Turn Your Motorola Android Phone Into A Raspberry Pi

August 15, 2016 by 50 Comments

In the surest sign that hardware hacking is the new hotness, Motorola and Farnell/Element 14 have developed an add-on board and SDK that will let you connect virtually anything to your mobile phone. Motorola is calling it the “Moto Mods” system, and it looks like its going to be a dedicated microcontroller that interfaces with the computer inside the phone and provides everything from GPIOs to DSI (video). Naturally, I2C, I2S, SPI, UART, even two flavors of USB are in the mix.

dev-config-diagram-5

The official SDK, ahem Mods Development Kit (MDK), is based on the open Greybus protocol stack (part of Google’s Project Ara open phone project) and it’s running on an ARM Cortex-M4F chip. It’s likely to be itself fairly hackable, and even if the suggested US $125 price is probably worth it for the convenience, we suspect that it’ll be replicable with just a few dollars in parts and the right firmware. (Yes, that’s a challenge.)

The initial four adapter boards range from a simple breadboard to a Raspberry-Pi-hat adapter (hence the title). It’s no secret that cell phones now rival the supercomputers of a bygone era, but they’ve always lacked peripheral interfaces. We wish that all of the old smartphones in our junk box had similar capabilities. What do you say? What would you build with a cellphone if you could break out all sorts of useful comms?

Via HackerBoards, and thanks to [Tom] for the tip!

3D Printed Case Turns Pixel 6 Pro Into Palmtop

January 3, 2025 by 33 Comments

Despite initial interest in the 1990s and early 2000s, palmtop computers never really took off. Realistically most consumers were probably satisfied enough with smartphones as they became more widely available, but those of us who would prefer a real keyboard on our mobile devices are still feeling the pain. Today there are still a few commercial palmtop-like machines out there, but they aren’t exactly mainstream.

Which is why this 3D printed case for the Pixel 6 Pro from [TypingCat] is so interesting. It takes a relatively popular and capable contemporary phone, pairs it with a physical keyboard, and manages to create something that looks quite practical. Thanks to Termux, you can even get a fairly usable Linux environment going on the thing.

There aren’t too many components at play here, but still, we appreciate the fact that [TypingCat] provided links for not only the specific Bluetooth keyboard used, but the fasteners required to hold the three printed parts together. A link is also provided to the Termux-Desktops project, which allows you to get a Linux X11 desktop environment running on Android. It’s not the pocket Linux computer of our dreams, but it’s pretty close.

While the Pixel 6 Pro is a solid enough choice to base this project around, we’re interested in seeing if the community will come up with variants of this case to hold other similarly sized phones. It’s interesting to note that [TypingCat] has decided to use the “No Derivatives” variant of the Creative Commons license for the bottom half of the case. But since the top half is a remix of an existing Pixel 6 Pro case from [JoshCraft3D], it carries a more permissive license and must be distributed separately. Long story short, folks can create and distribute custom versions of the phone-side of this case, but the bottom needs to remain the same.

If you’ve got filament to burn extrude and would rather have a more pure Linux experience, we saw a printable Raspberry Pi Zero palmtop a couple months back that looked quite promising.

Reverse Engineering The Web API Of An Akaso EK7000 Action Camera

September 8, 2024 by 2 Comments

Recently, [Richard Audette] bought an Akaso EK7000 action camera for his daughter’s no-smartphones-allowed summer camp, which meant that after his daughter returned from said camp, he was free to tinker with this new toy. Although he was not interested in peeling open the camera to ogle its innards, [Richard] was very much into using the WiFi-based remote control without being forced into using the ‘Akaso Go’ smartphone app. To do this, he had to figure out the details of what the Android app does so that it could be replicated. He provided a fake camera WiFi hotspot for the app in order to learn its secrets.

Normally, the camera creates a WiFi hotspot with a specific SSID (iCam-AKASO_C_1e96) and password (1234567890) which the Android app connects to before contacting the camera’s IP address at 192.72.1.1. The app then shows a live view and allows you to copy over snapshots and videos. Initially, [Richard] tried to decompile the Android app using JADX, but the decompiled code contained so many URLs that it was hard to make heads or tails of it. In addition, the app supports many different Akaso camera models, making it harder to focus on the part for this particular camera.

Continue reading “Reverse Engineering The Web API Of An Akaso EK7000 Action Camera” →

A Clean Linux Installation For An Android TV Box

September 3, 2024 by 22 Comments

Although Android technically runs on top of Linux, generally most Android devices abstract away the underlying Linux-ness of these machines. In theory this is a good thing; we wouldn’t necessarily want to live in a world where we have to log in to a command-line interface just to make a phone call. But too much abstraction often needlessly restricts the capabilities of the underlying hardware. [Murray] a.k.a [Green Bug-Eyed Monster] has an Android TV box with just such a problem, as the Android OS included with it allows for watching TV just fine, but with a few tweaks it can run a full Linux installation instead, turning it into a much more versatile machine.

This specific Android TV box is based on the Rockchip 3566, a popular single-board computer used in a wide array of products. As such it is one of the easier targets for transforming a limited TV machine into a fully capable desktop computer. The first step is to compile an Armbian image for the machine, in this case using an x86 installation of Ubuntu to cross-compile for the ARM-based machine. With a viable image in hand, there’s an option to either solder on a microSD slot to the included pins on the computer’s PCB or to flash the image directly to the on-board eMMC storage by tricking the machine into thinking that the eMMC is missing. Either option will bring you into a full-fledged Linux environment, with just a few configuration steps to take to get it running like any other computer.

