An Intel Atom CPU In The Raspi Form Factor

October 18, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 133 Comments

For years now, people have been trying to stuff an Intel processor on a credit card sized board. An x86 board that can fit in your pocket is an intriguing device – after all, that’s what Gumstix, the forerunner of the Raspberry Pi, were. Efforts to put x86 on a dev board have included the Minnowboard, the Intel Galileo and Edison, and even the Intel Compute Stick. These have not seen the uptake you would expect from a small x86-powered board, but that tide may soon turn. The UP board is exactly what you would expect from a Raspberry Pi-inspired board with a real Intel processor.

The feature set for the UP board is impressive for a credit card sized board; it’s powered by a quad-core Intel Atom x5-Z8300 CPU running at 1.84 GHz. The board comes equipped with 1GB of RAM, 16GB of eMMC Flash, Gigabit Ethernet, five USB 2.0 ports (one on a pin header) and one USB 3.0 port. Up also includes a real-time clock, HDMI, the same 40-pin GPIO pin connector found in the Raspberry Pi Model B Plus, and DSI and CSI connectors for the Raspberry Pi camera and touch screen.

To be fair to all the previous attempts at making a board built around an x86 chip that borrows heavily from the Raspberry Pi, there haven’t been many chips out there that have been suitable for credit card-sized applications. Only in the last year or so has Intel released chips suitable for an x86 single board computer, and the growing market of Windows 10 tablets bears this out. While it remains to be seen if the UP board will be a success, more than a few people will pick one of these up for a miniature Skype box.

Open Source Tracked Robot Supports STEM In Africa

October 18, 2015 by Al Williams 16 Comments

A lot of hacker projects start with education in mind. The Raspberry Pi, for example, started with the goal of making an affordable classroom computer. The Shrimp is a UK-based bare-bones Arduino targeted at schools. We recently saw an effort to make a 3D printed robotic platform aimed at African STEM education: The Azibot.

Azibot has 3D printed treads, a simple gripper arm, and uses an Arduino combined with Scratch. Their web site has the instructions on how to put together the parts and promises to have the custom part of the software available for download soon.

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Hackaday Links: October 18, 2015

October 18, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

We have our featured speakers lined up for the Hackaday Supercon, one of which is [Fran Blanche]. We’ve seen a lot of her work, from playing with pocket watches to not having the funding to build an Apollo Guidance Computer DSKY. In her spare time, she builds guitar pedals, and there’s a biopic of her in She Shreds magazine.

Halloween is coming, and that means dressing children up as pirates, fairies, characters from the latest Marvel and Disney movies, and electrolytic capacitors.

There’s a new movie on [Steve Jobs]. It’s called the Jobs S. It’s a major upgrade of the previous release, featuring a faster processor and more retinas. One more thing. Someone is trying to cash in on [Woz]’s work. This time it’s an auction for a complete Apple I that’s expected to go for $770,000 USD.

Hackaday community member [John McLear] is giving away the factory seconds of his original NFC ring (think jewelry). These still work but failed QA for small reasons and will be fun to hack around on. You pay shipping which starts at £60 for 50 rings. We’ve grabbed enough of them to include in the goody bags for the Hackaday Superconference. If you have an event coming up, getting everyone hacking on NFC is an interesting activity. If you don’t want 50+, [John] is also in the middle of a Kickstarter for an improved version.

Your 3D printed parts will rarely come out perfectly. There will always be some strings or scars from removing them from the bed. There’s a solution to these problems: use a hot air gun.

Everyone has a plumbus in their home, but how do they do it? First, they take the dinglebop, and smooth it out with a bunch of schleem. The schleem is then repurposed for later batches.

The Practical Potato Cell

October 18, 2015 by James Hobson 32 Comments

Potato batteries, lemon batteries, they’re all good fun for the classroom — but is there a way of making them better? [Marcel Varallo] decided to give it a shot — and we gotta admit, it’s a pretty cool idea!

Normally for these fruit and vegetable batteries you poke some leads into the battery, connect it to a clock, and bob’s your uncle. But what if we made them resemble batteries? [Marcel] took some copper pipe, cut it down to size, and poked it through a potato. Now he had a potato-cored, copper tube. Stick a zinc nail in the middle, and you’ve got yourself a battery cell! Or as [Marcel] likes to put it.. a Mar-Cell. Or the more scientific term.. the Solanum tuberosum based electron differencer V1.0.

