Friday Hack Chat: Raspberry Pi Principal Hardware Engineer Roger Thornton

March 1, 2017 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

Have you heard about the new Raspberry Pi Zero W which now includes WiFi and Bluetooth? Of course you have. Want to know what went into the addition to the popular design? Now’s the time to ask when this week’s Hack Chat is led by Roger Thornton, chief hardware engineer for Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi was born on February 29th, 2012 and has seen a remarkable number of hardware flavors and revisions. Throughout, the hardware has been both dependable and affordable — not an easy thing to accomplish. Roger will discuss the process his team uses to go from concept, all the way through to the hands of the user. It’s an excellent chance to ask any questions you have from soup to nuts.

The Hack Chat is scheduled for Friday, March 3rd at noon PST (20:00 GMT).

Here’s How To Take Part:

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging.

Log into Hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. Once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.

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

Upcoming Hack Chats

Mark your calendar for Friday March 10th when Hack Chat features mechanical manufacturing with members from the Fictiv team.

$10 Raspberry Pi Zero W Adds WiFi And Bluetooth

February 28, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 168 Comments

The Raspberry Pi was born on February 29th which means we’re only three years away from its second birthday, and a new hardware release from the Pi Foundation is becoming somewhat of a tradition. This year is no different: a new Raspberry Pi has been announced. The Raspberry Pi Zero W is the latest iteration of the Pi foundation’s tiny and extremely inexpensive single board computer. It’s a Raspberry Pi Zero with WiFi and Bluetooth.

The specs of the new Pi Zero W are nearly identical to the previous incarnation of the non-W Zero. It sports a 1GHz single-core processor, 512 MB of RAM, features Mini HDMI and USB OTG ports, uses a micro USB port for power, features the now-standard 40-pin header with four additional pins for composite video and a reset button. This board, like the second hardware revision of the Pi Zero, also features a CSI camera connector.

Of course, the big feature is the addition of WiFi and Bluetooth. The Pi Zero W adds the wireless functionality from the Raspberry Pi 3B. That’s 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0.

The Pi Zero’s claim to fame was, of course, the price. The original Pi Zero was at first a bit of hardware glued to the cover of the MagPi magazine, later to sell for just $5 USD. The Raspberry Pi Zero W is priced at just $10.

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Bring Saturday Mornings Back To Life With This Cartoon Server

February 23, 2017 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

It was an American ritual for over four decades: wake up early on Saturday morning, prepare a bowl of sugar, and occupy the couch for four glorious hours of cartoons. The only interruptions came when the least-significant sibling had to be commanded to get up to change the channel to one of the two other networks, or when your mom decided to vacuum the TV room. It was a beautiful ritual, but now it’s gone.

Or is it? If you really want to recapture your misspent youth, you can try this Raspberry Pi multi-channel cartoon server with retro TV display. [FozzTexx] started with a yard sale 13″ Zenith set, which languished in his shop for want of a mission. When he found a four-channel video modulator, he knew he had the makings of the full channel-changing Saturday morning experience.

Four Raspberry Pis were configured to serve up four separate streams of cartoons from his Plex server, and after a late Friday night of hacking the whole thing together, each stream was ready to go live at 7:00 AM on Saturday. [FozzTexx] thought of everything — from the pre-“broadcast day” test pattern to actual commercials spliced into the cartoons to the static between the channels, it’s all there in low-definition glory. He even printed up faux TV Guide pages! You can watch a brief demo on [FozzTexx]’ Twitter feed, or you can watch the entire 2-hour Periscope feed if you’re feeling nostalgic.

[FozzTexx] chose UHF channels for his “stations,” so if you want to replicate this build it may pay to bone up on analog TV tuner basics. Or if it’s just the retro look you’re going for, this custom case inspired by a 40s TV might be nice to check out.

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PolaPi-Zero For Surprisingly Good Instant Photos

February 18, 2017 by Pedro Umbelino 21 Comments

The ‘Pola’ in the PolaPi is a giveaway for what this Hackaday.io project is. This polaroid-like camera, created by [Muth], is a sort of black and white, blast from the past mixed with modern 3D printing. It is based on a Raspberry-pi Zero with a camera module, a Sharp memory LCD for viewing the image, and a Nano thermal printer to print the actual photo. Throw in some buttons, a battery and a slick 3D printed case and you have your own PolaPi.

Right now it’s already on the second iteration as [Muth]s gave the first prototype to some lucky person. As he had to rebuild the whole camera from scratch, he took advantage of what he learned in the first prototype and improved on it. The camera has a ‘live’ 20fps rate on the LCD and you can take your photo, review it, and if you like the shot, print it. The printed photo is surprisingly good, check it out in the video after the break.

Currently the software is being actively developed and the latest version has, among other things, a slit-scan mode. For those who don’t know, slit-scan photography is a technique that can create some crazy warped and psychedelic effects (in this case, as psychedelic as a black and white photo can be).

We know you want one for yourself. If you don’t want to spend the time installing and configuring your RPi Zero, [Muth] kindly shared an SD card image with everything ready.

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This 3D Printed Microscope Bends For 50nm Precision

February 17, 2017 by Michael Uttmark 20 Comments

Exploiting the flexibility of plastic, a group of researchers has created a 3D printable microscope with sub-micron accuracy. By bending the supports of the microscope stage, they can manipulate a sample with surprising precision. Coupled with commonly available M3 bolts and stepper motors with gear reduction, they have reported a precision of up to 50nm in translational movement. We’ve seen functionality derived from flexibility before but not at this scale. And while it’s not a scanning electron microscope, 50nm is the size of a small virus (no, not that kind of virus).

OpenFlexure has a viewing area of 8x8x4mm, which is impressive when the supports only flex 6°. But, if 256 mm³ isn’t enough for you, fret not: the designs are all Open Source and are modeled in OpenSCAD just begging for modification. With only one file for printing, no support material, a wonderful assembly guide and a focus on PLA and ABS, OpenFlexure is clearly designed for ease of manufacturing. Optics are equally interesting. Using a Raspberry Pi Camera Module with the lens reversed, they achieve a resolution where one pixel corresponds to 120nm.

The group hopes that their microscopes will reach low-resource parts of the world, and it seem that the design has already started to spread. If you’d like to make one for yourself, you can find all the necessary files up on GitHub.

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PiMiniMint — Altoids RPi Zero Computer

February 15, 2017 by Pedro Umbelino 24 Comments

We’ve seen our fair share of Altoids mint tin projects and it seems the tin… can always house another interesting project. This time [MWAGNER] managed to make his long time idea of having a computer inside an Altoids tin. He had the idea in 2012, after the original raspberry pi came out, but the size constraints kept the project from going forward. The RPi Zero is much smaller and its launch made the project possible.

[MWAGNER] made two versions, the first version of the PiMiniMint includes a screen, WiFi, Bluetooth, 32GB of storage, an infrared camera, and a full size USB port. All of this fit inside the Altoids tin. The second version has a battery — 2000mAh reportedly lasting for 6-8hrs. But there is only so much space to perform small miracles so in this version the camera had to go. This makes it a wireless standalone computer as you can control it with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse while connecting to the outside world over WiFi.

Back in 2015, in Hacklet 29, we covered a bunch of Altoids based projects, from AM/FM transmitters to OTP generators and now we have a fully working laptop PC on a tin, screen and all. The project blog has all the instructions you need to try it yourself. If you do, let us know how it went and how long did that battery lasted.

That is, if you can get your hands on a Zero…

[thanks Itay]

Giving Linux The Remote Boot

February 14, 2017 by Al Williams 11 Comments

A lot of embedded systems are running Linux on platforms like Raspberry Pi. Since Linux is fully functional from a command line and fully network-capable, it is possible to run servers that you’ve never had physical access to.

There are a few problems, though. Sometimes you really need to reboot the box physically. You also need to be at the console to do things like totally install a new operating system. Or do you? Over on GitHub, user [marcan] has a C program and a shell script that allows you to take over a running system without using any software on the root filesystem. It starts an ssh server and you can remotely unmount the main drive, do any maintenance you want and –presumably–reboot into a new operating system.

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