In our brand-new video, we ask some of our favourite content creators how they define the word ‘maker’, and what being a maker means to them.

How do you define ‘maker’?

We asked some of our favourite content creators how they define the word ‘maker’, and what being a maker means to them.

Joel Telling

Joel took the ultimate content creator plunge in early 2018, quitting his job at Adobe to follow his 3D printing passion full time.

Joel Telling – 3D Printing Nerd on Twitter

It was at this very hour 1 year ago TODAY I left the Adobe offices for the last time and began my career as a host and content creator. ONE YEAR HOLY COW! #highfive https://t.co/fQ6wBGY8Ch

You can find Joel on YouTube as 3D Printing Nerd, and he also makes appearances for MatterHackers at various conventions — including Maker Faire New York, where we accosted him for this video.

Jackie Craft

Jackie Craft is a cosplay goddess. She has turned her passion for prop making and costume design into her career, and her creations are incredible. Seriously, look at how cool they are:

You can find Jackie on Instagram, and at her website, where you can also buy costume patterns to recreate her designs.

Laura Kampf

Based in Cologne, Germany, Laura Kampf is best known for her dog, Smudo. Avid Smudo devotees may have noticed that Laura is a talented wood and metal worker with a penchant for turning unwanted scrap into fantastic and stylish creations. She also built her own tiny house, complete with an additional tiny house for Smudo.

Smudo´s Tiny Doghouse

Thank You Rockler for supporting this Project! visit them at www.rockler.com I had so much leftover material from my Tiny House Trailer that i figured i might as well build smudo his own Tiny Doghouse.

Yes, okay, we’re all about Smudo here at Raspberry Pi.

Bob Clagett

Bob Clagett likes to make stuff. All kinds of stuff, from wood, to metal, to electronics. His 2.3 million YouTube subscribers tune in for weekly tutorials, tips, and Josh, who occasionally makes appearances on screen, and otherwise helps Bob run I Like To Make Stuff behind the scenes.

Please note: our actual favourite member of the ILTMS team is Ginny Clagget, Queen of Hugs and Wonderfulness.

Jimmy DiResta

You know who he is. We know who he is. So here’s Jimmy cutting things in half with Ron Swanson Nick Offerman.

Making It – “Will It Saw?” with Nick Offerman and Jimmy DiResta (Digital Exclusive)

In the most exciting video you ever saw, Nick Offerman and Jimmy DiResta test the durability of a rollerblade, bongos, a baseball and a roll of salami.

What does it mean to you?

From woodwork and electronics, to crocheting and baking: makers come in all flavours. How do you define the word ‘maker’, and what does being a maker mean to you? Tell us on YouTube, or in the comments below.

Seven years ago, the Raspberry Pi was launched, and that kickstarted everything the Foundation has done. We always celebrate this “birthday” with community-focused events, and this year on the first March weekend, we are again coordinating local Jams all over the world so you can join the party!

Calling all community members

Whether you’re a Raspberry Pi user, club volunteer, avid forum question answerer, regular blog commenter, or brand-new community member, we want you to feel welcome! Look at the map, find a Jam near you, and meet the real-world Raspberry Pi community on 2 or 3 March.

Manchester is coolest!

Coolest Projects UK, our world-leading technology fair for young people, will take place in Manchester on 2 March, and Manchester’s Birthday Jam is going to happen inside the Coolest Projects venue! We’re tying the two events together so that those of you in the North West can attend Coolest Projects without missing out on the Birthday Jam. Keep your eye on mcrraspjam.org.uk for information on Jam tickets — coming soon!

Project idea registration for Coolest Projects UK is on closing 10 Feb — only a scant few days left for the creative young maker in your life to register their idea! If you know someone who might want to participate, head over to the Coolest Projects UK website for more details.

Photobooth fun

One of the treats in the Big Birthday Weekend kit we’ve got for Jam organisers is an arcade button they can use to make their own Raspberry Pi–powered tweeting photobooths for the big day. Download the code for the project and make it your own!

