Week 757 – STAR, Noodles, Synths, and 3DS Repairs

by | Dec 8, 2025 | Weeknotes | 0 comments

Each week we’ll endeavour to publish some details of the interesting things that members of DoES Liverpool have been up to over the past seven days. You can find out a bit more about them in our introductory post.

And remember, if you’re involved with DoES Liverpool at all, let us know what you get up to so we can include it here!

🥳🎉🤶Xmas Party – Friday 12th December 6pm until late 🎄🍾🍰

It’s our Xmas party this Friday. Please come along if you can, and get in touch with Terry or Neil if you’d like to “do a turn”.  See Neil’s post here for more details.

Things of Note

    • A brief overview of the 2 day mini STAR workshop I took part in with folks from Newcastle University and the IUCN.
    • How I had to redo the fundamentals of Yirgacheffe, and a little on how I have made this complex geospatial library specifically because I’m bad at it.

    #weeknotesmichael:Weeknotes o’clock! https://digitalflapjack.com/weeknotes/2025-12-01/

  • MCQN Ltd:Noodling with noodles; playing with projectors; confusion with codes… the latest #weeknotesmcqn.com/posts/week-1052-littl
  • Chris Huffee:As seasons become less predictable we’re seeing some @museuminabox boxes nest very early this year.

    A yellow acrylic museum in a box packed in a lot of shredded paper in a cardboard box. This one is in for repair after being involved in a nasty smash. It will be fixed and heading back to its library today.
  • matthewcroughan: Found a free Nintendo 3DS with a very damaged charging port at @DoESLiverpool and replaced it with USB C on their #makernight that happens every week on Thursday.We added a red LED in-line because it makes it look cooler. The battery power circuit was beyond saving, so we just allowed it to be directly driven using any 5V source via USB C by hard wiring the thermistor. Maybe the next step is to add magsafe coil so it can be powered wirelessly with any magsafe power banks, which far exceed the battery capacity of the original battery that lived inside of the DS anyway.

    My main laptop (GPD Pocket 4) ran out of juice on the night whilst researching and I couldn’t find a PSU for it, so had to switch to the Shiftphone 8 which is running Linux, so I was able to use it as a desktop/laptop replacement for the rest of the night, which worked quite nicely.

    By the way, does anybody know how to make homebrew apps for the 3DS using a modern toolchain that is fun? Let me know! I want to make an MQTT dashboard that runs on here.

    #weeknotes

    A nintendo 3DS with its charging port replaced by a USB C connector
    The back of a 3DS with its backplate removed and battery taken out. The silk screen of the 3DS is visible and bears the Nintendo logo. Our bodge wire and LED is proudly shown.
    Some bluetooth speakers, a keyboard and a laptop which is closed because it had ran out of power is pictured. The 3DS is placed face down on the laptop and the red LED is powered indicating power is being provided via the bodge circuit. Also pictured is a mobile phone running NixOS Linux and the fastfetch terminal command showing information about the platform.
    A closeup picture of the 3DS back with silkscreen exposed and red LED from our bodge turned on.
  • Adrian McEwen:At @DoESLiverpool for the Liverpool #Synth Meetup.There are many, many synths of all sorts.

    #Liverpool #weeknotes

    A Luma Drum Computer 1, a black slab with wooden end caps and a sloped front festooned with buttons and sliders
    A Yamaha CS30 keyboard - a row of
    A pair Black Corporation synths, stacked on top of each other. They're
    A Roland TR-8S, in its box
  • Adrian McEwen:My plan for the day is to see if I can turn these components into something that makes noise, following @todbot‘s CircuitPython synthio tutorialsgithub.com/todbot/CircuitPytho

    #CircuitPython #synthio #ESP32C3 #weeknotes

    An array of components laid out on a desk. There's a small speaker, a little purple circuit board (that's an I2S DAC and class D amp) and an ESP32C3 breakout board. Plus a header and screw terminals to solder into the amp, the electrostatic bag it came in, and an USB cable
  • michael:I had a play with OpenSCAD, as I thought it might combine my love of building with my fondness for functional programming, but in the end I realised that it’s not quite for me. I wrote some notes as to why for my use case it doesn’t work, but I hope that it continues to evolve as I’d love to use it more with some of the rough edges sorted.https://mwdales-guitars.uk/blog/2025/12/07/openscad/

    #maker #weeknotes #cad

Coming Up in the Next Week

These are the events booked in for this week. Click the link or contact the event organiser for more details. Want to run something yourself? Check the host your own events page on our website.

