Leigh Hackspace

The Hackbots Project II - Paul Williams
Mar 18, 2024

Continuing the Bot Building Process So, we’ll continue from where we left on last a little while ago with our bot building blog posts. We’d got to the MK IV if memory serves… Next on the list of things to do is to make our bot interface page nice and pretty. Enter, CSS Because we’re using a very simple webserver on the Raspbery Pi Pico W and because the code handily returned from our generateHTML() function is effectively the page that’s served by the websever; we know this is a good place to add a little customisation for our robot - make our page a little prettier.

Creating an AppleTalk NAS - Andrew Williams
Feb 21, 2024

Working on retro Apple Macs sometimes presents challenges in a modern context, most systems make use of either outdated or dying media which may be unreliable or difficult to locate. In my case, I’ve recently acquired a Power Mac G4 Sawtooth which while it has USB the interface is slow and wrangling files between computers using USB sticks isn’t the quickest method. For even older Macs this isn’t even an option, so you have to resort to burnt CDs, Zip disks, or floppy disks.

The Hackbots Project - Paul Williams
Jan 1, 2024

The Beginning We’ll start at the beginning, after all, it is the very best place to start! The inspiration for the robots came from wanting to make a simple project using fairly off the shelf and reasonably priced parts that young people could also get their hands on and follow allong with. Note: This post has been written a little “after the fact” so some parts will be skipped… for brevity

Disk replacement on a Powerbook G4 - Andrew Williams
Nov 5, 2023

In October 2003, I made my first leap into using an Apple device. For quite some time I’d been trying to find a reasonable and portable machine for daily use, and I had slowly gotten frustrated with the current offerings by Dell, HP, and other major laptop manufacturers. In the hunt for something new, I picked a Powerbook G4 12". This machine was my daily workhorse for several years and at the end of its life, it was stuffed into a draw and forgotten about.

Using an old webcam on modern Linux - Andrew Williams
Jun 28, 2023

Linux is known for its good hardware support of even ancient pieces of kit. From time to time the kernel devs deprecate drivers and architectures that are no longer supported, but for the most part, you can pick up an old piece of hardware and get it running on a major release or two from the current mainline. Yesterday I attempted this. At Leigh Hackspace we wanted a webcam on our out-of-band access box so we could look at the status of the rack without visiting the space.