[Kratz] just turned into a rock hound and has a bunch of rocks from Montana that need tumbling. This requires a rock tumbler, and why build a rock tumbler when you can just rip apart an old inkjet printer? It’s one of those builds that document themselves, with the only other necessary parts being a Pizza Hut thermos from the 80s and a bunch of grit.
Boot a Raspberry Pi from a USB stick. You can’t actually do that. On every Raspberry Pi, there needs to be a boot partition on the SD card. However, there’s no limitation on where the OS resides, and [Jonathan] has all the steps to replicate this build spelled out.
Some guys in Norway built a 3D printer controller based on the BeagleBone. The Replicape is now in its second hardware revision, and they’re doing some interesting things this time around. The stepper drivers are the ‘quiet’ Trinamic chips, and there’s support for inductive sensors, more fans, and servo control.
Looking for one of those ‘router chipsets on a single board’? Here you go. It’s the NixCoreX1, and it’s pretty much a small WiFi router on a single board.
[Mowry] designed a synthesizer. This synth has four-voice polyphony, 12 waveforms, ADSR envelopes, a rudimentary sequencer, and fits inside an Altoids tin. The software is based on The Synth, but [Mowry] did come up with a pretty cool project here.
I was going to write something snarky about how much better Teenage engineering PO-1 is but the Minty Synth actually sounds pretty good. But Minty is out of stock so…. :-/
You can always build it yourself with the schematics and partslist, then flash the ATmega328p with the software.
Here: http://mintysynth.com/hardware.html
and Software: http://mintysynth.com/software.html
Just an update–the latest version of MintySynth is now in stock at Adafruit, at a more competitive price. Thanks for the feedback!
That synth is pretty impressive although at that price I’m certainly not buying one, especially when I can find used gear for a bit more, keyboard included. Nonetheless the build experience can be a fun way to teach electronics and programming to youngsters (make them build led blinkers and they’ll hate electronics, let them make “wooob woob” synths and “thump thump” amplifiers and they will love it!).
Yes, drums and trumpets drive parents crazy faster than flashlights will.
The NixCore looks neat, thanks for posting it.
A previous HackaDay artical mentioned using Folger’s plastic coffee cans for tumbling stones. Some day I’ll get around to building a rock tumbler/parts cleaner using an old Ice cream maker and Folger’s container.
I do not doubt that there is a practical application for moving the OS of a raspberry pi off of the (micro)SD card and onto a USB stick, but I am having trouble figuring one out.
What, if any, are the performance and durability changes with this kind of configuration?
Larger capacity USB drives cheaper than SD byte for byte?
I couldn’t find many.
I performed this at the request of a client, in the name of providing redundancy in case of media corruption of the pi’s OS, which can happen with a power failure, but it certainly didn’t help there!
One major caveat to the system is that you must use the same USB stick that you initially set up the bootable SD with. If you loose the SD to corruption, you can’t use the USB stick with another berryboot SD card… This was the case when I played around with it anyway, that may be resolved now?
You can, you just have to setup the config.txt file correctly, and possibly fstab on the USB drive.
I use that setup in my car, RPi 2 conencted to a pair of composite 9″ headrest screens for the kids. Having it on a USB drive is handy as the Pi is hidden under a console and I have a USB extension cable for the USB drive in the console box where I can get to it easily, I can just pull the drive out to change up the content, more fiddly with the Micro SD as I have to find the SD card reader and an adapter after digging the Pi out of it’s hidey hole…
And using device ID’s like that is not very safe, he should be using UUID’s when mounting drives, if you plug in multiple USB drives at next reboot the drive you want to boot from may not be mounted correctly because fo the way Linux allocates device ID’s.