RGVSA on Twitter

PiParty photo booth @RGVSA & @ @Nerdvana_io #Rjam

There’s still time

If you’re only just hearing about this now, and you want to run a Jam on the Big Birthday Weekend, all you need to do is:

1. Find a venue
2. Create a sign-up page (e.g. on Eventbrite)
3. Submit the event to the Jam map

Once we’ve checked your submission, we’ll add your Jam to the map and send you a coupon you can use to get a free Big Birthday Weekend kit from ModMyPi.

Along with the kit, you’ll also get up to three free T-shirts. They’re also available to buy just £5.65.

2020 vision

I’m already looking forward to our eighth birthday — next year is a leap year, so we’ll be able to celebrate on Saturday 29 February 2020!

A simple Raspberry Pi camera setup is helping staff at the Victoria and Albert Museum track and identify insects that are threatening priceless exhibits.

The problem with bugs

Bugs: there’s no escaping them. Whether it’s ants in your kitchen or cockroaches in your post-apocalyptic fallout shelter, insects have a habit of inconveniently infesting edifices, intent on damaging beloved belongings.

And museums are as likely as anywhere to be hit by creepy-crawly visitors. Especially when many of their exhibits are old and deliciously dusty. Yum!

Tracking insects at the V&A

As Bhavesh Shah and Maris Ines Carvalho state on the V&A blog, monitoring insect activity has become common practice at their workplace. As part of the Integrated Pest Monitoring (IPM) strategy at the museum, they even have trained staff members who inspect traps and report back their findings.

“But what if we could develop a system that gives more insight into the behaviour of insects and then use this information to prevent future outbreaks?” ask Shah and Carvalho.

The team spent around £50 on a Raspberry Pi and a 160° camera, and used these and Claude Pageau’s PI-TIMOLO software project to build an insect monitoring system. The system is now integrated into the museum, tracking insects and recording their movements — even in low-light conditions.

“The initial results were promising. Temperature, humidity, and light sensors could also be added to find out, for example, what time of day insects are more active or if they favour particular environmental conditions.”

For more information on the project, visit the Victoria & Albert Museum blog. And for more information on the Victoria & Albert Museum, visit the Victoria & Albert Museum, London — it’s delightful. We highly recommend attending their Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition, which is running until 24 February.

Game developer Andrew Gillett explains how to make a simple text adventure in Python — and what pitfalls to avoid while doing so — in the latest issue of Wireframe magazine, out now.

Writing games in BASIC

The first game I ever wrote was named Pooh. It had nothing to do with the bear. In September 1982, I was four years old, and the ZX Spectrum home computer had just been released. It was incredible enough that the Spectrum let you play games on the TV, but like most home computers of the time, it also came with a built-in language called BASIC, and a manual which explained how to program it. In my first game, Pooh (the title was a misspelling), the player controlled a baby, represented by a pound sign, and had to guide it to a potty, represented by the letter O. There were no obstacles, no enemies, and if you tried to walk off the screen, the program would stop with an error message. I didn’t have any idea how to create a graphical game more complex than Pooh. I didn’t even know how to display a sprite on the screen.

Text adventures

Instead, I focused on writing text adventures, where the game describes scenes to the player (“You are in a comfortable, tunnel-like hall. You can see a door,” from 1982’s The Hobbit) and the player enters commands such as “Go through door” or “Kill goblin with sword.” Although this type of game is comparatively easy to write, I implemented it in the worst way possible. The code was essentially a huge list of IF statements. Each room had its own set of code, which would print out a description of the room and then check to see what the player typed. This ‘hard-coding’ led to the code being much longer than necessary, and more difficult to maintain.

The correct way would have been to separate my code and data. Each room would have had several pieces of data associated with it, such as an ID number, the description of the room (“You are in a small cave”), an array of objects which can be found in the room, and an array of room numbers indicating where the player should end up if they try to move in a particular direction – for example, the first number could indicate which room to go to if the player enters ‘NORTH’. You’d then have the main game code which keeps track of the room the player is currently in, and looks up the data for that room. With that data, it can then take the appropriate action based on the command the player typed.

