What I've done this year

Maybe I'm making a bit of a tradition of these yearly reviews. It'll be roughly in the order of things happening. Maybe I'll add headers for the months… There's been a lot of projects this year. Let's dive straight in.

January

I got off to a good start in January and had already completely three projects by the end of the first month.

Train Departure Board (v2)

I wasn't happy with the board using an Uno R4 WiFi (with WiFi…) and wanted it to use Ethernet. It's housed in a metal enclosure after all. I also wanted to add line drivers so I could use both sides of the display. It was also the first time I'd put the MCU on board and not just built a shield/hat.

I had already added WizNet ethernet on a previous board, so fairly confident that bit would work. I think I used the wrong SPI bus for the Arduino board but was able to work around that in software. I wrote about all of this in its own blog post.

Building PDP-11 Memory

This was fun. It was my first time using a CPLD. While the project was a reproduction of another project I'd found online, there was still much to be learnt and I ended up with a mostly working 4MB RAM card for my PDP-11. It doesn't support DMA but that is probably a logic thing in the CPLD. It too had a blog post.

It was also the first time I found the Glasgow Interface Explorer to be really useful, and inspired me to work on a few other Glasgow projects later in the year.

An LED Matrix for my Kitchen

I firmly hold the belief that all kitchens should have an LED matrix. This probably isn't an opinion shared by many others on earth, but since I have my own kitchen, I can practice what I preach. I found a cheap listing on eBay for an interesting looking LED matrix and as I've done with every other LED matrix I've ever touched, hacked it to be a network connected super display. Well, not really, but it is hooked up to Home Assistant and displays some stats. There was more detail on the blog post.

It's still quite happily running :)

Improvements to the Hackspace Electronics Area

We had a Hack the Space Day in early January and a few members interested the Electronics area, myself included, met up to discuss how we can make the area better. We listed a few things we wanted and ranked them. In the end, we settled on doing the following:

• Installing soldering extraction.
• Getting a (cheap) reflow oven.
• A digital microscope.

A lot of members had been moving away from through hole electronics, and the area wasn't particularly well cut out for it. I did the bulk of the work and 3D Printed lots of ducting adapters and things to mount the noozles (nozzle noodles?) to the bench. It ended up pretty decent!

As with a lot of the upgrades and new purchases in the space, this was a pledge drive. Some of this work continued into February a bit.

February

Lucy needed surgery!

Poor thing. Despite being spayed as a kitten, she had always experienced the "time of the month". This was quite annoying for us since she would like to leave her scent in various places, but mostly seemed annoying for her. In February though, there was some strange ooze dripping out of her. We took her straight to the vet, but my initial googling suggested it was likely a pyometra. This is where the womb and attached parts get infected. The vets initial verdict was a UTI, which was a relief. Some special food and medication and she would be fine, but unfortunately continued to get worse.

Taking her back, it was indeed a pyometra. The vet asked us if we had insurance. We don't… so it ended up being quite an expensive surgery. Worth it for little Lucy though. Besides, based on how much insurance would have cost for two cats over the years, we've saved money so far.

Lucy has recovered well since then and seems like an all-round happy cat. Incidentally, during the surgery they noticed that one of her kidneys is not attached to the bladder. This may require an additional surgery at some point, but for now is fine.

Building a new LED matrix

Starting to run out of train LED matrix displays, I declared a state of emergency and decided to build my own. It was a nice project, and the assembly is quite relaxing.

There was a separate post of course.

March

Nottingham Light Night

Every year, Nottingham City Council run a light night. It's usually quite pretty, although over the past few years I've enjoyed it less and less. However, this year I decided to wear an LED matrix on my backpack, which was kinda cool.

Build an Arduino Workshop

Since there had been some improvements in the electronics area at the hackspace, I was keen try and lower the barrier to entry for as many people as possible. I designed a workshop around building a simple Arduino Uno R4-compatible dev board. It covered applying solder paste, placing the components and using the reflow oven. I have ran it three times so far as it's been quite successful.

