BuildBrighton Hackspace

How We See Ourselves

Philip Cunningham — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:07:31 +0000

When I was kid we drew pictures of ourselves and our school put them on a tea towel to sell to parents. Strange that even as a ten year old I knew I wanted to be a programmer (3, 10).

Weekly summary of BuildBrighton elsewhere online (May 21st)

toby — Tue, 21 May 2013 05:00:03 +0000

This is an automated summary of what’s been going on with BuildBrighton on the interwebs this week.

	Shared Re: [brighton-hacker-space] Re: For Sale: Alesis M1 Mk2 Active Monitors £100. Re: [brighton-hacker-space] Re: For Sale: Alesis M1 Mk2 Active Monitors £100
	Shared Hack The Space & laser training tonight.. Hack The Space & laser training tonight.
	Shared Laser Operators. Laser Operators
	Shared Artwork for screen printing PCBs. Artwork for screen printing PCBs
	Shared New member – introduction. New member – introduction
	Shared Thanks and Inspiration. Thanks and Inspiration
	Shared We need one of these!. We need one of these!
	Shared Re: [brighton-hacker-space] We need one of these!. Re: [brighton-hacker-space] We need one of these!
	Shared More crazy Farnell packaging. More crazy Farnell packaging
	Shared Wired magazines. Wired magazines
	Shared Hot glue goodness. Hot glue goodness
	Shared Tonight. Tonight
	Shared LittleLGP – Linear Genetic Programming in Clojure. LittleLGP – Linear Genetic Programming in Clojure
	Shared LittleLGP – Linear Genetic Programming in Clojure. LittleLGP – Linear Genetic Programming in Clojure
	Shared Workshop next week. Workshop next week
	Shared Messing about with 7 segment displays and a PIC 16F628a. Messing about with 7 segment displays and a PIC 16F628a
	Shared The RepRap. The RepRap
	Shared Wheelchair motors. Wheelchair motors
	Shared A tidy workplace is a happy workplace!. A tidy workplace is a happy workplace!
	Shared Fwd: [GreenCycleSussex] OFFER: Box of various micro chips (Miller’s Road or Steyning). Fwd: [GreenCycleSussex] OFFER: Box of various micro chips (Miller’s Road or Steyning)
	Shared Anyone Around This Evening?. Anyone Around This Evening?
	Shared Laser location. Laser location
	Shared 9 gram servo motors. 9 gram servo motors
	Shared Brighton Mini Maker Faire — Call to Makers!. Brighton Mini Maker Faire — Call to Makers!
	Shared Call for project write-ups. Call for project write-ups
	Shared Getting Stated with the Ardunio. Getting Stated with the Ardunio

Call for project write-ups

andrew — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:17:10 +0000

For this year’s event, we’ll be producing a small zine to help people get started on some simple maker projects.

It will feature a few easily-accessible projects across a range of tech and craft types, from fabric crafts to simple electronics, using materials and tools that are easy to find, cheap or free, or recycling stuff you may already have around you. They might be projects you can do alone, or in your school, with your kids (or your parents). Maybe useful stuff, maybe just fun.

It will also have some pointers to essential online resources to help people get started making, and articles on the maker spirit, and why we enjoy it so much.

We’ve always seen Brighton Mini Maker Faire as a spark to ignite making in as many people as possible. We love it when people come to the event, and go away feeling like they’ve discovered a whole new world. We want them to take that feeling home and make something. But jumping from inspiration to action isn’t always easy. We all need a little help to get started on something new (or to re-discover something old). The zine (along with the workshop programme we’re developing) is part of that. You can read more about the inspiration for the zine, and some of our creative ideas, over on my blog.

To make it happen, we need great project ideas and write-ups. That’s where you come in. We want you to submit your ideas for a project that you can write up, in an engaging and accessible format. We also want to hear from anyone else who can support us with illustrations, photography, distribution or sponsorship.