Getting it right

The code below shows how to implement the beginnings of a text adventure game in Python. Instead of numeric IDs and arrays, the code uses string IDs and dictionary data structures, where each piece of data is associated with an ID or ‘key’. This is a more convenient option which wasn’t available in Spectrum BASIC. We first create a list of directions in which the player can potentially move. We then create the class Location which specifies each location’s properties. We store a name, a description, and a dictionary data structure which stores the other locations that the current location is linked to. For example, if you go north from the woods, you’ll reach the lake. The class includes a method named addLink, which adds entries to the linked locations dictionary after checking that the specified direction and destination exist.

Following the class definition, we then create a dictionary named locations. This has two entries, with the keys being woods and lake, and the values being instances of the Location class. Next, we call the addLink method on each of the locations we’ve just created, so that the player will be able to walk between them. The final step of the setup phase is to create the variable currentLocation, specifying where the player will start the game.

We then reach the main game loop, which will repeat indefinitely. We first display the description of the current location, along with the available directions in which the player can move. Then we wait for the player to input a command. In this version of the code, the only valid commands are directions: for example, type ‘north’ at the starting location to go to the lake. When a direction is entered, we check to make sure it’s a valid direction from the current location, then update currentLocation to the new location. When the main loop restarts, the description of the new location is displayed.

I moved on from the ZX Spectrum eight years after my dad first unpacked it. Despite the poor design of my code, I’d learned the essentials of programming. Ten years later, I was a game developer.

Further reading

If you’re keen to learn more about making a text adventure in Python, you could check out Phillip Johnson’s guide to the subject, Make Your Own Python Text Adventure. The author has also written a condensed version of the same guide.

You may also be interested in our free online course Object-oriented Programming in Python: Create Your Own Adventure Game.

More from Wireframe

You can discover more tutorials, alongside great reviews, articles and advice, in Wireframe issue 6, out now and available in Tesco, WHSmith, and all good independent UK newsagents.

Or you can buy Wireframe directly from the Raspberry Pi Press store — worldwide delivery is available. And if you’d like to own a handy digital version of the magazine, you can also download the PDF for free.

When Martin Mander’s portable Hitachi television was manufactured in 1975, there were just three UK channels and you’d need to leave the comfort of your sofa in order to switch between them.

Today, we have multiple viewing options and even a cool Raspberry Pi TV HAT that lets us enjoy DVB-T2 broadcasts via a suitable antenna. So what did nostalgia-nut Martin decide to do when he connected his newly purchased TV HAT to the Pi’s 40-pin GPIO header? Why, he stuck it in his old-fashioned TV set with a butt-busting rotary switch and limited the number of channels to those he could count on one hand – dubbing it “the 1982 experience” because he wanted to enjoy Channel 4 which was launched that year.

Going live

Martin is a dab hand at CRT television conversions (he’s created six since 2012, using monitors, photo frames, and neon signs to replace the displays). “For my latest project, I wanted to have some fun with the new HAT and see if I’d be able to easily display and control its TV streams on some of my converted televisions,” he says. It’s now being promoted to his office, for some background viewing as he works. “I had great fun getting the TV HAT streams working with the rotary dial,” he adds.

Although Martin jumped straight into the HAT without reading the instructions or connecting an aerial, he eventually followed the guide and found getting it up-and-running to be rather straightforward. He then decided to repurpose his Hitachi Pi project, which he’d already fitted with an 8-inch 4:3 screen.

“It’s powered by a Pi 3 and it already had the rotary dial set up and connected to the GPIO,” he explains. “This meant I could mess about with the TV HAT, but still fall back on the original project’s script if needed, with no hardware changes required.”

Change the channel

Indeed, Martin’s main task was to ensure he could switch channels using the rotary dial and this, he says, was easier to achieve than he expected. “When you go to watch a show from the Tvheadend web interface, it downloads an M3U playlist file for you which you can then open in VLC or another media player,” he says.

“At first, I thought the playlist file was specific to the individual TV programme, as the show’s name is embedded in the file, but actually each playlist file is specific to the channel itself, so it meant I could download a set of playlists, one per channel, and store them in a folder to give me a full range of watching options.”

Sticking to his theme, he stored playlists for the four main channels of 1982 (BBC1, BBC2, ITV, and Channel 4) in a folder and renamed them channel1, channel2, channel3, and channel4.