The LaserDisc Player

A few of us decided to try and fix a laser disc player. This turned into a several month long project which has since been abandoned. Every time we got close, there was something else which broke. We are now considering replacing the controller entirely, since most of the circuitry is for demodulating and then remodulating a PAL signal to try and improve the picture quality - this can be bypassed.

We kept detailed notes as we went, which are on the nottinghack wiki. Despite being a bit of a failure, there were lots of lessons, from disassembling firmware to understanding weird analogue stuff.

Fixing my Kenwood handheld radio

I have a Kenwood TH-D74e. It's a pretty nice handheld radio with built in packet modem, GPS and the usual other bits on a handheld ham radio. Unfortunately I left it charging too long and something died. After a bit of faffing I was able to get it working again by replacing a charge controller. While it now turns on and can be used, it still doesn't charge though, so I bought a charging base very cheaply on eBay which charges the batteries directly. Good enough for me.

April

Upgraded my nose

Those that know me know that I have too many facial piercings. My septum hosts five small rings in what people call a "stack". Until April, I was wearing two gold rings at the front and three blackened niobium rings behind those. I quite liked the way it looked, but decided to replace the neobium rings with gold rings, so now they are all sparkly.

GPIB Glasgow

I've played around with GPIB quite a few times over the years, having previously built an Arduino implementation, then wrote a driver for the IBV11 on the PDP-11 under 2.11BSD, and now I have also done an FPGA implementation for the Glasgow Interface Explorer. It's still an open PR on the glasgow repo, and likely needs a bit of cleaning up, but we can come back to it at some point.

For this I also designed a small breakout PCB. The bottom side was covered in beans, and so I called it the GPIBean.

New Oscilloscope

While debugging the GPIB stuff, I got a bit frustrated with my (lovely) Tektronix TDS420A oscilloscope. It's a beautiful thing and does everything I need from a scope, but it's just so big! I ended up buying a TDS 3014 - a very similar but much smaller scope. This now sits on a laptop arm above my monitors.

The scope has very cute plug in modules, which turned out to just be ROMs, which were very easy to overwrite and unlock the full functionality of the scope. If these things were available online, I would have bought them, despite my views on license lockouts of hardware.

May

Dade Vest

I found a Desert DPM body armour jacket online at Anchor Supplies. This is almost the same jacket worn by Dade in Hackers, except his was a slightly earlier version and had been dyed purple. I also dyed mine purple. It's pretty cool. I might wear it for EMF Camp next year.

June

Geiger Counter in the Space

I'm always keen to add more instrumentation to nottinghack, even if it might be slightly pointless. I had one of those DIY Geiger tube kits knocking around and decided to hook it up to the LED Matrix in the Studio. We now have radiation cpm reported to our Grafana dashboard.

Amusingly it took less than a day before someone taped a smoke detector to it!

Measuring Elephants

In the same vein, I decided to stick an Arduino and accelerometer to the ceiling. This is because the upstairs of the hackspace has some very noisy neighbours above us - a dance studio. I was curious about whether we could figure out the style of dancing they were doing based on the fourier transform of the vibration. That's now pushing to Grafana too, but I've not spent any effort analysing it yet.

July

Surly Maintenance

My chain was skipping so it was time for a new chain and a new cassette. I took my Surly to a bike shop around the corner form the hackspace - Nottingham Bikeworks. These guys run as a not for profit and do a lot of good for the local cycling scene. I was happy to leave this to the pros, I'm not that interested in swapping out bike parts. Rides like a dream again now.

Sea Planes

It's nice to hangout with people from the hackspace in the hackspace, but also out of the hackspace. Sam mentioned that there was a sea plane thing at a local park, so a bunch of us travelled out to watch. It was pretty enjoyable, and a nice bike ride.

I learnt a little bit about sea planes while there, but mostly went for the social aspect. I drank a club mate on a bench in the sun.