Brief for writers

Specs

500 – 1,500 words
Ideally with high-quality photography for key steps (but we may be able to help with this)

Timing

Send in your project ideas: Now — 10th June
Deadline for completed write-ups: 15th July

Fees

We will pay writers a (modest) fee for original submissions.

Project guidance

Uses readily available materials: recycled or free, or cheap to buy, and not requiring special expensive tools
For example, for electronics projects, we’d rather they made use of a toy from a high-street shop, that needed a special order from an online component supplier with a minimum £20 order.)

Beginner-level difficulty
We’re looking for a range, so not everything has to be do-able by a 7 year old. But if your project assumes some level of skill, provide links to places where readers can pick up that skill.

Any age
It could be something aimed at kids, or grown-ups. Or something for families to do together.

Leads on to something more challenging
What could someone who made this make next? Is there a website where people share projects like this, or a meetup group or a book they should read?

Any kind of make
We want to represent a broad range of interests, materials, skills and crafts. The exceptions are projects that are already well-served by mainstream magazines – if there’s a magazine about your kind of project on the shelves of WH Smith, we don’t need to cover it here.

Inspiring
It can be something useful, or something silly. So long as you enjoy writing about it, and others enjoy making it.

Articles
We’re also looking for articles on making as a hobby or culture. Why kids should be taught to be makers in schools, or how you’ve made things together as a family. All the great materials you’ve found in skips, why you love LEDs, or your collection of hot glue guns or sewing machines. What inspired you to become a maker, or people you’ve known who had the maker spirit. Inspire us!

How to contribute

Read the guidance above, and send in your ideas using the form below. Any questions, leave a comment on this post.

Loading…

This project is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Messing about with 7 segment displays and a PIC 16F628a

Chris Holden — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:37:00 +0000

I scored a load of cheap 4-way 7-segment displays off eBay the other day. They worked out at about 30p each so I got 20 and stuffed them in a drawer. Then I thought that perhaps it'd be nice to get one working, just so that we know what to do with them in future projects (one already springs to mind).

So here's a simple 4-way 7-segment LCD display hooked up to a PIC 16F628a microcontroller. We're running the PIC off it's own internal oscillator (there's nothing time critical going on here) and will use a simple direct drive method to make them light up.

Basically this means we'll light one digit it a time - lighting the appropriate segments of each character in a 4-digit number and waiting a few milliseconds before moving on to the next. Persistence of vision will give the illusion that all characters are illuminated at the same time.

These particular 7-segment displays have a common anode - each digit shares the same "power" supply and we need to pull different pins to ground to get the different segments to light up. The display also includes decimal point characters and a double-dot (colon) character for use with digital clocks and so on.

While you can use a driver chip (like a MAX7219) or even a shift register or two to display the digits on these, it's easy enough to drive them directly from the i/o pins. Eight segments and 4 characters means 12 pins are needed to display all four characters at a time.

As ever, we're using Oshonsoft PIC Simulator to write the code in BASIC and using the keyword SYMBOL to assign a descriptive word to an i/o pin. This is really handy because when it comes to laying out your circuits on a PCB, sometimes you need to flip pins around to simplify the layout. Instead of going through all your code and changing every reference to PORTB.0, for example, you simply change which pin the symbol points to.

Here's the code. It's just a counter, but demonstrates how to display all 4 digits at the same time:

Define CONF_WORD = 0x3f18 
Define CLOCK_FREQUENCY = 4 

AllDigital 

Config PORTA = Output 
Config PORTB = Output 

Dim i(4) As Byte 
Dim tmp As Byte 
Dim j As Byte 
Dim k As Byte 

Symbol pin_a = PORTB.3 
Symbol pin_b = PORTB.0 
Symbol pin_c = PORTB.7 
Symbol pin_d = PORTB.5 
Symbol pin_e = PORTB.4 
Symbol pin_f = PORTB.6 
Symbol pin_g = PORTB.1 


init: 
     'rather than a single variable counting 0-9999 
     'we'll keep track of the tens, hundreds, thousands  
     'and units separately to make displaying them easier 
     i(0) = 0 
     i(1) = 0 
     i(2) = 0 
     i(3) = 0 


loop: 

