Projects

Petrol Station Dot Matrix Display

We come from the school of thought that working surplus stuff might well be someone else’s refuse, but if it can be repurposed into something useful, then we’re generally up for the challenge. One of our members was able to recover some dot matrix signs which were used to show the price of petrol(before it needed extra digits because of inflation!) These signs came with no documentation about their display protocol, so one of our members put his software engineering skills to work and reverse...

Automated Hydroponics Enclosure

This project started out as a pile of old hardwood truss and framing timber from a house that was due to be demolished, the owners were giving away what was some nice quality wood hardwood(built back before cheap and light pine was the main goto material). Some of our members packed up some power tools, headed to this demolition site and collected a few sticks of timber that would be the start of the enclosure. One of our members took some of the timber and cleaned it up and built it into a...

Smart Picture Frame

When you have a modern resolution monitor that doesn’t work, but is in otherwise good physical condition, do you throw it away as e-waste? Not us, one of our members was in this situation, and after some searching online, found a replacement controller board, and now had a completely working computer screen ready to do something cool. The timber used in this frame was otherwise going to waste Another of our members took the screen and built a timber frame from it from old scrap timber that was...

Arcade Game Table

So what do you do when you get a free table from someone online and an old computer screen? You strip off all the casing from the computer screen down to its raw components, take a circular saw to the table to cut out an opening for the screen to fit in, of course. Stephen & Mic tidying up the cut edges with a routed chamfer This was the initial thought which led to the conception of our idea that we wanted to build a retro arcade game table out of old scraps of hardware and into something that’s truly unique. We also wanted to draw upon a wide range of maker skills like woodworking, electronics, building computers and CAD. This arcade game table has been tilted up to provide better viewing angles for gameplay, it runs on a Raspberry pi 4 running the RetroPie distro. Aidan taking great care to drill out the button holes without cracking the acrylic sheet The two built in controllers each connect to a USB breakout board which are presented to the pi as game controllers. We got...