Electronics Mat

A year or two back, someone had an accident in the electronics area with some ferric chloride. I'm not sure why they thought the electronics area was a good place for this. It left quite a mess. Despite trying to clean the benches a few times, it wasn't really coming out. I put forward the suggestion of getting a silicone bench mat for the Electronics Area. It looks super swish now.

August

My Sisters Wedding

My sister got married. How nice! It was a very lovely day. I stayed with my parents at an AirBnB nearby which was the only station master's house. Quite a few steam trains went past.

Power over Ethernet Experiments

I was curious about PoE and decided to try doing an Arduino-like board which supports PoE. It worked, although this version had a small issue due to the omission of a level shifter. While the WizNet is 5v tolerant, the Arduino will not recognise 3v3 as "high" if it's powdered by slightly more than 5v. I guess the resistors in my power supply were off just a tad. I did a second version of the board which fixed this issue.

The Pixel Pump

With all this SMT-activity going on in the space, a few of us pledged some money towards buying a Pixel Pump. Andrew printed the case for us too. It's a pretty handy tool for populating small components - for most things though I still feel more comfortable with tweezers.

MNT Pocket Reform

On January 1st, I somewhat impulsively ordered a MNT Pocket Reform. The idea of a tiny laptop has appealed to me for a long time. Anyway, it finally arrived. It was a joy to use, if not slightly awkward, but then the charge controller died. MNT sent out a new one, and it's now working again. I think generally I do recommend this little guy if you are looking for a (very) small laptop. It's easy to replace parts and nice that everything is open source.

Derby Museum of Making

Emily (from the hackspace) and I took a day trip to the Derby Museum of Making for an SEM workshop. It was quite cool to learn a bit more about scanning electron microscopes, although the workshop was definitely aimed at children and some of my questions probably seemed a bit odd.

Flipdot Display Pickup

Jon found some flipdot displays on eBay. We won it and then drove down to birmingham to pick it up. It was a fun day out, and ended up with not only one flipdot display, but two! As well as four LED matrix displays. They are all from National Express coaches. One of them now been setup in the Comfy Area of the space… more on that later.

September

Hackers at the Savoy

It was the 30th anniversary of Hackers, and the Loft Movie group at Savoy (apparently) unknowingly had planned to screen Hackers on the same night. Well, that's a great coincidence if so, but even if they knew it was great to have somewhere screening it in Nottingham on the anniversary. A number of members from Sheffield Hackspace came down for the evening and had a quick tour of the space before heading off to the cinema. It was nice to meet some new people with common interests.

Tetrapods

There seemed to be a bit of an unusual fad going around on Infrastructure Club and Mastodon for Tetrapods. Some had even started to make Plush Tetrapods. I hadn't used a sewing machine for quite a while, but with some guidance with Shane and a laser cutter, I had successfully made a tetrapod.

Ice Hockey

A few of us watched the Panthers play at the Hackspace (live stream… not actually at the hackspace). I'd been hockey curious for quite a while, and had previously binged hockey clips on YouTube, but never watched a full game. Well, I was hooked pretty rapidly and have now been to quite a few games in person. I like how it doesn't seem to share the hooligan stuff with football.

Neon Sign

Last month I decided I wanted a neon sign for the hackspace and then contacted a fairly new company, South Wales Neon. They seemed to like the sound of the project and the hackspace and gave us a good price. It arrived in September and we quickly put it up in an interior window, backed by a sheet of clear acrylic to avoid damage. It's a beautiful thing and working with South Wales Neon was a great experience. They even wrote a guest post for the nottinghack blog.

October

Earlectronics

I accidentally bought some 0603 metric components… instead of 0603 imperial, so I had to find a use for them. For a while I had thought it would be cool to make some LED matrix plugs for my ears, so that's sort of what I did. Both version works, but with v2 I decided to add an accelerometer.

Flipdot Display

The flipdot display which I picked up from Birmingham with Jon finally needed some attention. I'd designed a PCB with a small buck supply onboard, since I could get a 24v supply for free, but not a dual 12/5v. Unfortunately I had some issues with the power supply exploding which led to some lessons about switching supplies and some much chonkier capacitors.

