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[Ken Olsen] needed a bunch of analog inputs for his model railroad project. He wanted to use the Raspberry Pi board, but alas there are no analog inputs available on the GPIO header. But there is SPI. So he used an online service to design his on Analog input expansion boards. He mentions that Eagle can be a bit of a pain to work with. For this project he decided to give circuits.io a try. This … [Read more...]
While the Raspberry Pi has very good support for an I2C bus, a lot of very cool chips - including the in system programmer for just about every ATtiny and ATmega microcontroller - use an SPI bus. [Louis] sent in a tutorial for getting hardware SPI on his Raspi, and even though it's rather limited right now, it's a step in the right direction. Previously, [Brian Hensley] put up a tutorial for … [Read more...]
A few of [michu]'s friends formed a band named Kalikut Now and needed an awesome stage show. The band made a few 80cm-high letters of their band name, cut a few pieces of acrylic, and wired them up with a few LED modules. The work of connecting these letters to a computer and programming them fell on [michu], and we've got to say he did a pretty good job. You may remember [michu] from his … [Read more...]
Imagine you're stuck on a desert island, hundreds of miles away from the nearest person, and you finally have time to finish that project you're working on. You have a single microcontroller, but you're lacking a computer and you need to program an ATtiny13. How do you do it? [androidruberoid] figured out how to manually flash a microcontroller (Russian, surprisingly good translation) using … [Read more...]
We've seen a ton of projects that interface hardware with the Raspberry Pi. But they usually depend on bit-banging. That means they toggle the pins in software to match a specific protocol. The thing is that the beefy Broadcom SoC that anchors the board has a lot of built-in peripherals that are just waiting to be used instead of bit banging. In this case, it's the hardware SPI peripheral which … [Read more...]
Here's a novel approach to adding a display to your Raspberry Pi. Instead of using a wired display -- either via the HDMI (which can feed a DVI port with a simple hardware adapter) or the composite video out -- [Chris Bryden] decided to use Bluetooth to provide a wireless display. This really depends on the hardware that you have available. He snapped up a hackable digital picture frame for a … [Read more...]
You can find all kinds of LCD screens in broken electronics. But it's often a chore to figure out how they are controlled if you don't have a working device that can be used to sniff the communications protocol. [Justin] grabbed this character LCD screen from an old Brother printer and decided to see if he could reuse it in his own projects. Luckily the driver card still worked so he patched into … [Read more...]
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