What have members of Sheffield Hackspace been up to this month?
Let’s find out!
- Matthew - 3D Printed Trophy
- Rich - Ethernet stringing
- alifeee - upholstery and rag-rugging
- Harvey and Alex M - making a guitar
- Nik - Computer Visuals
- Stuart - picture framing
- alifeee - making a video game
- Alex K - Cursor AI code editor
Matthew - 3D Printed Trophy
Matthew used the 3D printer to make a custom trophy for a fighting game tournament.
Rich - Ethernet stringing
In an effort to save money, I watched what the electrician did for the first fix for power cable and mimicked it with the much safer cat6 cable. I ran 2 cables each from each study in my extension after the flooring was built but before plastering in a star configuration back to where the router is in the old part of the house.
Installing a back box in an existing brick wall and running cable under the house will be a lot more difficult!
alifeee - upholstery and rag-rugging
I’ve recently upholstered the cushion of a chair, and next is the back. I bought some foam from the foam shop in Sheffield that is unfortunately closing down :(, and wrapped it loosely in fabric using the sewing machine at the hackspace. Next, I need to pin it to the back of the chair. It’ll be a little harder than the cushion, as with that there was a place to hide my shoddy pinning (underneath the chair)
I’ve also hemmed a large piece of hessian which I plan to make into a large rag rug. I think that will take a… long time.
Harvey and Alex M - making a guitar
We laser cut some MDF templates, and used them to cut out and start routing a strat-style electric guitar body, from a slab of paulownia wood.
Nik - Computer Visuals
I’ve been developing a workflow with TOOLL3, an open source real time audio visual software originally developed for use in demoscene. Its quite rough around the edges but very fun to play with and experiment. I’ve been doing projection experiments in the Hackspace courtyard and testing out a bunch of different effects recently, getting ready to do a full 1 minute sequence for the Minute Map event at MAPP festival in Montreal. These are some of my experiments so far.
Real time test with OSC data sync from VCV Rack (an open source eurorack emulation software for modular electronic music)
data transfer test from Houdini (Industry VFX software) to TOOLL3
Stuart - picture framing
I recently went on a picture framing course and picked up a 2nd hand framing mortise guillotine. Since then I’ve been looking out for interesting things to frame as practice. I’ve had the 2 Happy Toast images, Frankie Boyle and The Young Ones, for a while and the Milky Way image is from Devon where we go on holiday.
- See the post by sy_woodworking on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/C_I7ISLoql6/
alifeee - making a video game
This month I participated in the GMTK 2024 gamejam with some friends, and we made a game about creating and climbing a tower. I spent most of my time making the online leaderboard and implementing some movement mechanics.
You can play it in your browser here! https://jman9092.itch.io/summon-to-scale
or see my leaderboard on https://summon2scale.alifeee.co.uk/
Alex K - Cursor AI code editor
I’ve recently used Cursor, an AI code editor to create a complex full stack web development in language and app stack I haven’t used before and the workflow made it easy. This video is a recording of the features and thoughts of my first few months of using Cursor. It feels very familiar if you are used to VSCode, as it is a fork of VSCode, also meaning that most plugins for VSCode work the same in Cursor.
Cursor uses Machine Learning in a way that I find to be a very intuitive workflow to help write code with just English. Of course you can also write and edit the code but you often dont need to.
I find it helps if you need to code for your project but dont know how to code or just need a productivity boost.
Read more on Alex K’s blog post: https://alexkelly.world/posts/2024-08-18_cursor_ai/cursor_ai.html
That’s all
That’s all for this month! Remember, you can:
- come and visit the space! https://www.sheffieldhackspace.org.uk/calendar/
- add your own items to next month’s month update: https://github.com/sheffieldhackspace/month-updates
Until next time :)