     For k = 1 To 100 
      
          'activate all four characters, one after the other, 
          'but really quickly in succession 
           
          For j = 0 To 3 

          tmp = i(j) 
          'turn off all characters 
          PORTA = 0x00 
          PORTB = 0xff 

          'pull the appropriate segments in each character 
          'low in order to light them up 
           
          Select Case tmp 
          Case 0 
          'a,b,c,d,e,f=low g=high 
          Low pin_a 
          Low pin_b 
          Low pin_c 
          Low pin_d 
          Low pin_e 
          Low pin_f 
          High pin_g 

          Case 1 
          'b,c=low 
          High pin_a 
          Low pin_b 
          Low pin_c 
          High pin_d 
          High pin_e 
          High pin_f 
          High pin_g 

          Case 2 
          'a,b,d,e,g=low 
          Low pin_a 
          Low pin_b 
          High pin_c 
          Low pin_d 
          Low pin_e 
          High pin_f 
          Low pin_g 

          Case 3 
          'a,b,c,d,g=low 
          Low pin_a 
          Low pin_b 
          Low pin_c 
          Low pin_d 
          High pin_e 
          High pin_f 
          Low pin_g 

          Case 4 
          'b,c,f,g=low 
          High pin_a 
          Low pin_b 
          Low pin_c 
          High pin_d 
          High pin_e 
          Low pin_f 
          Low pin_g 

          Case 5 
          'a,c,d,f,g=low 
          Low pin_a 
          High pin_b 
          Low pin_c 
          Low pin_d 
          High pin_e 
          Low pin_f 
          Low pin_g 

          Case 6 
          'a,c,d,e,f,g=low 
          Low pin_a 
          High pin_b 
          Low pin_c 
          Low pin_d 
          Low pin_e 
          Low pin_f 
          Low pin_g 

          Case 7 
          'a,b,c=low 
          Low pin_a 
          Low pin_b 
          Low pin_c 
          High pin_d 
          High pin_e 
          High pin_f 
          High pin_g 

          Case 8 
          'a,b,c,d,e,f,g=low 
          Low pin_a 
          Low pin_b 
          Low pin_c 
          Low pin_d 
          Low pin_e 
          Low pin_f 
          Low pin_g 

          Case 9 
          'a,b,c,d,f,g=low 
          Low pin_a 
          Low pin_b 
          Low pin_c 
          Low pin_d 
          High pin_e 
          Low pin_f 
          Low pin_g 

          Case Else 
          High pin_a 
          High pin_b 
          High pin_c 
          High pin_d 
          High pin_e 
          High pin_f 
          Low pin_g 

          EndSelect 

          'activate the appropriate digit 
          'by giving it power 
           
          Select Case j 
          Case 0 
          High PORTA.1 

          Case 1 
          High PORTA.2 
          Case 2 
          High PORTA.6 

          Case 3 
          High PORTA.3 
          EndSelect 


          'wait a little while for the LED to appear lit  
          '(thanks to persistence of vision it will appear lit 
          'all the time when actually it's really flickering) 
          WaitMs 2 

          Next j 
     Next k 

     'increase the units variable 
     i(0) = i(0) + 1 
      
     'if we've rolled over to 10, increase the tens 
     'by one and set units back to zero 
     If i(0) >= 10 Then 
          i(0) = 0 
          i(1) = i(1) + 1 
     Endif 
      
     'if we've rolled over to 100, increase the 
     'hundreds by one and set tens back to zero 
     If i(1) >= 10 Then 
          i(1) = 0 
          i(2) = i(2) + 1 
     Endif 
      
     'if we've rolled over to 1000, increase the 
     'thousands by one and set the hundreds back to zero 
     If i(2) >= 10 Then 
          i(2) = 0 
          i(3) = i(3) + 1 
     Endif 

Goto loop 
End                                                

And here's a video showing the counter in action:

LittleLGP – Linear Genetic Programming in Clojure

Philip Cunningham — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:35:57 +0000

LittleLGP is a little genetic programming (GP) project written in Clojure. It evolves populations of two distinct classes of programs that have a typical predator prey relationship. One class of program seeks to destabilize the environment whilst the other seeks to bring order.

