Tinker X

Berlin Clock

The Berlin Clock, also known as the 'Mengenlehreuhr,' displays time with a series of coloured flashing lights. This clock works in base 5: www.3quarks.com/en/BerlinClock/index.html I printed an acrylic board for the lights, which were WS2812 (aka Neopixel strips). At first I wanted to

Lofi Cardboard robots

We found this wonderful website: https://cardboard.lofirobot.com/ which has a large variety of microbit-controlled robot designs using cardboard. Max decided to build the forklift from the site. This is the completed build.

Word Clock

Dhruv has been working on ThinkCrate's word clock project for a few weeks. Without looking at the instructions, he reverse engineered the assembly of the hardware, and wrote the code for it. 0:00/1× Source Code Word clock word_clock.ino 4 KB download-circle Reflections I think this project

Berlin Clock

Aidan has been working on a Berlin clock project for some time. He's using the Raspberry Pi Pico and a few strands of the WS2812 LED strips. After some debugging work, he got the LEDs to light up in the proper sequence. 0:00/1× Next steps, putting it together

Think Crate projects

Brandon has been playing around with Think Crate projects. He's built a piano (pictured above). 0:00/1× And he has also built a Planetarium project. Here's his code for the Piano project: bool activateSecondCode = false; bool button11Pressed = false; bool button12Pressed = false; // Add a variable to track button 12 state

15 April Consolidated Update

Raphael brought in the Gaggia coffee machine, and is making the connections from the electronic components to the machine today. Aidan is 3D printing out a Chain Chomp, and making a house for him that will hide some electronic circuitry. Brandon is deep in gear work. Kavi continues to learn

Consolidated Update

Dhruv is working on creating an obstacle-avoiding car powered by the Raspberry Pi Pico. Meanwhile, Kevin came and built an LED-powered sword for school. 0:00/1×

Arduino-powered coffee machine

Raphael came to learn how to solder to build his Arduino-powered coffee machine project (following online instructions) He's also 3D-printing the housing for the control unit. There are many parts; one of which is shown here.

Class sign

Kevin dropped by with a million-and-one project ideas. But we were lacking in some raw materials, so he settled on building a lightbox class sign. There will be an LED strip that lights up the engraved class sign. He finished the project at home. Here it is in it's full

Automated hand sanitiser

The servo motor is not powerful enough to push down the hand sanitiser pump. So we are figuring out from scratch how to make a gearbox to increase the force to push down on the pump.

Alarm Clock

Pin Hua is ready to laser cut his designs to see if they work in practice. The first iteration has some design errors, and he went back to his working file in Inkscape to fix the errors. Housing design housing_design.svg 13 KB download-circle

Automatic Soap Dispenser

Brendan continues working on his soap dispenser. He is figuring out how to mount a rack-and-pinion mechanism that will push down on the dispenser bottle. He also experimented with adding guide rails to prevent the pressing lid from moving around too much. You can see it in the photo below

Automatic soap dispenser

Brendan is working on a new project, a soap dispenser. We sketched out the idea on the whiteboard, and he did a rough prototype using cardboard, before transferring his design to Inkscape, and laser cutting the design on acrylic. He's still figuring out how the electronics will be incorporated into

Creating games in Unity

Theeran is back, and he's going back to the Unity platform, but now learning to create games in C# rather than using Unity Bolt.

City building in Minecraft

Kavi is learning to program using Minecraft:EE. He is going through the Computing with Minecraft unit, learning to control the agent's behaviour for it to automate the building of a cityscape.

Raspberry Pi Pico

Aahana soldered for the very first time, putting on the header pins on a Raspberry Pi Pico, then figuring out how to program it using Python.

Snapmaker resurrection

Kevin is building flutes using all manners of material. He is working on using wood right now, scraping out the tunnel by hand, and using the table saw to trim down the thickness of the wood. He also took the chance to resurrect our old Snapmaker, getting the router module

3D-printed trombone

Kevin built a working trombone, using 3D-printed parts and PVC pipes. It looks great, and the most amazing thing is that it works well (albeit with some leaks). An example of putting your science and music theory into action.

Adding to the clock functionality

As he added functionality to the clock, Pin Hua ran into a problem where the extensions added a lot to the size of the program, and it was no longer able to fit onto the micro:bit. He then worked to remove one of the libraries and implemented the functionality

Table-top clock project

Pin Hua is still working on his clock project. This is the second iteration of his housing design. He is adding an LED strip to add some visual effects to the clock. Link to code: LCD ClockMade with ❤️ in Microsoft MakeCode for micro:bit.Microsoft MakeCode

Who moved my cheese?

Aahana is continuing to explore the Hummingbird kit, making a new project that has more engineering complexity. Opening and closing the flap involves engineering a crank mechanism, and building a reliable hinge. Here's a close-up of the hinge mechanism: The purple straw is attached to the flap. The pieces of

8-bit computer

Daniel has been following Ben Eater's tutorial on YouTube to build an 8-bit breadboard computer. His clock module is done, and he is working on the register modules.

Micro:bit and Motors

The Hummingbird kit enables fun micro:bit projects. In my first project, I created a little bot that responds to sound. 0:00/1×

Building a clock

This is a new project to build a clock display controlled by the micro:bit. An interesting component used here is the 16x2 LCD character display that communicates using the I2C communications protocol. I have also used the RTC module which will keep time accurate when the project is not

Improving the RC car design

In the first iteration of the design, Brandon glued the servo motor directly to the base plate. He improved the design to remove that requirement, by fabricating a part that will trap the servo motor firmly in place without glue, although glue is still used to attach the fabricated part