“Next, I created a script with an infinite loop that would look out for any action on the GPIO pin that was wired to the rotary dial,” he continues. “If the script detects that the switch has been moved, then it opens the first playlist file in VLC, full-screen. The next time the switch moves, the script loops around and adds ‘1’ to the playlist name, so that it will open the next one in the folder.”

Martin is now planning the next stage of the project, considering expanding the channel-changing script to include streams from his IP cameras, replacing a rechargeable speaker with a speaker HAT, and looking to make the original volume controls work with the Pi’s audio. “It been really satisfying to get this project working, and there are many possibilities ahead,” he says.

More from The MagPi magazine

The MagPi magazine issue 78 is out today. Buy your copy now from the Raspberry Pi Press store, major newsagents in the UK, or Barnes & Noble, Fry’s, or Micro Center in the US. Or, download your free PDF copy from The MagPi magazine website.

Subscribe now

Subscribe to The MagPi magazine on a monthly, quarterly, or twelve-month basis to save money against newsstand prices!

Twelve-month print subscribers get a free Raspberry Pi 3A+, the perfect Raspberry Pi to try your hand at some of the latest projects covered in The MagPi magazine.

Coolest Projects, our world-leading technology fair for young people, takes place in seven countries this year: Ireland, the UK, USA, Netherlands, Belgium, Bulgaria, and Milan in Italy.

Volunteer-led Coolest Projects events

Teams of marvellous volunteers organise and run the events in the Netherlands, Belgium, Bulgaria, and Milan! They are doing incredible work to give children in their regions the chance to present their tech creations and be celebrated for their skills and creativity.

And we want to support you in our global community to do the same: organise your own regional Coolest Projects events, wherever you are, so that young people near you can showcase their work and be inspired by others’ inventions.

5 reasons to host your own Coolest Projects event

Running your own Coolest Projects is your chance to:

1. Celebrate the creativity of young creators
2. Grow your local coding and volunteer community
3. Engage parents and educators with technology
4. Develop connections with local businesses
5. Build the worldwide network of Coolest Projects participants, partners, and volunteers

The Coolest Projects Regional Handbook

We’ve put together a free Coolest Projects Regional Handbook that walks you through everything you need to organise your own Coolest Projects event!

Our brand-new handbook brings together everything you need to plan, prepare for, and host your own regional Coolest Projects event. It includes practical advice on:

• Building your Coolest Projects team
• Managing an event budget
• Choosing a venue
• Sponsorship and partner management
• Communications and marketing
• Coolest Projects licensing

Your regional event does not have to be large or formal — it can be as big or small as your community’s volunteers want it to be, and tailored to your community’s needs and interests.

Like the volunteer teams who already run regional Coolest Projects, you too can run your own event — with our handbook as guidance.

Download your free handbook now!

If you’re interested in bringing Coolest Projects to your community, email us at [email protected] so we can connect you to other volunteers in your region who have expressed their interest to us! Letting us know you want to be involved will also enable us to give you more support while you’re getting started.

You’ve only got a little time left to register your idea

To participate in this year’s Coolest Projects, just register your project idea by the deadline (see below)! And don’t fret: you don’t have to have started your project to register, just the idea is enough.

If you don’t want to present something by yourself, you can register in a team of up to five members.

And you don’t need to have finished your project to present it at the event, because the most important thing is to showcase your love and enthusiasm for tech!

Registration deadlines:

• UK (Manchester) — 10 Feb 2019
• USA (Santa Ana, CA) — 15 Feb 2019
• International (Dublin, Ireland) — 14 April 2019

Registration for all Coolest Projects events is free! And you’re also more than welcome to visit and check out the amazing projects without submitting your own. For more information, and to get your free visitor tickets, visit the Coolest Projects website and select your nearest event.

UK-based Lucem Custom Instruments has teamed up with Seattle’s Tracktion Corporation to create an electric guitar with a built-in Raspberry Pi synthesiser, which they call Spirit Animal.

The Spirit Animal concept guitar

We love seeing the Raspberry Pi incorporated into old technology such as radios, games consoles and unwanted toys. And we also love Pi-based music projects. So can you imagine how happy we were to see an electric guitar with an onboard Raspberry Pi synthesiser?