The display now hangs out in the Comfy Area and people seem to enjoy sending messages to it.

Ice Skating

Shane wanted to go ice skating and I agreed to go along. It had been a very long time since I'd been skating. I used to go quite often as a child. There were a few lessons here. Firstly, falling over hurts a lot more when you're another metre off the ground. I hurt my ribs quite badly for a few weeks, but have been going pretty regularly since.

I have been cycling for a long time now and it's been nice to add something else physical to the list of things I enjoy doing.

Foragers' Kitchen

Our friends Darcy and Marianna from the hackspace have opened a vegan deli in town, not too far from the hackspace. I was privileged to be customer number 1 and have been going about once a week since. They do some really delicious seitan.

Ice Skates

Repeatedly disgusted by the rental skates at the National Ice Centre, I decided to buy some! Even very cheap skates are a lot better than the ones they have on offer. I got hockey skates, since the front pick thing is a scary, and because one day I will become a pro hockey player for the Nottingham Panthers (not really… :'()

November

nh-tools (asj version)

At the hackspace we have something for controlling access to induction tools called nh-tools. It's essentially a small MCU with some pins for an NFC card reader, plus some buttons and LEDs. We had installed all of the ones we had, which had been designed by Matt. I decided to make a KiCAD version, mostly out of curiosity, but also because I'm keen to get a few more heaters setup in the space. I also wanted to add Ethernet on board since the WizNet shields keep breaking.

cgit

Fed up with GitHub adding AI buttons to everything, I questioned why I use it at all for personal projects. I rarely actually want contributions on personal projects, but am happy for people to grab the code and turn it into something, if that's helpful. I looked into some alternatives but ended up settling on cgit, which is very light weight and just gets called via CGI. I ended up getting a bit carried away and added some syntax highlighter scripts which do more than syntax highlighting, such as rendering OpenSCAD files in the browser through OpenSCAD.wasm.

December

Nottinghack AGM

This was my third AGM as a trustee at nottinghack. It was a pretty nice evening, lots of recognition of peoples contributions to the space. There was also a vote for a change to the constitution. While I was very appreciative of the engagement, it was not a change which I supported (actually, I opposed it quite heavily…). In the end it did not pass, so I was quite glad about that, but chatting to the proposer for a bit afterwards to thank them etc.

Energy Monitoring

The day after the AGM we had a network maintenance day. There were some disks to replace and operating systems to upgrade, so we closed the space for general use, since lots of stuff stops working when computers are broken. Anyway, we got distracted and started talking about energy monitoring. Within a day or so we'd set up a pledge drive to buy all the parts.

Nottinghack is spread across two floors and four units (as far as our lease is concerned). This also means four separate power feeds, three of which are three phase. It was looking expensive, but we managed to get some SDM630 meters pretty cheap on eBay, and a few other members pledged enough to cover the rest of the parts.

So far the meters have been installed, and one is temporarily hooked up to an Arduino, publishing the stats to MQTT for Prometheus to pick up and display in Grafana. We'll have the other units working soon too! I've designed a small DIN mountable board with Ethernet and RS485, and Steve designed the case for it. Matt did a lot of work installing breakers and the enclosures. It's been quite a nice group project, which will continue into January next year.

Skate with the Panthers

Apparently every year there's a public skating session with the panthers. This seems to turn into more of an autograph event but it's pretty cool to go on the ice with them. I managed to catch Matt Alfaro just before a large queue formed and asked him to sign my skates. I even bought a fancy pen! I don't know if signing skates is a thing in the ice skating world, but he seemed to happily oblige after exclaiming "Your skates?!" - Coolest skates in town.

That's all

Thanks for reading. It's been quite a busy and exciting year. There are some cool things I want to try and do next year.

• Learn to play hockey
• Go ice skating on a lake in Sweden or Canada
• Go to Sweden or Canada
• Build some more cool projects

Related posts:

• Ice Skating!
• What I've done this year
• Uses This
• An update, I guess
• My blog turned 5!?

Tags: personal