at Street Fighter 2 and see the defeat in your opponent’s eyes. It’s also how mw33212 used up a load of walnut offcuts that he had after working on other projects. We’d love to say that the plans are available for all to see, but to quote the maker, “sadly I think you would be a little disappointed by my ‘plans’, which were basically just lots of Post-it notes with triangles and scribbles on them. I generally have an idea about an overall design, and then just get started.”…