Icoboard Software Defined Radio Platform

March 20, 2018 by Al Williams 8 Comments

The Icoboard is a plug-in for the Raspberry Pi with a Lattice iCE FPGA onboard. Combined with a cheap A/D converter, [OpenTechLab] build a software-defined radio using all open source tools. He found some inexpensive converters that cost about $25 and were fast enough (32 MHz) for the purpose at hand. The boards also had a digital to analog converter and he was able to find the data sheets. You can see a video with the whole project covered, below.

The video, by the way, is pretty extensive (about an hour’s worth) and covers the creation of a PC board to connect from the Icoboard to the converters. There’s also a 3D printed frame, and that’s explained in detail as well.

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Friday Hack Chat: Everything Raspberry Pi

March 14, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

The Raspberry Pi is six years old now, and in that time it’s become the most popular single board computer. Over these last few years, the Pi has improved from a relatively anemic board based on a smartphone SoC to a surprisingly fast board that’s loaded up with some of the best software and the best community support we’ve ever seen. There’s an awful lot you can do with a Pi, and the continued support of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has enabled millions of people to get their hands on a cheap computer that runs Linux. It’s great.

Now it’s your turn to ask the engineers behind this tiny little computer what’s going on in the world of Pi. We’re having a Hack Chat this Friday, and you’re invited.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Roger Thornton], principal hardware engineer for the Raspberry Pi, where he oversees design, test, compliance, and production for Raspberry Pi products. Previously, [Roger]’s work for Broadcom included being part of the team that characterized and tested numerous SoCs including the BCM2835/6/7 found in various Pis. He also has experience in the smart home and IoT fields from working in a consultancy where be helped bring chips to market.

[Roger]’s most recent work was announced today; the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is the latest in a long line of Pis, and while it’s not the octocore ARM monster with SATA and PCIe and Gigabit networking and 4G that the power-hungry have been clamoring for, it is more capable than its predecessor and still only costs less than forty bucks.

This is also the second time [Roger] has been a guest on our Hack Chats. You can check out the transcript of the 2017 chat here.

During this chat, we’re going to be discussing the future of Raspberry Pi products, Pi events around the world, and a question on the minds of many: where you can buy Pi Zeros in quantity. You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the Hack Chat. You can do that by leaving the questions as a comment on this Hack Chat’s event page.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week it’s going down at the usual time, on noon, Pacific, Friday, March 16th Want to know what time this is happening in your neck of the woods? Have a countdown timer!

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Raspberry Pi Gets Faster CPU And Better Networking In The New Model 3 B+

March 14, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 144 Comments

While the Raspberry Pi’s birthday (and the traditional release date for the newest and best Pi) was a few weeks ago, Pi Day is a fitting enough date for the introduction of the best Pi to date. The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is the latest from the Raspberry Pi foundation. It’s faster, it has better networking, and most interestingly, the Pi 3 Model B+ comes with modular compliance certification, allowing anyone to put the Pi into a product with vastly reduced compliance testing.

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The Sensor Array That Grew Into A Robot Cat

March 6, 2018 by Roger Cheng 32 Comments

Human brains evolved to pay extra attention to anything that resembles a face. (Scientific term: “facial pareidolia”) [Rongzhong Li] built a robot sensor array with multiple emitters and receivers augmenting a Raspberry Pi camera in the center. When he looked at his sensor array, he saw the face of a cat looking back at him. This started his years-long Petoi OpenCat project to build a feline-inspired body to go with the face.

While the name of the project signals [Rhongzhong]’s eventual intention, he has yet to release project details to the open-source community. But by reading his project page and scrutinizing his YouTube videos (a recent one is embedded below) we can decipher some details. Motion comes via hobby remote-control servos orchestrated by an Arduino. Higher-level functions such as awareness of environment and Alexa integration are handled by a Raspberry Pi 3.

The secret (for now) sauce are the mechanical parts that tie them all together. From impact-absorption spring integrated into the upper leg to how its wrists/ankles articulate. [Rongzhong] believes the current iteration is far too difficult to build and he wants to simplify construction before release. And while we don’t have much information on the software, the sensor array that started it all implies some level of sensor fusion capabilities.

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Shoot-And-Forget Digital Photo Frame

March 5, 2018 by James Hobson 28 Comments

Digital photo frames these days require you to manage the photos stored on it or the cloud-based service tied to the frame’s manufacturer. [Henric Andersson] realized that he and his wife take a lot of photos but find little time to go through them — like photo albums of days past — and add them to any photo frame-like appliance or service. Since Google photos can do a lot of the sorting for them, he decided to incorporate that into a digital photo frame.