Tracktion, responsible for synth software BioTek 2, ran their product on a Raspberry Pi, and Lucem fitted this Pi and associated tech inside the hollow body of a through-neck Visceral guitar. The concept guitar made its debut at NAMM 2019 last weekend, where attendees at the National Association of Music Merchants event had the chance to get hands-on with the new instrument.

The instrument boasts an onboard Li-ion battery granting about 8 hours of play time, and a standard 1/4″ audio jack for connecting to an amp. To permit screen-sharing, updates, and control via SSH, the guitar allows access to the Pi’s Ethernet port and wireless functionality.

See more

You can find more information about the design on the Gear News website, and see the instrument in action at NAMM on the Lucem Custom Instruments Facebook page. We look forward to seeing where this collaboration will lead!

Music and Pi

If you’re a guitarist and keen to incorporate a Raspberry Pi into your music, then also check out these other projects:

• pisound — the Raspberry Pi–powered guitar pedal

• Pedalumi — the illuminated pedal board

• Guitarboy — is it a Gameboy? Is it a guitar? Unclear, but it’s awesome!

Guitar Boy video

The Guitar Boy is a guitar. The Guitar Boy is a Game Boy. The Guitar Boy is the best of both worlds! Created for the BitFix Gaming 2015 Game Boy Classic build-off, this Game Boy guitar plays both Pokemon and rock and roll!

Today we bring you the latest iteration of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module series: Compute Module 3+ (CM3+). This newest version of our flexible board for industrial applications offers over ten times the ARM performance, twice the RAM capacity, and up to eight times the Flash capacity of the original Compute Module.

A long time ago…

On 7 April 2014 we launched the original Compute Module (CM1), with a Broadcom BCM2835 application processor, a single-core ARM11 at 700MHz, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of eMMC Flash. Although it seems like yesterday, that was nearly half a decade ago! At that point I had no kids, looked significantly younger (probably because I had no kids), and had more hair (fortunately I’m still better off in that department than Eben). [This is fair – Ed.]

Just under three years later we launched Compute Module 3 (CM3) based on the quad-core BCM2837A1, and now, almost exactly two years on, we bring you the CM3+.

The Compute Module has evolved

While we’ve greatly improved the performance, RAM capacity, and Flash capacity of the Compute Module, some things remain the same: CM3+ is an evolution of CM3 and CM1, bringing new features while keeping the form factor, electrical compatibility, price point, and ease of use of the earlier products.

Our aim for the Compute Module was to deliver the core Raspberry Pi technology in a form factor that allowed others to incorporate it into their own products cheaply and easily. If someone wanted to create a Raspberry Pi-based product but found the Model A or B Raspberry Pi boards did not fit their needs, they could use a Compute Module, create a simple low-tech carrier PCB, and make their own thing.

It’s for enterprises of all sizes

We limit the price so that the “maker in a shed” is not disadvantaged when producing only a few hundred products relative to professionals with much larger production runs. The Compute Module takes care of the high-tech bits (fine-pitched BGAs, high-speed memory interfaces, and core power supply), allowing the designer to focus on the differentiating features they really care about. The eMMC Flash device on a Compute Module is more reliable and robust than normal SD cards, so it is more suited to industrial applications. The Compute Module also provides more interfaces than the regular Raspberry Pi, supporting two cameras and two displays, as well as extra GPIO.

CM1 and CM3 have proven very popular, with sales increasing steadily. We don’t generally get to see what the majority of our module customers are using them for, because they’re often companies that understandably want to keep the insides of their products secret, but one nice example application is Revolution Pi from Kunbus. Many NEC digital-signage displays incorporate a socket for CM3, and there are some excellent community efforts too, of which our current favourite is this nifty dual camera board. We’ve also seen enterprising companies start offering turnkey design services using the Compute Module, such as that offered by Kunst Engineering.

So what is Compute Module 3+?

CM3+ is derived from the CM3 board, but incorporates the improved thermal design and Broadcom BCM2837B0 application processor from Raspberry Pi 3B+. This means that, with the exception of a small increase in z-height, CM3+ is a drop-in replacement for CM3 from an electrical and form-factor perspective. Note that due to power-supply limitations the maximum processor speed remains at 1.2GHz, compared to 1.4GHz for Raspberry Pi 3B+.

