Linux Magazine Special Editions

Welcome to MakerSpace 2, an all-new collection of exciting, hands-on projects for you or the maker in your life. If you’re new to MakerSpace, here’s a short overview of what we do. This is a computer magazine, but we’re not talking about the latest Apple computers or Windows or Linux boxes – or about Android or iOS smartphones and tablets, either. This is about technology that you can use to build your own stuff. It is where you can let your ideas materialize. Or, if you haven’t had the time or don’t yet have the necessary skills, you can look at projects that others have been working on, and maybe that’s the final kick you need to start that programming class, learn soldering, or do whatever else you’ve been thinking…

Without light, nothing can be seen in photography, but with just a little background light and light brushes, you can create interesting motifs. For long exposures, you need a camera with manual adjustment and a tripod. A flashlight or laser pointer is sufficient to paint simple patterns or lettering into an on-going exposure. If you like to experiment, you might want to work with LEDs to achieve particularly interesting light graphics. I was interested in a creative approach and in trying out what can be achieved with modern pixel elements and clever programming. The idea of a light stick for light painting was born. In this article, I use a Raspberry Pi Pico to build a Micro-Python programmable LED light stick. Table 1: Materials The control does not require much…

When my trusty audio amplifier bit the dust with crackling, hissing, and sound dropouts, the speakers and CD player from the hi-fi system still worked perfectly. My idea was to replace the broken module with a Raspberry Pi at a reasonable price. If it could receive music on Bluetooth, then all of my family members could feed it from their smartphones without leaving the couch. A piggyback board from the HiFiBerry series combined with the matching system on a Raspberry Pi replaced this legacy audio amplifier. The system can play music sent over Bluetooth or other ways, and you can control it conveniently in a browser. However, the build and setup come with a few pitfalls, along with a few minor quirks in operation. A setup like this is also…

Special projects deserve special components, which is why a display with unusual dimensions acts as the basis for my living room music system. However, the path to the final version was fraught with challenges. A web radio based on a Pi Zero (Figure 1) came to life in 2018 as a lightweight tinkering project with a keyboard, mini-speakers, and a small LCD screen [1]. Now, however, it has found a permanent place on my audio/visual (AV) receiver (Figure 2). Today, it is no longer controlled by a keypad, but by an infrared remote control. This solution works well, but it has one obvious drawback: The display is simply too small for couch potatoes. Therefore, a new version of the project has been in the pipeline for quite some time but…

In recent years, Arduino has gained fame as the quintessential beginner’s board, but other boards with different characteristics might be more appropriate for certain projects. The ESP8266 is a system-on-chip (SoC), similar to the ATMEGA microcontrollers found on Arduino boards, but with a wireless communications module embedded within the same package. The main advantages of the ESP8266 are its extremely low price, low energy consumption, and relatively high performance. Apart from these advantages, the availability of a platform support package for the Arduino IDE makes it extremely accessible to beginners. Although ESP8266 modules can be used as independent microcontrollers, they are often used as WiFi modems for Arduino projects because the default firmware implements an AT modem. The ESP8266 microcontroller can be found in several form factors [1]. One that…

The sniffing described in this article occurs at the MAC layer, which is a sublayer of the Link layer. The MAC layer in IEEE 802.11 performs several functions related to the radio access service provided by the PHY layer. First, the MAC layer orchestrates access to the medium through the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. Second, the MAC layer defines an addressing scheme, wherein each terminal uses a unique identifier to send and receive datagrams. MAC addresses are made up of 6 bytes and represented by 12 hexadecimal digits. The MAC address of an access point (AP) is also the BSSID of a basic service set (BSS). The BSSID is completely different from the service set ID (SSID): It cannot be customized, it is used only…