Tech Talks Pesda

 

 

It was a pleasure earlier this week to host an evening of tech talks at Canolfan Cefnfaes in Bethesda. Partneriaeth Ogwen allowed us to use their excellent community room and we were treated to a collection of great talks. Charles Gersholm  from Reality Boffins got us started and spoke about how Godot has put the fun back into coding, not just for games, but for quick tools and applications also. Along the way he highlighted how Reality Boffins are paying it forward into their community running excellent tech help drop ins for anyone having problems or fed up with their tech to come and get some help and a cuppa. (I'll be blogging on that very soon)!

Chris Huffee, aided and abetted from the sidelines by Snoof Kattekop, spoke about their frankly brilliant work over at Steam Engineers. They work ceaselessly to make science and making and related topics fun and accessible with a brilliant focus and set of skills in working with neuro-divergent groups. Fabulous. Chris also brought some tantalising hardware that can be used as a controller for the TOUV project... but I'm going to post next week about that more properly!

Finally we had the fabulous Adrian McEwen talking about his company and what drives them to do both exciting commercial work, but also to work on fascinating slower burn projects that have garnered lots of support and use. He spoke about the amazing Museum in a Box which is in use widely in a broad collection of settings, from dementia care to schools. He then rounded out a motivating talk with some show and tell of the "My Bikes Got LED" project and how it has enabled a community bike joy riding group to operate more safely and crucially, have more fun! Thanks to everyone who turned out. Diolch pawb.

 

SOURCE Issue 2 Out Now!

 

 

 Well here we are! After a lot of work I'm pleased to release SOURCE issue 2. It's larger than issue 1 and we have a collection of tutorial content rather than one big deep dive. In this issue we get started with the Godot game engine, we look at Termux that brings a linux terminal to your android phone, a little Inkscape tutorial and look at a really simple way to contribute to Open Street Map.  I also included a piece I've wanted to write for a while about combining Logseq and Synchthing for some really handy functionality. 

Here is the direct PDF link for SOURCE Issue 2.

As established in Issue 1, this is a pay what you feel magazine, and there are links in the magazine to chip in some cash via paypal or kofi. I'm committed to producing at least 4 of these but I'd love it if there was a little bit of donation, enough for me to continue to give it some attention and carry on after Issue 4. Also if people are donating by issue 4 we can look at hosting this in a better way. Speaking of, DO feel free to share SOURCE, you can host it, compress it and email it, seed it, whatever, lets make it spread the opensource knowledge far and wide!

So I now turn to Issue 3. I think it's going to focus on some opensource tools for open hardware and generally look at open hardware related stuff! That's the "plan" so far anyway!

Printing the Mundane Can Be Rewarding

 

I'm still, after all these years, in awe of 3D printing and what it allows me to create and make. Today is a good case in point, my Prusa mini + is on with a longish job printing a new rear panel for  my uConsole, the uConsole is a great portable computer that runs of 2 18650 cells but they are inside a bolted on aluminium cover, and there is no battery hatch. I found a design for a back cover with a magnet hatch over on Printables and chucked it onto my machine. That's pretty magical but it's the other job I've chucked together in 5 minutes for my other machine I wanted to talk about. 

For ages I have had this really cheap set of USB lights. They are primarily deployed for adding light to take photos of stuff for articles, but often also get deployed as a temporary work light. They have swivel heads and are mounted on pretty light (but OK) tripods and are reasonably adjustable. The one thing that has bugged me about them is that there is nowhere to stow/stash the built in USB cable. I end up wrapping it around the tripod which is a mess, also is definitely shortening the lifespan of the cable, and takes ages to unwind when I want to use them.  

I whipped up a supper simple glue on slot piece. As you know I am an advocate for FreeCAD, but really, what ever tool you choose, it's just so super handy to be able to make even simple items like this in whatever CAD you choose. This took me way less than 2 minutes to create and within 5 minutes from the "I need to keep half an eye on the first 20 minutes of this uConsole job what else can I do" moment it was on the printer. 

20 minutes later and it's glued onto the pair of lights.  The slot allows me to insert a length of hook and loop, which I have in my sewing box, to make a simple tie down system for the wrapped USB cable. Such a handy solution. 