Each potato cell produces approximately 0.8V, so if you throw eight in series, you’ll have the equivalent of a 6V battery, just maybe not the same mAh rating.

For another cool way to demonstrate electricity to youngsters, we love this lemon battery hack — it’s actually quite elegant.

Raspberry Pi Tablet Based On Sailfish OS

October 18, 2015 by Rud Merriam 21 Comments

There are so many hacks in this project it’s hard to know where to start. So let’s start at the SailPi tablet which is a Raspberry Pi running the Sailfish OS on an LCD touch screen powered by a cell phone battery pack. The design looks more like a high-tech sandwich with the Pi in the middle than a tablet. Despite the appearance it works, at that’s what counts. The creator, [Aleksi Suomalainen] expended a lot of effort pulling all the pieces together on this project.

The Sailfish OS project is targeted at creating a new OS for mobile devices, especially cell phones. It is open source which invites developers to contribute to the project. The touch screen user interface is designed for ease of use by gestures from one finger on the hand holding the phone.

[Aleksi] ported Sailfish to a Pi 2 during a hacking week. He’s shared the code for it on his blog. During the hack week he played with accessing the GPIO on the Pi to flash an LED. To get you up and running quickly he provided an image you can load onto an SD.

It appears the Pi is finding a niche for OS hackers in addition to the hardware hackers using the GPIO.

Don’t miss the demo after the break to see the OS running on the Pi. Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Tablet Based On Sailfish OS” →

Coke-Propane Rocket Blasts Off Without Ignition

October 18, 2015 by Mike Szczys 85 Comments

Everyone’s seen the Diet Coke and Mentos “experiment” that ends in a brown eruption. But have you seen the Coke and Propane ~~experiment~~ insanity that results in a rocket launch? As [Itay] pointed out when he sent us the tip, this doesn’t need to be lit. The simple act of turning the bottle upside down starts a powerful reaction without any ignition.

Of course it’s the how of this that tickles our brains, but let’s finish the setup. This starts with a bottle of Coke which is about 3/4 full. The head space is displaced by spraying propane into the bottle; propane is heavier than air. All that’s left is to turn the bottle upside down and pray it doesn’t smack anyone in the noggin as it takes off.

In trying to find an explanation for this phenomenon we came across a plausible answer on the Chemistry StackExchange. It points to the Mentos phenomenon combined with the temperature differential caused by the very cold propane. The answering user theorizes that tiny ice crystals form and when the bottle is turned upside down the cold propane and micro crystals rise through the warmer soda acting as a much more rapid catalyst than Mentos alone. Of course this is just a theory so please share your own ideas below.

We thought the folks who microwave stuff outside of a microwave enclosure had their fill of danger but this videos is also one of theirs. It should be no surprise that they also tried the experiment with an ignition source. That video is found after the break and should immediately convince you to never try any of this yourself.

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FPGAs For The Raspberry Pi

October 18, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 101 Comments

FPGA development has advanced dramatically in the last year, and this is entirely due to an open-source toolchain for Lattice’s iCE40 FPGA. Last spring, the bitstream for this FPGA was reverse engineered and a toolchain made available for anything that can run Linux, including a Raspberry Pi. [Dave] from Xess thought it was high time for a Raspberry Pi FPGA board. With the help of this open-source toolchain, he can program this FPGA board right on the Raspberry Pi.

The inspiration for [Dave]’s board came from the XuLA and StickIt! boards that give the Raspberry Pi an FPGA hat. These boards had a problem; the Xilinx bitstreams had to be compiled on a ‘real’ PC and brought over to the Raspberry Pi world. The new project – the CAT Board – brings an entire FPGA dev kit over to the Raspberry Pi.

The hardware for the CAT Board is a Lattice iCE-HX8K, 32 MBytes of SDRAM, a serial configuration flash, LEDs, buttons, DIP switches, grove connectors, and SATA connectors (although [Dave] is just using these for differential signals; he doesn’t know if he can get SATA hard drives to work with this board).

Despite some problems with his board house, [Dave] eventually got his FPGA working, or at least the bitstream configuration part, and he can blink a pair of LEDs with a Raspberry Pi and programmable logic. The Hello World for this project is done, and now the only limit is how many gates are on this FPGA.

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