[Murray] began this process as an alternative to paying the inflated prices of Raspberry Pis over the past few years, and for anyone in a similar predicament any computer with the Rockchip 3566 processor in it could be a potential target for a project like this. You might need to make a few tweaks to the compile options and hardware, but overall the process should be similar. And if you don’t have an RK3566, don’t fret too much. We’ve seen plenty of other Android TV boxes turned into similar devices like this one which runs RetroPie instead.

Audio On Pi: Here Are Your Options

August 12, 2024 by 37 Comments

There are a ton of fun Raspberry Pi and Linux projects that require audio output – music players, talking robots, game consoles and arcades, intelligent assistants, mesh network walkie-talkies, and much more! There’s no shortage of Pi-based iPods out there, and my humble opinion is that we still could use more of them.

To help you in figuring out your projects, let’s talk about all the ways you can use to get audio out of a Pi or a similar SBC. Not all of them are immediately obvious and you ought to know the ropes before you implement one of them and get unpleasantly surprised by a problem you didn’t foresee. I can count at least five ways, and they don’t even include a GPIO-connected buzzer!

Let’s rank the different audio output methods, zoning in on things like their power consumption, and sort them by ease of implementation, and we’ll talk a bit about audio input options while we’re at it.

Continue reading “Audio On Pi: Here Are Your Options” →

Phone Thermal Cameras Get Open Source Desktop Tools

July 11, 2023 by 14 Comments

Whenever phone-based thermal cameras are brought up here on Hackaday, we inevitably receive some comments about how they’re a bad investment compared to a standalone unit. Sure they might be cheaper, but what happens in a couple years when the app stops working and the manufacturer no longer feels like keeping it updated?

It’s a valid concern, and if we’re honest, we don’t like the idea of relying on some shady proprietary app just to use the camera in the first place. Which is why we’re so excited to see open source software being developed that allows you to use these (relatively) inexpensive cameras on your computer. [Les Wright] recently sent word that he’s been working on a project called PyThermalCamera which specifically targets the TOPDON TC001, which in turn is based on a project called P2Pro-Viewer developed by LeoDJ for the InfiRay P2 Pro.

Readers may recall we posted a review of the P2 Pro last month, and while the compact hardware was very impressive, the official Android software lacked a certain degree of polish. While these projects won’t help you on the mobile front in their current form, it’s good to know there’s at least a viable “Plan B” if you’re unwilling or unable to use the software provided from the manufacturer. Naturally this also opens up a lot of new possibilities for the camera, as being connected to a proper Linux box means you can do all sorts of interesting things with the video feed.

The two video feeds on the left are combined to produce the final thermal image.

Speaking of the video feed, we should say that both of these projects were born out of a reverse engineering effort by members of the EEVblog forums. They figured out early on that the InfiRay (and other similar models) were picked up as a standard USB video device by Linux, and that they provided two video streams: one being a B&W feed from the camera where the relative temperature is used as luminance, and the other containing the raw thermal data cleverly encoded into a green-tinted video. With a little poking they found an FFmpeg one liner that would combine the two streams, which provided the basis for much of the future work.

In the video below, you can see the review [Les] produced for the TOPDON TC001, which includes a demonstration of both the official Windows software and his homebrew alternative running on the Raspberry Pi. Here’s hoping these projects inspire others to join in the effort to produce flexible open source tools that not only unlock the impressive capabilities of these new thermal cameras but save us from having to install yet another smartphone application just to use a device we purchased.

Continue reading “Phone Thermal Cameras Get Open Source Desktop Tools” →

Photo of a smartphone with the ATTiny85 inserted into it, with a screen unlock pattern being drawn on the screen

ATtiny85 Automates Your Smartphone

March 2, 2023 by 14 Comments

It might not seem too impressive these days, but when microcontrollers with hardware USB support were more expensive and rare, the VUSB library was often used to create USB devices with an ATtiny85. It became so popular that the ATtiny85 even got packaged into USB dongle formfactors, like the DigiSpark boards. Well, you might not know this, but your Android smartphones can also work with USB mice and touchscreens in lieu of the built-in touchscreen display. [ErfanSn] combined these two ideas, creating a library to automate smartphone touchscreen events and keyboard input with an ATtiny85 — open for all of us to use, and with examples to spare.

The library is called DigiCombo, and it comes with plenty of examples for any screen touch event emulation that you might want. For instance, check out the README — it has video examples for Instagram page scrolling, unlock screen brute-forcing with random coordinates, playing the Stack rhythm game, and pinch zoom — all the building blocks for your smartphone touch emulation needs are covered pretty well! Of course, all of these have example code corresponding to them, that you can download and base your own ideas on. What’s more, the library is available in current Arduino IDE under the DigiCombo name. So if you need to, say, make a quick autoclicker for your phone, the library is a few steps away!

If your smartphone project was stalled because you needed to emulate touchscreen input, this library is your chance to get it done! We appreciate projects that let us get more from smartphones — there’s a lot of those laying around, they’re pretty functional and self-sufficient devices, so it makes sense that some projects of ours could do with a phone instead of a Raspberry Pi. Some manufacturers let us get a bit more of our phones, but this hasn’t really caught on, which means we have to make do with help of libraries like these. Or, perhaps, you rely on your phone day-to-day, and you’d like to add a touchpad to its back?