So Yeah! Whilst I might catch your eye making  DIY Tiny Opensource Underwater Vehicles, I flipping love 3D design and print for these little practical doohickeys. Finally, many moons ago I wrote an article for Hackspace magazine about a similar theme  of 3D printing functional things. Was reasonably popular at the time in Issue 36.

Testing the Tiny Opensource Underwater Vehicle (TOUV-1) and Makertube

I acknowledge the irony of posting about Makertube on this old (est 2007) blogspot (google hosted)... I'd love to move everything towards the fediverse and away from the capitalist monoliths but this blogspot is almost like a listed historic building... one day I may migrate it. 

That aside, above is a circa 1 minute video of the TOUV-1, a small brushed DC motor powered tiny underwater vehicle. I'm writing an article about the design/build for Raspberry Pi magazine (I'm using a Pico plugged into my StoRPer board for a controller!) and will get the source released in the next week or so. It's been a fun first foray into underwater stuff and I'd love to create more. 

And yes, it's my first video posted to Makertube a maker themed peertube instance. It's pretty straightforward to join and use and it's a PLEASURE that there are no adverts! I don't plan to take down my Youtube account (hell somewhere out there there is a Vimeo account as well!) but in the future all my sporadic video stuff is heading to the fediverse. Do give me a follow over on Makertube!

DIY Bike Stem/Feed Bag With Bonus Tent Recycling

 

 

 

Spent a little time today knocking up a first attempt at a DIY Stem/Feed bag for on the bike. The idea is that you have a set of loops around the bag to shockcord or velcro onto the handlebars and then some more webbing loops across the bottom panel to connect to the fork crown so the bag stays snugly in place. The main grey material is some pretty thick vulcanised fabric I bought a while back specifically for bag making but the bag is lined with, well, my old tent!

A couple of weeks back I travelled up to Open Hardware Summit to both check out the talks and stuff, cover it for Raspberry Pi magazine, and to help run a panel on Opensource Rocketry. In a fit of cheapness and adventure I schlep'd up on the train with camping gear and camped a bit out of town. We own loads of tents but I decided to take this 25 yr old Coleman 2 person tent. It's not a very lightweight tent but it was a good balance of size and weight for carrying it but not walking long distance with it, versus having a reasonable bit of room. It hadn't been used for a while so I re-waterproofed it the week before the trip. Sadly... whilst I spray treated it, I failed to generally inspect the seams and they'd failed in numerous places. I'd already patched and fixed numerous parts of it, so on return home, I decided to end of life the tent and use it for parts!

 

 The bag is lined and I've used a part of the tent outer for the liner, and also for the small drawstring lid. I also used some of the binding from the tent for the binding around the upper edge of the bags main section.

 

I love my sewing machine! It's a Brother FS60 which I was given by a family member. It's really good, but projects like this definitely show that it's a machine mostly for fancy stitches in fine materials as opposed to stitching through multiple thick layers of fabric and webbing.  I spent a lot of time struggling with the machine and I'm definitely up for picking up something a little more industrial at some point.

 

 

The bag works well, I'm obsessed with these super handy ranger bead knots which work well to cinch up the top section of the bag.  There's plenty of space in it for even the largest water bottle. I'll use this one a little, but I'd like to make a matching pair eventually, but will probably try a few different designs. I've seen someone using using a rectangle as 3 sides of a square body and then an L shape rectangle to make the base and final side, seems like it would be simpler to produce. Also lots of people add pockets and other features which I'm keen to explore. There's also stuff to think about with the webbing mounts. I could make machine stitching easier by not making the webbing run through the bag seams, but also could potentially make bags that could be used not only mounted to bike handlebars, but potentially front fork bottle cages and also to other objects/rucksacks/packs etc.

Tiny DIY Knife from Hacksaw Blade

A lifetime ago I was really into Locksport and in particular into making manual tools and picks, I'd often use hacksaw blades as a cheap stock of very hard decent steel. I've also always wanted to tinker with knife making and today the synapses all fired at once and I made this.

