Leigh Hackspace

Why, again? I’ve been using NixOS for my day job for a good while now … I already mentioned that in a Previous Post, including posting my config for others to play around with and hopefully get up and running with some dual boot fun in an effort to move away from Windows 11 and the ever growing amount of AI “improvements” (think copilot, recall, etc.) - but i ranted about all that in my previous post about NixOS so we’ll not do it here!

WHY? I’ve been using NixOS for my day job for a good while now … I think I first started using it when one of the other hackspace members mentioned it - shout out to chris and I thought it would be a good idea to have a standardised testing VM which comes bundled with all the tools I need day to day; that way if my VM died I could quickly grab my config, redeploy it, and be ready to get going again fairly quickly!

A Little Bit About Me I have always loved puzzles since I was little, from my first jigsaw to the CTF challenges on Hack The Box and Try Hack Me. So when I saw the puzzles that were built into some of the badges from #Defcon and from the #BadgeLife community,I knew I wanted to get my hands on one. Now that I finally managed to get hold of an electronic badge, I was super excited to get stuck in trying to find and solve the challenges that are embedded within.

I wanted to build a control box for 2 LED strips of WS2812s. This is for a display in a bedroom, but I also wanted it to be controllable from mobile/desktop, along with multiple colours and brightness controls! How to break it down into components First I needed to work out the different components I needed and how they would be put together, to make sure they fit in the location I wanted but also portable enough if I ever wanted to take them away.

I wanted to understand how to make WS2812 LEDs work but also within the Hackspace I found some PICs. I had used something similar many years ago, but this was a completely new learning curve! 2812 LEDS and how they work There are many many write ups about how 2812 LEDs work, so rather cover much of that I will just outline the basics to get things going. The WS2812B DataSheet outlines the timings, but to make life easier the basics are as follows :

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.

Check out upcoming events 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.

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.

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.

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…