This project was my first attempt at writing a GP program and my first program written in Clojure. Overall, I really enjoyed working on it, even if the final product isn't great! The code is available to peruse on Github.

Continue reading →

LittleLGP – Linear Genetic Programming in Clojure

Philip Cunningham — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:35:57 +0000

Continue reading →

More crazy Farnell packaging

Chris Holden — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:28:00 +0000

We love Farnell here at Nerd Towers - pop onto their website click around a bit and the next morning, a parcel arrives with all your lovely goodies. Sometimes you can leave it as late at 7pm and your stuff still arrives the next day! But sometimes their choice of packaging leaves a bit to be desired.

Here's what arrived this morning, and the carton it arrived in:

The speakers came in their own dedicated and padded boxes too. Surely a padded envelope would have sufficed?

Artwork for screen printing PCBs

Chris Holden — Tue, 14 May 2013 21:41:00 +0000

Since we got back from Berlin (after a two-day drive on each leg of the journey, and a total of 1,500 miles there and back) we've been giving lots of thought to silkscreen printing for making lots of PCBs.

We've gone back-and-forth with numerous designs, going from A4 panels (so front and back would fit on a single A3 frame) to 160x140 panels (double-sided 200x200mm copper clad board is easier to source than A4 sheets) to eurocard and back to A4.

After about six iterations of the same board design - each time reducing the number of jumpers and vias on our double-sided board, we still couldn't get a design which used as much of the copper board as possible: no matter what the layout, there was always quite a bit of waste on each panel. And then we had an epiphany moment....

We've been concentrating on making a hex-based board for the Dreadball Board Game. And because the miniatures stand on 25mm clear bases, we've been concentrating on making each "cell" on the board at least 30mm - allowing for a 2mm border around each cell, this allows a 28mm push-button surface (miniatures for other games are sometimes provided on 28mm round slotta-style bases). And it's because of these relatively large cells we can't get them to fit nicely on any "standard" sized copper clad board. But here's a thought....

The miniatures in Dreadball are much smaller than standard (read Games Workshop) miniatures. Originally they were designed to be used as-is from out of the box, but a lot of players complained that they fall over easily (because the bases are so ridiculously small)

So Mantic included some clear acrylic bases for the miniatures to stand up in. But the bases provided are pretty lame too - the recess for the rounded player base is too large and the miniature doesn't clip in nicely - it needs to be glued into place. Interestingly, all of the pre-release artwork for the game shows the miniatures painted up minus the clear acrylic bases, which suggests they were just added in as an after-thought.

So already we're thinking of cutting some fresh clear acrylic bases for the miniatures, to make the playing pieces clip in nicely instead of flopping about or needing to be held in with glue.

And then we got to thinking - if we're going to laser-cut our own bases from 3mm sheet acrylic anyway, why not make them a bit smaller and just reduce the size of each cell in our game board?

And that's exactly what we did.
This time, we're using cell dimensions of 20mm. Allowing for a 1mm border all around (a 2mm gutter between each space on the board) means each hexagon needs to be at least 22mm high.

And by some bizarre coincidence, when we placed a pattern of 8 hexes across and 4 hexes down, reduced to 22mm instead of 30mm, the total PCB layout fits exactly into a 160mm x 100mm rectangle!