 

 Starting with a small length of hacksaw blade I made a crude drawing on some card, cut it out and glued it to the stock. Ages ago I bought one of those tiny, cheap, yet surprisingly useful 12V belt grinders. I could do with making some jigs/holding to make my bevels absolutely correct but for half an hour of off hand grinding it's not the worst for a first attempt.

 

I ground out the original hole to accomodate the little piece of brass tubing I'd found and I also ground a hole (this steel is incredibly hard to drill unless you temper it and re harden) and throughout the grinding I kept cooling the blade in water so it didn't lose it's hardness. 

 

Then a super quick little bit of design work in FreeCAD and some 3D printing it was time to assemble. The scales are printed in PETG and I've used some epoxy resin to hold it all together. Despite my grinding it's wicked sharp so I deffo need to come up with a small sheath. Finished off with a small lanyard it's been a good fun little project and it's possibly inspired me to look for a larger piece of steel for further attempts! 

 

SOURCE Issue 1 out now! Computational Fluid Dynamics

 I've been tinkering on two things a lot for the last couple of months. One has been an odyssey into learning Computational Fluid Dynamics using the amazing CfdOF FreeCAD add on workbench. The second is I've been wanting to, for a long time, learn some kind of opensource tool for page layout/design.

 In an effort to create a commitment to this learning I've decided to launch something called "SOURCE". SOURCE is a little home for me to place longer tutorial content that's beyond what my amazing paying clients would want. I'm aiming to bring one out every quarter (the observant will note issue one is marked as June 2025 so I've given myself and extra few weeks for Issue 2)!

 It's opensource, it's made in Scribus and the archive for this issue can be found on Github here under a CC-BY-NC v4.0 license. It's free... or it's pay what you feel! There are donation links in the PDF for Paypal or KoFi, it's a HUGE amount of work even for this first 11 page experimental issue so any donations will help me keep assigning hours to it. I plan to have larger and more varied content in upcoming issues. Finally... do share it! I'd love it to be decentralised and disseminated far and wide... send the PDF in email (compression may help), host it somewhere, seed it, whatever! Download SOURCE Issue 1 here.

Picocalc, Having fun with PicoMite!

 

So I am a sucker for portable tech. In fact as well as a heap of old Palm PDA's I own things like a Pocketchip and indeed every portable so far released by ClockworkPi. So the latest offering from them, Picocalc was always going to be on my desk too!

It's a fun platform and I think I can really see it getting some traction over the next few years as it's already been hacked around on a lot by the community and it's available for $75. AND, wonderfully, it arrived after a few weeks, much better than my pay now wait 18 months for my Uconsole! 

So what is it.. well, It's a Pico compatible handheld that ships with a Pico on board flashed with PicoMite which is essentially a port of MMBasic. Assembly is gorgeous with superb instructions and the build quality is high and typical of ClockworkPi products. It's got a nice screen and you can power it from one or two 18650 cells. 

The keyboard has a click but it's pretty nice to use and feels like a spacious thumb-board. You can do a stack on it and it doesn't get to wearing! Oh and the keyboard is back-lit with two brightness levels so it's pretty lovely to work on in low light. 

Over on the forum there is LOADS going on with this. There's already lots of different bits and bobs ported to it, Micropython, Lua, Lisp and more. And that's just with the onboard Pico. Tantalisingly (and I have one on my desk for when I get to it) it's possible to insert a Luckfox Lyra board which can run full Linux environments, there's a really active thread where this is being developed very quickly, loads of game emulators, people working on getting WiFi adaptors up and running and more. Amazing. 

For me in the week or so since I built mine I've just been tinkering with it in Basic mode, I'm mucking about relearning basic and slowly working on a little suite of calculator scripts for useful things for me (descent rate calculators, parachute design stuff etc). It's such a nice object to tinker on and feels cool to be working with older languages like Basic whilst having modern stuff like a vacuous SD card to save stuff too!

Lovely Friends make Lovely Things, Steam Engineers Spoonbot

I've met some lovely people in my time as a maker/tinkerer. None more so than the mighty Snoof and Chris who form Steam Engineers. They are constantly working on expanding STEAM activities and making inclusive exciting STEAM education available and accessible. So I was delighted when they sent me a new little item they had made, Spoonbot. 