One of the most frequent requests from users and customers is for Compute Module variants with more on-board Flash memory. CM1 and CM3 both came with 4GB of Flash, and although we are fans of the Henry Ford philosophy of customer choice (“you can have any colour, as long as it’s black”), it was obvious that there was a need for more official options.

With CM3+ we are making available three different eMMC Flash sizes, in addition to a Flash-less “Lite” variant, all at competitive prices:

Product	Unit price
CM3+/Lite	$25
CM3+/8GB	$30
CM3+/16GB	$35
CM3+/32GB	$40

As CM3+ is a new product, it will need a recent version of the Raspberry Pi firmware (and operating system such as Raspbian) to operate correctly.

Thermals

Due to the improved PCB thermal design and BCM2837B0 processor, the CM3+ has better thermal behaviour under load. It has more thermal mass and can draw heat away from the processor faster than CM3. This can translate into lower average temperatures and/or longer sustained operation under heavy load before the processor hits 80°C and begins to reduce its clock speed.

Note that CM3+ will still output the same amount of heat as CM3 for any given application, so performance (and particularly sustained performance) will depend heavily on the design of the carrier PCB and enclosure. As always, we recommend that product designers pay careful attention to thermal performance under expected use cases.

Having characterised the behaviour of the new product, we have broadened the rated ambient temperature range to -20°C to 70°C.

Development Kit

We are also releasing a refreshed Compute Module 3+ Development Kit today. This kit contains 1 x Lite and 1 x 32GB CM3+ module, a Compute Module IO board, camera and display adapters, jumper wires, and a programming cable.

Updated datasheet

Our Compute Module datasheets have been updated to include a new one for CM3+.

Long-term availability

CM3+ will be available until at least January 2026.

We are also moving the “legacy” CM1, CM3 and CM3 Lite products to “not recommended for new designs” status. They will continue to be available until at least January 2023 as previously stated, but we recommend customers use CM3+ for new designs, and where possible move existing designs to CM3+ for improved performance and longer availability.

Compute Module 3+ is, like Raspberry Pi 3B+, the last in a line of 40nm-based Raspberry Pi products. We feel that it’s a fitting end to the line, rolling in the best bits of Raspberry Pi 3B+ and providing users with more design flexibility in an all‑round better product. We hope you enjoy it.

Project Alias, the newest creation of Amsterdam-based maker Bjørn Karmann, allows you to rename your home assistant and, more importantly, paralyse the device’s always-on listening function — for better security.

Project Alias

Alias is a teachable “parasite” that is designed to give users more control over their smart assistants, both when it comes to customisation and privacy. Through a simple app the user can train Alias to react on a custom wake-word/sound, and once trained, Alias can take control over your home assistant by activating it for you.

Always-on home assistants

Love them or hate them, devices such as Google Home and Amazon Echo have become a staple in many homes, thanks to people’s desire to automate mundane chores. I mean, why think about vacuuming my home when my Echo Dot can tell my robot hoover to do it for me?

However, despite their convenience, one concern remains for users of most off-the-shelf products: the always-on, always listening function.

As stories of TV ads prompting unwanted purchases via Amazon surface and South Park commandeers people’s devices via a rather ingenious episode script, more and more people are looking for ways to plug their home assistants’ ears, so to speak.

But how do you get something to do your bidding without it always listening for your commands?

Introducing Project Alias

Bjørn Karmann’s Project Alias serves two purposes: it lets you rename your assistant however you see fit (hello Trogdor!), and it paralyses the device’s always-listening function, taking over command. Then, instead of Amazon/Google/etc. listening to the comings and goings in your home, it’s a headless Raspberry Pi 3A+. And as the Raspberry Pi doesn’t need an internet connection in order to do its thing, the only one listening to you in your home is your significant other, your kids or, in my case, two obnoxious house bunnies.

Bjørn has provided a STL file to let prospective Project Alias makers 3D print their own modern-looking case for the 3A+. And the setup tutorial and complete code are on his GitHub.

Once the add-on is built, you simply access the Project Alias trainer via your phone’s browser and tell your home assistant its new name.