Monday 08 December, 7:00pm-9:00pm Socialist Alternative discussion group
Tuesday 09 December, 7:00pm-9:00pm Liverpool Revolutionary Communist Party
Wednesday 10 December, 7:00pm-9:00pm DoES Salon
Thursday 11 December, 9:00am-6:00pm Jelly Liverpool
Thursday 11 December, 6:00pm-9:30pm Goodgym Liverpool
Thursday 11 December, 7:00pm-9:30pm Maker Night
Our free weekly evening meeting, where you can find out about our space and all the making equipment in it, get a laser cutter or CNC embroidery machine induction, and work on projects from physical computing and electronics to 3d printing, CNC routing and sewing. Just pay for materials used.
Friday 12 December, 6:00pm-Saturday 13 December, 12:00am

DoES Liverpool Xmas Party! (Dongo’s Dingo) – Please come along

We’re promising an evening full of entertainment and joy with music, dance, magic, fun, entertainment and BINGO

Food: After the Birthday celebrations this year where everyone brought their own food we decided we would operate like that again as it was so successful. Please bring something to share and something for yourself. Bring your own Drinks too.

6pm – Community Meal
7pm – Entertainment starts
This will be everything that we had last year except it will be better as we have practiced more. We have Bingo cards, so expect a Bingo Extravaganza, with entertainment, singing, dancing and participatory entertainment.

This will be a high energy event so wear your dancing shoes – if you feel like dressing up or wearing fancy dress then please do.

We’re keen to welcome everyone who has come along to DoES this year, that may be you have attended a Maker night, Repair cafe or are a member.

It’s your turn
Would you like to do a turn? That’s theatre speak for getting up and giving it a go. If you would like to sing, do a bit of prestidigitation, read a poem etc then let us know and we will put you on the list of performers. Please let Jackie or Terry know.

We’re looking for prizes
If you have an item left over from the laser cutter, made too many badges or embroidered one thing too many. Then please put it aside and drop it off to Jackie or Terry.

See you on the 12th!!!

12 December, 2025
6:00 pm – 11:00 pm

Saturday 13 December, 12:00pm-6:00pm Maker Day
Our monthly daytime meeting, where you can find out about our space and all the making equipment in it, get a laser cutter or CNC embroidery machine induction, and work on projects from physical computing and electronics to 3d printing, CNC routing and sewing. Just pay for materials used.
Sunday 14 December, 2:00pm-5:00pm

Plastic Playground

In a world with mountains of plastic and molehills of play, let’s get our spades out and shift the balance. Make new things from abandoned plastic with us. Plantpots, purses … pedalos?

Shred plastic. Blend it. Meld scraps together with a heat gun. Make sheets. Laser cut it. CNC it. Stitch potato bags together with soldering iron? Make fabrics with a regular iron? What have we got, what can we make? We don’t know – let’s figure it out!

Facilitated by Plastic Tactics – follow on social for the latest updates, and to see what we make if you can’t be here in person:
http://instagram.com/plastacs
http://facebook.com/plastictacticsliverpool

Somebody Should

The DoES Liverpool to-do list is stored in the issues of our Somebody Should repository on github. Head over there if there’s something you’d like to report, or if you want to help out fixing things.

See all the issues…

Issue counts: 414 open, 1701 closed

3 new issues:

Featured issue: Tony apparently not cutting square. Can we move this on or close it?

2 issues closed:

Thanks amcewen!

Community Maker Events

Maker Events are regular meetings organised by DoES Liverpool to provide a space for people to learn, experiment and work on projects related to Physical computing, Laser cutting, Arduino, Electronics, 3D printing…

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