Milton Keynes Makerspace

Between June the 2nd and the 5th this year, a number of Makerspace members joined almost three thousand other makers, artists, engineers and technology enthusiasts and their families in Eastnor Castle Deer Park, the temporary home of the biennial event known as Electromagnetic Field, or EMF.

EMF is a nonprofit camping festival packed with talks, workshops and performances by fellow enthusiasts including a number of popular YouTubers. The entire event is run by unpaid volunteers, notably…

At the start of the Covid-19 outbreak in March, we were approached by a local GP to see if the MK Makerspace could assist with the production of 3D printed face shields for people who were unable to obtain them – especially elderly care workers, pharmacists etc, after her son had started with his own 3D printer. This was something that we were considering to do, and pushed us to do it.

Through a lot of time, dedication and organization, we managed to produce several thousand face shields for…

We now have air quality (PM2.5 & PM10), temperature, humidity and pressure monitoring at the shed. There’s an SDS011 and a BME280 sensor connected to an ESP8266 upstairs in the corner near the printer. Readings are taken every 5 minutes and uploaded to an influxdb server which grafana is pulling it’s data from to produce these neat graphs available here:

The plan is to extend this and have outdoor monitoring as well as other interesting data points…

As some of you may know, Jim and I benchmarked a number of SD cards a couple of years ago.

Jim has a blog post here https://mkmakerspace.co.uk/speed-testing-cheap-micro-sd-cards/, and I did 4K block and random tests to establish their suitability as Raspberry Pi boot devices.

Unfortunately the 16GB LD card which was then good value is now rather expensive on AliExpress compared with the competition, so I have been looking for replacements. Several of these arrived recently and are looking…

It is often said you will always have an attachment to your first car, whether it was pristine from the dealership, junk or anywhere inbetween. Some of us at the Makerspace decided to take that to heart, and go back to the days of our first vehicles, but they might not be what you think…

Enter Hacky Racers, a small DIY electric vehicle racing league inspired by the Powerwheels Racing Series across the pond, where competitors get together to race wonderful contraptions with a budget limit of…

Jenny gave an interesting talk at the 2019 CCCamp in Germany asking for better standards of official investigation and media reporting into British drone incident stories.

Looking at the sorry saga of drone incident reports and drone-related airport closures in the UK, and shining a light on the woefully poor quality of official investigations, police response, and media reporting.
Over the last few years the UK has seen a public moral panic over reported air proximity incidents between…

Our very own Jenny List gave a really interesting talk at EMF Camp about making cider:

A comprehensive description of good and bad ciders from a technical, simple flavour chemistry, and hardware viewpoint. What different apples do for the taste of a cider, what goes into a real cider, how real cider is made, and then by contrast how cheap cider is made. This talk is based upon four decades of cider making experience growing up on a British small farm.

One of our esteemed and regular members Chris gave an interesting talk on Antiparticles and geiger counters at EMF Camp 2018. He built his own geiger counter and you can find his code on github here.

Geiger counters are interesting and surprisingly useful devices, and you can build one for less than the price of a video game. They can monitor background radiation levels, check household items such as smoke alarms and gas mantles, and provide information about medical treatments. I designed and…

Many people do not realise how much heat is generated by modern high brightness LEDs. An old-fashioned 100W incandescent light bulb produces around 5% visible light, 83% infrared radiation and 12% heat. An equivalently bright LED bulb might produce 30% visible light and 70% heat. Although the total power consumption is much less (around 17W for the LED), the amount of heat which must be dissipated at the source is almost the same (12% of 100W is 12W, 70% of 17W is 11.9W), and LEDs are easily…

Last wednesday we had the mayor visit the shed to have a look around. The visit was also documented by MK Citizen and made the front page of the paper edition.

They were impressed by the 3D printers we had built and Paul designed a key ring with the Mayors name on it for him to take away. Here’s a couple of picture:

Mayor visits the shed.

Photos by Nigel