And there you have it: an augemented home assistant that does your bidding without you needing to be concerned about who is listening at the other end.

Other potential names for your home assistant

Now you have Project Alias set up on your Amazon Echo or Google Home, here are some names we think you should use:

• Hey there Delilah
• Hey-ay, baby
• Hey ya!
• Hey Hei

In January 2007, one plumber and a few friends in a pub set out to build a wall of death out of 850 pallets in a field in Lincolnshire. It’s something we’ve all done as children on a small scale, jumping over a cardboard box perhaps. But to scale it up to something 30ft in diameter and 17ft high, and ride around it on a moped at 25mph… that took a special kind of person. That took maker, inventor, YouTuber, and record-breaker extraordinaire Colin Furze.

Colin Furze

You’ve probably seen one or two of Colin Furze’s videos on YouTube. There’s the one where he shoots flames out of a scooter (gaining the attention of Her Majesty’s Lincolnshire Constabulary). There’s the one where he builds the world’s fastest mobility scooter, and the one where he sets off 5000 fireworks at once to celebrate getting three million YouTube subscribers. Maybe you know the one where he sets himself on fire, or the one with a spinning belt of knives to make chopping vegetables easier.

We had a chat with Colin, and sent a very brave photographer to his house to get some photos of him from a safe distance. If you don’t know him, strap in: over the coming pages you’re going to get an exclusive insight into the world of Britain’s most explosive maker.

How to be a better maker, the Furze way

“The thing that I find most exciting about what I do is that sometimes you have the initial test. You have an idea, you nip out to the shed – this could be after tea at night – and you bodge something together quite crudely. And you get that moment of realisation that it might actually work. I think that’s what I find the most enjoyable.”

“I’ve got to the point now where I’ve set my bar pretty high in terms of what people expect. Some projects, like the belt of knives, I knocked that up pretty quick because it was quite simple, but there were other things like the turbo jet scooter, I made sure things look good and they’re pretty well made, so they can take quite a while.”

“Some are a lot easier than others to make, and if you look through my videos in order, they tend to go from ones that are a bit more complicated to ones that are simple. You can never really predict what you’re going to get next; with some YouTube channels it’s much of the same thing if you know what I mean. When I upload a video, you’ve no idea what it’s going to be. I try to hop around a bit so it doesn’t become the same thing over and over again.”

Quality, not quantity

“I used to get a video up every week, or at least try for that, whereas now I’m going to kill myself if I try to match that. I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re ready when they’re ready. If there’s no video on a Thursday, the world’s not going to end. And it makes them a little bit more special when they do come out.”

“I’ve never worked in an office. I think I’d enjoy it for a week, then I’d drive everyone up the wall. I’d be too noisy I think. The only thing I miss from plumbing is the social aspect, because obviously I don’t see many people being in the shed, because I’m only just outside the back door of my house. I haven’t even got a commute. You can just be in there beavering away. I only ever have Rick in there with me when it’s a two-person job. And also it’s not like I’ve got two sheds so something can be being built in the background… a lot of people, when they get to six or seven million subscribers, employ loads of staff, the workshop gets bigger, everything expands, and you start to look at it and think ‘What is this now?’ This is not a guy in the shed at the side of his house trying to make impossible stuff; it’s a factory. Well, you’d expect big stuff to come out of a factory, wouldn’t you? Whereas when I make stuff in that little shed, there’s a little bit of extra interest in it because it’s something that most people could own, if they’ve got the space. So I’ve purposely kept it small and not got too big.”

“I like to go into something thinking ‘Let’s make the best job I can of this.’ Like the shredder that I’ve just made, all the housing and the aluminium surround, I wanted to get it as precise at possible. I used my optical punch and tried to get everything bang on. It all bolts together, and it looks like something that if I’d been shown it before, I’d have gone ‘No, I’m not sure I could make that.’”

Read more!

Read the rest of the exclusive 12-page Colin Furze special in HackSpace magazine issue 15, out today. Buy your copy now from the Raspberry Pi Press store, major newsagents in the UK, or Barnes & Noble, Fry’s, or Micro Center in the US. Or, download your free PDF copy from the HackSpace magazine website.

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