Spoonbot has a few aspects, it can be a reasonably challenging soldering kit, features some microprocessor entinkerment so could be used for beginner and intermediate STEAM activities, which the team will happily talk to you about delivering. However, it can also be bought as a fully built object from their Tindie store and it's that I was gifted. 

The lovely full colour PCB has the robot design on it and it's flashed so that you have a small rotary dial on the side with which you can adjust your Spoonbot LED level. For those that perhaps run out of spoons socially and struggle to sometimes communicate that this is a really valuable tool to tell others in the world whether your social battery is full or somewhat depleted. 

I love it as a concept and if you know someone who'd appreciate it, go buy one, you're supporting lovely people doing brilliant work. Oh... and it's fully opensource and OSHWA certified. 

Building Beautiful Things, RC2014 Mini II Picasso Ltd Edition

 

As a prelude to this post, I've stopped working, after a long time, for Tindie. No big story and you should definitely still browse and buy there. Other work and other commitments have taken priority and something had to give. I mention this as the kit in this post is an RC2014 product, if you don't know they make a range of retro computing Z80 kits. Not only that they have also spawned a load of add ons by all manner of makers. I know Spencer at RC2014 and so whenever I wrote up either a RC2014 product, or a product linked to RC2014 I had to declare an interest to my Tindie editor! So writing this post will feel unencumbered!

So yep, it's a GORGEOUS kit. These Mini II Picasso are a limited edition run and each individual kit will indeed be individual with no 2 having the same combination of PCB colour, silkscreen, LED colour, header colours etc. The kit is electronically the same as  Mini II but obviously the layout and design is spectacular. It's really nicely designed, oh, and it isn't rectangular! It's kind of shaped like a pint glass but it's hard to photo as it just looks like weird perspective. In case you don't know once built this kit can be run in a few different ways. The easiest is to grab an FTDI USB cable, hook it up and connect to this using a serial monitor, putty/minicom etc. Then, with some judicial placing of headers, you can boot into numerous environments, Microsoft Basic, CPM, CamelForth and more!

Back to the build though. The peculiarity doesn't stop at the weird shaped board and colours. There's some interesting techniques in this fun kit, some I have never done before like the sunken chip which uses a weird underside surface mount approach that is pure Picasso! Everything is a jaunty angle and yes those radial resistor arrays do have a shared hole! It really is fun, and actually no more complex than any other kit. It's supplied with a lovely lasercut set of upper and lower panels and indeed the upper panel has two choices one with access to the header sockets. I think it would be a slight challenge as a first soldering attempt, but as a second or third kit for someone it's very doable, with great instructions and there's a superb community of users online. If you fancy joining in go have a peruse of https://z80kits.com/shop/rc2014-mini-ii-picasso/

Super affordable, £9.60, Meshtastic, Xiao ESP32 s3 with Wio SX1262

 

I'm currently writing a fair bit about Meshtastic the awesome opensource off grid communications mesh networking project. I'm writing some upcoming articles on using the Raspberry Pi Pico to create a solar charged node to use as a repeater etc, but today I've been playing with currently the cheapest way to set up a Meshtastic device. 

The Seeed studio XIAO ESP32S3 & Wio-SX1262 kit contains 2 tiny (like thumbnail sized) PCB. The XAIO ESP32S3 board has USBC and and IPEX connector for connecting and (included) little WiFi and Bluetooth antenna. All of this comes in a pack for £9.60 in the UK. I ordered mine with excellent service from PiHut. There's the usual pins but also there is a tiny surface mount connector. The Wio SX1262 is a LoRa add on board and you can (but don't do it before you flash Meshtastic to the ESP32) simply click it onto the surface mount connector to create a little backpack add on for the XIAO ESP32S3 board. The Wio has another tiny Ipex connector for the included LoRa antenna. Whilst you might want to upgrade this antenna down the line, it's certainly enough to get you up and running, oh and there is battery charging on board to make this a super tiny portable unit. 

