Top Projects

REGULAR

Hactus

By Chloe Madison

hsmag.cc/Hactus

Do you ever wish you had green fingers, but find that anything you plant just withers and dies? Well, Hactus might be the perfect houseplant for you! The cunning play on concrete and perfboard, by the artist Chloe Madison, will never need watering, and an online, plant-based cactus makes an ideal base for electric tinkering.

Right What is art? I don’t know, but I like it

SPARK

REGULAR

Lego + ultrasound vinyl cleaner

By Bas van Lieshout

hsmag.cc/LegoSpin

Things you don’t know about if you only listen to vinyl from charity shops: the best way to keep your priceless records in audiophile condition is to rotate them through a solution, while ultrasonic vibration

generates bubbles to gently dislodge the dirt and dust that accumulates in the grooves.

You can buy machines that turn the vinyl in the solution, but as the owner of plenty of Technic Lego and a 9V motor, Bas thought he’d have a go at his own implementation. This device rotates the record within the solution a set number of times and, rather than spin via the axle at the centre of the disc, it turns the edge of the disc instead (crucially, that’s the bit where no audio information is stored).

Right Bas doesn’t believe in genres; there’s only good music

SPARK

REGULAR

Copper-inlay mallet

By Cunningham Woodwork cunninghamwoodwork.com

These mallets, by Cunningham Woodwork, are a great example of a concept that we’ve touched on before: if you’re using a tool every day for your work, you want it to be the best tool that you can possibly make/afford. These are made with a traditional joint of a wedged mortise and tenon, with the handle going through the head of the mallet, and wedged in place with two different pieces of wood to keep a tight fit.

What really sets these mallets apart is the decorative copper inlays on the faces of the mallet. You might imagine that the combination of hard metal and soft wood would make this hard to get right, but if you go slowly, the copper is just about soft enough to work with on carbide-tipped tools, such as a router and band-saw.

Right By Odin, whoever wields this is sure to have some fun

SPARK

REGULAR

SPARK

Gigaduino

By Zach Hipps of byte sized engineering youtube.com/bytesized

This is no ordinary Arduino…this is a 12× scale model of an Arduino, CNCed out of wood, with a mix of wooden and 3D-printed components and connectors. And while it’s maybe a little bit impractical for embedded work, its creator, Zach Hipps, has embedded an Arduino inside it, making it an embedded, embedded device.

Left The Gigaduino makes your code twelve times bigger and better

REGULAR

Analogue + digital watch

By maker_ATOM

hsmag.cc/AtomWatch

This brilliantly bonkers design uses an Arduino Pro Mini, a DS1302 RTC module, LiPo battery, and TP4056 charging module, which protects the battery from overcharging. The components are stacked in layers, giving the watch a chunky feel on the wrist, like a Rolex or a TAG Heuer. To cut down on size, the watch face has only 30 LEDs to represent 60 minutes. Despite this, the wearer can still perceive time passing. If you don’t have a second hand/display, a digital watch is only accurate to within plus or minus one minute anyway, so it’s not as if accuracy was ever going to be a paramount consideration.

Below The 42 LEDs are connected using a technique called Charlieplexing

SPARK

REGULAR

Water-cooled Pi Cluster

By Michael Klements

hsmag.cc/PiCooler

Michael Klements has already been playing with cooling solutions for the Raspberry Pi – earlier this year he built a water cooling rig for a single Raspberry Pi, a project that he admits was “crazy overkill”. This cluster, on the other hand, makes a bit more sense. He’s used a 120 mm fan, an off-the-shelf water cooling kit, laser-cut acrylic to hold the cooling pads onto the Raspberry Pis, and eight Raspberry

Pi 4s mounted onto 3 mm MDF, with aluminium standoffs to keep some air circulating.

The build write-up he’s put together is a thing of beauty – apart from the super-computer he’s built, we’re also impressed by the clean Dremel work.

Right When it launched, the Raspberry Pi 4 had a reputation for getting a bit warm under heavy load… but this is just silly. And magnificent!

SPARK

REGULAR

Suzuki Hayabusa

By Samy

hsmag.cc/CardBike

Because of the nature of HackSpace magazine and the people who read it, we’re used to seeing designs put together in some sort of software package first. Whether it’s Inkscape, for laser-cut models, or something more advanced, like FreeCAD or KiCad, the precision you get from designing on the computer, then fabricating from those plans, gives a satisfying sense of predictability.

That’s why we love Samy’s work here. This cardboard Suzuki motorbike was modelled entirely by hand using… a picture of the bike taken from a Google image search. That’s it – but it was enough to make this incredible finished artwork.

Right Even the detailing on the engine is spot-on

SPARK