Day: December 18, 2016

Raspberry Pi Zero smart projector

Smart Projector With Built-in Raspberry Pi Zero

December 18, 2016 by 16 Comments

You’ve heard of smartphones but have you heard of smart projectors? They’ve actually been around for a few years and are sort of like a TV set top box and projector combined, leaving no need for a TV. Features can include things like streaming Netflix, browsing in Chrome, and Skyping. However, they can cost from a few hundred to over a thousand dollars.

[Novaspirit]  instead made his own cheap smart projector. He first got a $70 portable projector (800×480 native resolution, decent for that price) and opened it up. He soldered an old USB hub that he already had to a Raspberry Pi Zero so that he could plug in a WiFi dongle and a dongle for a Bluetooth keyboard. That all went into the projector.

Examining the projector’s circuit board he found locations to which he could wire the Raspberry Pi Zero for power even when the projector was off. He lastly made the Raspberry Pi dual-bootable into either OSMC or RetroPie. OSMC is a Linux install that boots directly into a media player and RetroPie is a similar install that turns your Raspberry Pi into a gaming machine. You can see a timelapse of the making of it and a demonstration in the video after the break.

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Another Desktop LED Xmas Tree!

December 18, 2016 by 7 Comments

We love it when someone takes inspiration from one of our posts and comes up with their own twist on it. [Matthew] liked one builds he saw on Hackaday so much, he built his own LED desktop Xmas tree!

[Matthew] was inspired by [designer2k2]’s DIY desktop Xmas tree that was posted in October. To get started, he found a set of concentric WS2812 rings over on Ali Express. The five rings total 93 LEDs, plus a single WS2812 for the top of the tree. He also got a laser cut tree model from Thingiverse and had it cut, combining the LED rings with the tree in the final product

The whole thing running on a Digispark USB Development Board from DigiStump, the same as the original project. There aren’t many details in the video, but [Matthew] has put links to where he got the rings and the tree, the laser cutting service, a link to the DigiStump website as well as a link to [designer2k2]’s original tree project. There’s no source code yet, but [Matthew] says a link to it is coming along with some more pictures.

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