The device is supported with the Meshtastic Web Flasher tool and so it's simply a case of connecting the XIAO ESP32S3 whilst holding the (tiny!) boot button to connect it in DFU mode via a USB C cable. Once flashed you can then unplug the device and connect the two boards together. Reconnecting some power via the USBC cable, you should have a Meshtastic node all ready for configuration via either the Web Client via Bluetooth, https or serial connection, or connect up to it using the Meshtastic app on your phone. Oh and for Bluetooth... the default pairing code is 123456!

EDC Bag DIY Sewing Project

I've had this idea floating around for ages. Influenced by a few interesting designs I'd seen I wanted to make a small bag for every day carry (EDC). I mainly carry a wallet, a phone, glasses, a penknife/multitool and commonly a pen drive, yet I can often place these items in a vast variety of forgettable places! A small bag/pouch could accommodate them all. So that's the starting point of the design and quite early on I decided it needed to be small enough so that it can be used as a bag in it's own right, or as a pouch that can be chucked into a larger bag or backpack. 

Whilst I was away in FOSDEM I saw someone walk buy with an unfamiliar small Patagonia branded bag across their chest. What caught my eye was the unusual strap that also has small section of cordage at the ends. On returning I had a search around online and came across the above image. Interestingly I think that this bag is a knock off fake design that is emulating a real Patagonia "stealth" bag from a fly fishing range. It is similar but these offered on various marketplace sites for £11/12 are deffo not legit. That said I liked the general layout and the function of the bag. The other influence was I'd seen in a local outdoor equipment shop, the OMM Trio Map Pouch, which was a more complex folding design, but I loved the idea that a bag/pouch could be attached onto an existing backpack as a chest pod. 

So, to the sewing machine! This was my first attempt at a lined bag where I made the inner and outer in such a way that when finished all the seam were inside of the bag between the layers. I'd previously made some small pouches and used this cut to length style zip, but mounted the zip in the face/front of the design. Using this style of zip for a top zip actually didn't work too well and it would be better next time using a "closed end zip" which is manufactured to a specific length and has a spare couple of cm of cloth at either end of the zip so you don't need to stitch over the zip at all. That said all this means is that this attempt has slightly less neat zip ends but it's still functional.  

Working out the order of operations to assemble what I had in my head was quite a challenge. The front outer panel received some webbing loops (actually it's some nylon tough webbing in black with an overlay of decorative rainbow cotton webbing because why not!) and also received the patch pocket which was stitched on but the bottom seam left un-sewn, to be stitched when the full assembly took place.  

I definitely wanted to have 4 attachment points on the rear of the pouch so that I could attempt to use it as a pouch, as a bag with a traditional strap, and attached using the 4 points to a rucksack as a chest pod. Sewing these welded D rings into position was hard as, despite using a zipper foot on the sewing machine, its hard to stitch the webbing down when the D ring is inserted as it tends to clash with the sewing foot. 

Turing the bag all the right way around and seeing all the seams disappear is a very pleasant moment. There's always stuff I can do better, but for a first attempt at a nylon lined bag I was pretty pleased. 

It's nice to then make some add on's for the bag. Above is a para-cord box knot key ring I tied and use as an easy grab fob for the zip. It's a really nice little add on and also when the zip is closed I can push the fob through the last of the webbing loops pretty securely (see the last/bottom image). This means that it's unlikely that the zip can accidentally undo.

Another small sett of add on's is these tied elastic loops onto which I have tied a "ranger bead" knot using Paracord. The interesting thing about the ranger bead is it acts like one of those plastic cinch toggles and can slide up and down the elastic loop. This means it can be used with the bottom d ring attachment points as a "larks head" style of attaching the pod to a rucksack as a chest rig, as in the photo below. 

Finishing it off with a vinyl cut dog logo I'm really pleased with this item made out of leftover bits and bobs. I may well make a second iteration with a better zip and using some chosen fabric rather than this camo cloth I use for everything as I have loads! I could also see myself designing and 3D printing some smaller attachment components for the handle/strap and perhaps for the chest pod attachments. I know it isn't high fashion, I'm old enough to not care. Making Your Own Gear (#MYOG) feels punk as fuck and I love having items on my that I've made and that work well for my kit and my (hapless) brain!