Member Blogs

Creating a 32 Channel ADC for Raspberry PI - Andrew K
Jul 3, 2024

Over the last 12 months I had been looking at building a hydroponics set up using the Raspberry PI. I wanted a cost effective and repairable solution for handling soil/moisture measurements. There of course many HATs already available which solve many problems, but after quite a bit of research found that the HATs available severly restricted the capability of the PI and increased costs should I ever want to scale up.

Summer of Making - Kian Ryan
Jun 24, 2024

☀️ See and book for our Summer of Making! ☀️ Alongside the opening of Leigh Spinners Mill, Leigh Hackspace has launched our Summer Of Making programme of events open to members and non-members from July to September. Leigh Hackspace Summer of Making Flyer We’re offering the opportunity to try a new range of skills from 3d printing to garment making. Events are heavily discounted for members, and members also have access to the Hackspace for their own projects at other times.

Making Stage Props for the Lottery Winners - Kian Ryan
Jun 23, 2024

Before Christmas, a group of musicians walked in to the space to talk about designing stage props for their upcoming UK tour. Up front I’m going to be honest, I had briefly heard of the Lottery Winners but had no sense of how big the band had become. The Lottery Winners are a local band made good, with a Number 1 album - Anxiety Replacement Therapy, and had performed last year at Glastonbury.

Can You Make It Bigger? - A Journey In Building Arcade Cabinets - Kian Ryan
Jun 23, 2024

This one started out as an idea. Dan Hardiker from Devoxx UK contacted me with an idea: “We want to make a bunch of games with our sponsors, and play them on a bunch of small arcade cabinets. But we also want to take the cabinets to a some other events.” I like small, well defined projects, and this one fitted the bill. We can do this. Small, well defined projects.

The Hackbots Project II - Paul Williams
Mar 18, 2024

Continuing the Bot Building Process So, we’ll continue from where we left on last a little while ago with our bot building blog posts. We’d got to the MK IV if memory serves… Next on the list of things to do is to make our bot interface page nice and pretty. Enter, CSS Because we’re using a very simple webserver on the Raspbery Pi Pico W and because the code handily returned from our generateHTML() function is effectively the page that’s served by the websever; we know this is a good place to add a little customisation for our robot - make our page a little prettier.

How to get 120 disks into a single chassis - Andrew K
Mar 4, 2024

As it turns out this is a little more complicated than I expected, even when you start with a larger chassis. My drive to do this, a combination of power requirements, storage space and actually can it be done! The Chassis I have several of these from an older project These are 4RU in height, wide and deep enough to sit on a 19" rack shelf and cabinet and are quite old now, >10 years.

Creating an AppleTalk NAS - Andrew Williams
Feb 21, 2024

The Netatalk logo. Working on retro Apple Macs sometimes presents challenges in a modern context, most systems make use of either outdated or dying media which may be unreliable or difficult to locate. In my case, I’ve recently acquired a Power Mac G4 Sawtooth which while it has USB the interface is slow and wrangling files between computers using USB sticks isn’t the quickest method. For even older Macs this isn’t even an option, so you have to resort to burnt CDs, Zip disks, or floppy disks.

The Hackbots Project - Paul Williams
Jan 1, 2024

The Beginning We’ll start at the beginning, after all, it is the very best place to start! The inspiration for the robots came from wanting to make a simple project using fairly off the shelf and reasonably priced parts that young people could also get their hands on and follow allong with. Note: This post has been written a little “after the fact” so some parts will be skipped… for brevity

Disk replacement on a Powerbook G4 - Andrew Williams
Nov 5, 2023

In October 2003, I made my first leap into using an Apple device. For quite some time I’d been trying to find a reasonable and portable machine for daily use, and I had slowly gotten frustrated with the current offerings by Dell, HP, and other major laptop manufacturers. In the hunt for something new, I picked a Powerbook G4 12". This machine was my daily workhorse for several years and at the end of its life, it was stuffed into a draw and forgotten about.

Using an old webcam on modern Linux - Andrew Williams
Jun 28, 2023

The Trust WB-1200P, a webcam from the early days of USB devices. Linux is known for its good hardware support of even ancient pieces of kit. From time to time the kernel devs deprecate drivers and architectures that are no longer supported, but for the most part, you can pick up an old piece of hardware and get it running on a major release or two from the current mainline.