Using his wife’s old Viewsonic 24” 1080p monitor, he cracked it open and incorporated the screen into a 24×16 distressed wood frame — reinforcing it to account for the bulky, built-in power supply with pieces of HDF and a lot of glue. The brains behind this digital photo frame is a Raspberry Pi 3 he received from a friend. To turn the whole on/off, he built a small circuit but it turned out it wasn’t strictly necessary since everything started just fine without it.

While functionally complete, it needed one more addition. A little thing called ‘color temperature calibration’ — aka white balance.

Finding the TCS34725 RGB color sensor by Adafruit — and readily available code for easy integration — [Andersson] puzzled over how to add it to the frame. To disguise it while retaining its effectiveness, he had to glue it to the rear of the frame after drilling a hole in the top piece and sticking a plastic stick through the hole to let light through to the sensor.

To get the photos to display, [Henric Andersson] says all he did was add a few queries to Google Photos and it will display all your relevant photos that have been synced to the service. For a breakdown of that side of this hack, check out his other post with the details.

While Google Photos deftly displays photos of various orientations, sizes, and aspect ratios, we’ve featured a digital photo frame that handles the task a little differently.

Graphing Calculator Dual Boots With Pi Zero

March 4, 2018 by Tom Nardi 41 Comments

The nearly limitless array of consumer gadgets hackers have shoved the Raspberry Pi into should really come as no surprise. The Pi is cheap, well documented, and in the case of the Pi Zero, incredibly compact. It’s like the thing is begging to get grafted into toys, game systems, or anything else that could use a penguin-flavored infusion.

But this particular project takes it to the next level. Rather than just cramming the Pi and a cheap LCD into his Numworks graphing calculator, [Zardam] integrated it into the device so well that you’d swear it was a feature from the factory. By exploiting the fact that the calculator has some convenient solder pads connected to its SPI bus, he was able to create an application which switches the display between the Pi and the calculator at will. With just a press of a button, he’s able to switch between using the stock calculator software and having full access to the internal Pi Zero.

In a very detailed write-up on his site, [Zardam] explains the process of getting the Pi Zero to output video over SPI. The first part of the battle was re-configuring the GPIO pins and DMA controller. After that, there was the small issue of writing a Linux SPI framebuffer driver. Luckily he was able to find some work done previously by [Sprite_TM] which helped him get on the right track. His final driver is able to push 320×240 video at 50 FPS via GPIO, more than enough to kick back with some DOOM.

With video sorted out, he still needed a way to interface the calculator’s keyboard with the Pi. For this, he added a function in his calculator application that echoed the keys pressed to the calculator’s UART port. This is connected to the Pi, where a daemon is listening for key presses. The daemon then generates the appropriate keycodes for the kernel via uinput. [Zardam] acknowledges this part of the system could do with some refinement, but judging by the video after the break, it works well enough for a first version.

We’ve seen the Pi Zero get transplanted into everything from a 56K modem to the venerated Game Boy, and figured nothing would surprise us at this point. But we’ve got to say, this is one of the cleanest and most practical builds we’ve seen yet.

[Thanks to EdS for the tip]

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K40 Laser Cutter, Meet Raspberry Pi

March 4, 2018 by Jenny List 24 Comments

The inexpensive Chinese K40 laser cutter has become the staple of many a small workshop within our community, providing a not-very-large and not-very-powerful cutter for a not-very-high price. As shipped it’s a machine that’s not without its flaws, and there is a whole community of people who have contributed fixes and upgrades to make these cutters into something a lot more useful.

[Alex Eames] bought a K40, and since he’s the person behind the Raspi.tv Raspberry Pi business, when he switched from the supplied Corel-based software to the popular open-source K40 Whisperer his obvious choice was to run it on a Raspberry Pi. Since K40 Whisperer is written in Python he reasoned that the Pi’s ARM platform would not prevent its use, so he set to work and documented the process and his workflow.

It’s a straightforward enough process, and his K40 now has a Pi into which he can SFTP his files rather than the inevitable old laptop that accompanies most K40s. With so many K40 improvements created by its community, we find it surprising that some enterprising Chinese manufacturer hasn’t seen the opportunity to make a quick buck or two extra and incorporate some of them into their products at the factory, including one of the many single board computers that could perform this task.

We’ve covered a lot of K40 stories over the years, if you are new to this machine you might like to take a look at this story of bringing one to life.