This gives us four "blocks" of 8 hexes per module. Which is a nice number for handling with software/firmware - certainly much easier to deal with than 3 columns of 8 which is what we had on our latest design. And the amount of waste around the outside of the module is kept to an absolute minimum. So all in all, we're quite happy with this latest design.

Making a 3x3 grid of these modules gives us a board of 24 hexes across and 12 hexes down - a few over from the 11x23 that make up the widest points of a Dreadball pitch, but sufficient to make a playable surface. Double-sided eurocard-sized copper board is all over the internet, so this design is perfect in terms of ease of manufacture as well as for sourcing the materials. The final board made up from these modules is a decent size too:

Eighteen inches isn't a massive board, but is still a pretty decent size. And when the board is all made up with etched squares and flashing LEDs, the closer proximity of the miniature playing pieces will make for a slightly more chaotic-looking game - just like a real futuristic sports simulation!

We're planning on getting a silkscreen made up with the top design on top and a mirrored copy of the bottom design on the bottom of an A4 sized frame. This will allow us to use the same screen for both sides of the board - we just need to mask off the unused bit and make sure the board is correctly lined up before each print, but that's not a major issue... is it?

Weekly summary of BuildBrighton elsewhere online (May 14th)

toby — Tue, 14 May 2013 05:02:58 +0000

This is an automated summary of what’s been going on with BuildBrighton on the interwebs this week.

If You Make It, They Will Come!

rowan — Mon, 13 May 2013 09:31:05 +0000

Calling Makers of All Varieties to Brighton Mini Maker Faire 2013

Yes, it’s that time of year again: The third annual Brighton Mini Maker Faire is on the horizon and we’re on the lookout for makers of every sort to help us create an even more mind-blowingly eclectic, enlightening and awe-inspiring event. If you think this could be you, read on…

Last year over 7,000 people of all ages came to Brighton’s Corn Exchange to experience a vast range of makers showing off their skills and projects, at one of the biggest Maker Faires in the country. You can read more about exactly what happened by listening to last year’s live podcasts or watching the official video.

Because it was so popular, we’ve decided to extend the event over two days this year, and will be running even more in-depth workshops and talks, so that our visitors can get more involved, learn more skills and have an even more memorable and rewarding time.

We’re looking for Makers, Educational Facilitators and other volunteers for this year’s event on 7th & 8th September. Whether you want to show off a project, teach skills to others, run a workshop or just help out, we’d love to hear from you. A ‘Maker’ can be anyone who makes things and wants to share it with others. This could include…

…and any other type of making you can think of!

Interested? You can apply to be a maker at http://www.makerfairebrighton.com/makers-2013/ between 13th May and 7th June.

Other volunteers and educators who’d like to be involved should get in touch here: http://www.makerfairebrighton.com/volunteer/

If you’re reading this and aren’t a maker, but know people who are, please help us connect with them by forwarding this post to them, or connecting us to them via Twitter (we’re @MakerFaireBTN).

And if you still need convincing, here’s what others have said about Brighton Mini Maker Faire:

“The event was incredible fun…I have never manned such a busy stall, talked to so many people or got so much positive feedback about what I was doing.” Emily Wright, maker

“Seeing kids faces light up as they learn to make stuff is just fantastic, especially when they then want to do more” Neil Ford, volunteer

“Brighton Mini Maker Faire is wonderful. Literally full of wonders.” Kerry Turner, visitor

	Shared Nerds in Berlin (again). Nerds in Berlin (again)
	Shared Fwd: [BNM] Free Accountancy and Tax Clinic at the Skiff. Fwd: [BNM] Free Accountancy and Tax Clinic at the Skiff
	Shared Screen printing PCBs. Screen printing PCBs
	Shared Hello and Laser Cutting. Hello and Laser Cutting
	Shared Rubber sheets. Rubber sheets
	Shared Call to makers. Call to makers
	Shared If You Make It, They Will Come!. If You Make It, They Will Come!