Author Archives: Paul Brook

We are in London

Posted on January 9, 2015 by Paul Brook

For three days only (Fri 9, Sat 10, Sun 11 Jan 2015) we are exhibiting our giant LED cube as part of the Canary Wharf Winter Lights Festival.  This is the contraption pictured at the top of the page, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Fixing an LED Cube with Hot Glue

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Paul Brook

Last weekend we went to the UK Maker Faire and saw many awesome things, including some very nice LED cubes. Inspired by this I thought I’d have a go at building a small one. Constructing the cube itself was relatively … Continue reading →

Posted in Projects | Leave a comment

Surface Mount?

Posted on March 22, 2014 by Paul Brook

Today we learned a lesson in quality control. And how little some suppliers have. We recently bought a set of (very) cheap “stepstick” 3D printer stepper motor drivers. While attaching heatsinks we noticed one board wasn’t mounting correctly. Further invstigation … Continue reading →

Posted in Blog, Projects | Leave a comment

The Evil Snowman

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Paul Brook

This year I decided to have a go at building my own electronic christmas card. As I have no real artistic skill, I did cheat a little, and started with a regular off the shelf card, featuring a snowman on … Continue reading →

Posted in Projects | Leave a comment

Flying Squirrel

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Paul Brook

Our 3D printer (a stretched Mendel Max) has recently got to the point where it works. To test this we ended up printing a selection of squirrels (currently posing on our webcam). We started with the medium sized white squirrel, … Continue reading →

Posted in 3D Printers | Leave a comment

Is it me, or is it hot in here?

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Paul Brook

As anyone who’s been to the hackspace recently will know, it’s often not the warmest place.  This has led to some members becoming a bit obsessed with temperature sensors.  Our resident bot already has a temperature sensor, but we had … Continue reading →

Posted in Projects | 2 Comments

Arduino and the Minimus 32

Posted on September 29, 2012 by Paul Brook

We recently bought a big pile of very cheap AVR Minimus 32 USB dev boards via Manchester Hackspace. These ship with a DFU bootloader.  This works fine when building regular C code, but that involves a fair learning curve for … Continue reading →

Posted in Arduino, Bought Kit | 7 Comments

Students

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Paul Brook

If you are a student in Leeds then we’d like to invite you to come one of our open nights on Tuesday evenings (for free!) and see what it’s all about. After some discussion we’ve decided to offer a student … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

List of Components

Posted on September 9, 2012 by Paul Brook

For a while now we’ve had two big cardboard boxes full of ICs, power regulators and power transistors.  On Friday I got bored, and catalogued them.  The results can be found on the wiki. There’s still an even bigger box … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Hacking tape

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Paul Brook

Some Hackspaces have “do not hack” stickers.  We decided that this was probably a bad idea.  If a sticker is accidentally overlooked, or falls off then someone is probably going to get upset. Instead we have rolls of green electrical … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment