Liverpool Makefest 2026 Photodump

 

The Book of Making 2027 from Raspberry Pi

 

Shamefully my blogpost where I kept an up to date of everything I ever wrote for Raspberry Pi press has been a little neglected, it's on my to-do list to get it up to date. However, even despite that bit of evidence I am indeed still writing semi regularly for them. Every year they compile a Book of Making and it pulls stories/makes out and puts them together in this bumper fun book. Some years I get a story in, this year, well I have loads in it!  

 

 

It's not just me of course, there's a heap of stuff that could keep you well entertained and inspired over the winter months, but even the contents page is pretty full of images from my projects (this is a thing that pleases writers!).   There's a tiny robot build with an RP2040 Pico, not one, but two underwater rovers and more!

 

I'm glad this Meshtastic story went in, it was great fun to take this beyond setting up simple nodes and looking at plugging it into things like the ATAK application etc. Also, love a writing gig where I get to walk into the hills and set up some kit! 

 

 

I'm super in love with the TOUV (Tiny Open source Underwater Vehicle) project. It's a ridiculously simple and fun project to undertake, cheap and highly entertaining to play with once built. Check out this little video of it in all it's cuteness... https://makertube.net/w/vSYDwqJhckUgQhEmtSfnjt

 

There's even bits and bobs I'd kind of forgotten I'd written. This article on electronics enclosures was pretty well received, it can sometimes seem mundane to write this kind of content but generally people react well to these sort of "multiple ways to achieve things" type tutorials. 

 

Anyway, the Book of Making 2027 is out now and, as they say, available from all good retailers (well and those billionaires sites as well).  

 

SOURCE issue 5, Rocket Design.

 As ever, way overdue, I released issue 5 of my "pay as you feel" SOURCE magazine into the wild last week. It's all about rocket design with the main bulk of the magazine being a step through tutorial for Openrocket. Openrocket is free and open source and under active development which is fabulous. It not only allows you to design a rocket it allows you to simulate it's flight using real world motor data from commercial rocket motors. 

The magazine steps on to then take a quick look at the FreeCAD rocket workbench and how simple it is to transfer parameters from your Openrocket design into it to create exportable CAD for your rocket parts for 3D printing or CNC routing etc. 

I'm super pleased to also now have more than one line of SOURCE magazines over on the website! I don't know why but it seems an important milestone. I've got lots of ideas in the pipeline for future issues, there's certainly going to be an Open Flexure Microscope build tutorial and also a getting started with Open Street Map editing article coming soon! 

 

 

EMF Camp 2026 photo dump

 

Xteink X4 with Open Source Firmware

 If you follow me over on Mastodon you'll no doubt have seen I have a new favourite device! The Xteink X4 is a tiny eink ereader which is pretty affordable, and definitely very pocketable. At around £44 from Aliexpress I took the plunge. 

One big plus that I had read about was that there are actively developed open source firmwares available for this device, most notably Crosspoint Reader. The supplied firmwares are pretty naff and also mine and most of these come out of the box setup with Chinese localisation. So to be honest, beyond just booting the device to check it worked I immediately flashed Crosspoint reader onto it within seconds. Flashing Crosspoint Reader is incredibly simple as there is a web flashing tool. Simply USB your device to your computer, point a chrome based browser at this website and click flash! Simple. 

 

 

After flashing Crosspoint I needed to add some epubs to read. I have a collection of stuff I've bought from HumbleBundle and usually used the PDF download so it was nice to see that they are all in my library available as epub files as well. The supplied SD card was pretty useless on my unit and contained a few spurious .bin files I couldn't quite decipher so I chucked in a better quality branded SD card. Of course you can simply copy and paste Epubs onto an SD card with the SD card connected to your computer, and in many ways thats the simplest and robustest method. 

 

However Crosspoint has a couple of other options. You can set the Xteink X4 up as a hotspot, connect to it via your computer or phone WiFi menu and then it will serve a small website with a file browser and transfer options. Similarly you can also connect the Xteink X4 directly to a WiFi network and then browse to your device from another device on the same network. Lot's of options.  

 

 

 

Speaking of options. there are also other ways you can create Epub to read on the device. There's an excellent browser plugin "send-to-x4" which acts to snip webpages and export them either to computer storage or directly to a connected Xteink X4 as epub. It's kind of cool to grab a long form article of pages like Hackaday and take them in my pocket to read offline. The other really useful one for me is that Libreoffice Writer which I use every day for work can  directly export epub files. This means I can take an article I am writing and want to read a draft of, or simply write myself a to do list or some notes which I can chuck on the device. 

 

 

So yes, it's primarily an epub device. No native support for PDF or other extravagant formats. However there is an Xteink format XTC which people sometimes use for graphic heavy books (Manga comics et al). There are some online convertors and a lovely SOURCE magazine reader (and donator!) asked if XTC might be a good format for SOURCE magazine on the device. Whilst it works... let me tell you... it's too small a device for the graphic heavy SOURCE magazine to work well on as a reading experience! 

 

Aside from books and documents, there's an ace feature in the Crosspoint reader firmware that allows you to set a single custom sleep image, or a folder with a gallery of randomly picked sleep images. I knocked up this super quick little name badge bmp image in Inkscape and GIMP and now my Xteink can double up as a lanyard mount name badge! Perfect.  

There are numerous official cased for the device, but I found the nice lanyard case on one of the many printables/thingiverse type websites.  But I really like reading on the device without a case, so I ended up making a custom version of a parametric FreeCAD Rugged box project and lasercut some different thicknesses of foam to make it the correct fit where it doesn't move in the case, but isn't likely to crush the screen. 

 

So my final thoughts on it are, it's cool, I love it, even in the little rugged case its incredibly pocketable and I am actively reading more having it in my life. It reads well outdoors and indoors and whilst not backlit its perfect for bedtime reading and gets me away from my distracting smart phone!  

SOURCE Issue 4 and the Future!

 

Way later than I ever wanted too, last week I published SOURCE issue 4. It’s got three tutorials, one on GNU Radio where we step through building an FM radio receiver using a perilously cheap Realtek SDR dongle, it has a walk through orientation tutorial for NASA’s Open Vehicle Sketch Pad (OpenVSP) which is a really powerful open source tool for designing and testing things that fly. It’s rounded out with a small tutorial on reverse engineering mesh files in FreeCAD using an up and coming community workbench called Detessellate.

The other thing people may have noticed since issue 3 of SOURCE is that it now has it’s own super minimal website. This is totally down to a lovely local to me chap, Luke Farrar, who quickly threw his amazing skills at setting it up. It’s served from Github pages an auto-generates the page when I push a new issue in the repository. It’s really lovely, and it is a great solution for SOURCE.

When I first started SOURCE I publicly committed to doing 4 issues and obviously that leaves the question now that 4 are done, what next? Well. I am going to continue, I enjoy the community responses and I’ve had a few people contact me about how it’s been useful. In the last week a lovely blogpost on the GNU Radio News site appeared being really supportive of SOURCE and, brilliantly, someone on Mastodon told me that because of SOURCE issue 3 they were planning to register a hardware design with OSHWA. These are the outcomes I dig very much. I’ve also had a small amount of donations. This is definitely not the main driver (In each issue I say that if you can’t donate then you are welcome to SOURCE and much solidarity to you) but it’s nice to see people moved to support.

So yep. I have some plans for ISSUE 5! Hopefully a few bits of content that are totally different to what's come before, but also, some solid tutorial content supporting brilliant open source projects.