Raspberry Pi

1887 Articles

Google AIY: Artificial Intelligence Yourself

May 4, 2017 by 35 Comments

When Amazon released the API to their voice service Alexa, they basically forced any serious players in this domain to bring their offerings out into the hacker/maker market as well. Now Google and Raspberry Pi have come together to bring us ‘Artificial Intelligence Yourself’ or AIY.

A free hardware kit made by Google was distributed with Issue 57 of the MagPi Magazine which is targeted at makers and hobbyists which you can see in the video after the break. The kit contains a Raspberry Pi Voice Hat, a microphone board, a speaker and a number of small bits to mount the kit on a Raspberry Pi 3. Putting all of it together and following the instruction on the official site gets you a Google Voice Interaction Kit with a bunch of IOs just screaming to be put to good use.

The source code for the python app can be downloaded from GitHub and consists of a loop that awaits a trigger. This trigger can be a press of a button or a clap near the microphones. When a trigger is detected, the recorder function takes over sending the stream to the Google Cloud. Speech-to-Text conversion happens there and the result is returned via a Text-To-Speech engine that helps the system talk back. The repository suggests that the official Voice Kit SD Image (893 MB download) is based on Raspbian so don’t go reflashing a memory card right away, you should be able to add this to an existing install.

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The Raspberry Pi Becomes A SCSI Device

May 1, 2017 by 90 Comments

SCSI devices were found in hundreds of different models of computers from the 80s, from SUN boxes to cute little Macs. These hard drives and CDROMs are slowly dying, and with that goes an entire generation of technology down the drain. Currently, the best method of preserving these computers with SCSI drives is the SCSI2SD device designed by [Michael McMaster]. While this device does exactly what it says it’ll do — turn an SD card into a drive on a SCSI chain — it’s fairly expensive at $70.

[GIMONS] has a better, cheaper solution. It’s a SCSI device emulator for the Raspberry Pi (original link dead, here’s the new location of this writeup). It turns a Raspberry Pi into a SCSI hard drive, magneto-optical drive, CDROM, or an Ethernet adapter using only some glue logic and a bit of code.

As far as the hardware goes, this is a pretty simple build. The 40-pin GPIO connector on the Pi is attached to the 50-pin SCSI connector through a few 74LS641 transceivers with a few resistor packs for pullups and pulldowns. The software allows for virtual disk devices – either a hard drive, magneto-optical drive, or a CDROM – to be presented from the Raspberry Pi. There’s also the option of putting Ethernet on the SCSI chain, a helpful addition since Ethernet to SCSI conversion devices are usually rare and expensive.

Officially, [GIMONS] built this SCSI hard drive emulator for the x68000 computer, developed by Sharp in the late 80s. While these are popular machines for retrocomputing aficionados in Japan, they’re exceptionally rare elsewhere — although [Dave Jones] got his mitts on one for a teardown. SCSI was extraordinarily popular for computers from the 70s through the 90s, though, and since SCSI was a standard this build should work with all of them.

If your retrocomputer doesn’t need a SCSI drive, and you’re feeling left out of the drive-emulation club, the good news is there’s a Raspberry Pi solution for that, too: this Hackaday Prize entry turns a Pi into an IDE hard drive.

Thanks [Gokhan] for the tip!

Linger Keeps You Around After You’ve Gone

April 29, 2017 by 40 Comments

We’re not sure if this is art, anti-snooping guerilla warfare, or just a cheeky hack, but we do know that we like it! [Jasper van Loenen]’s Linger keeps the SSIDs that your cell phone (for example) spits out whenever it’s not connected to a WiFi network, and replays them after you’re gone.

Some retail stores and other shady characters use MAC addresses and/or the unique collection of SSIDs that your phone submits in probe requests to fingerprint you and track your movement, either through their particular store or across stores that share a tracking provider. Did you know that you were buying into this when you enabled “location services”? Did the tracking firms ask you if that was ok? Of course not. What are you going to do about it?

Linger replays the probe requests of people who have already moved on, making it appear to these systems as if nobody ever leaves. Under the hood, it’s a Raspberry Pi Zero, two WiFi dongles, and some simple Python software that stores probe requests in a database. There’s also a seven-segment display to indicate how many different probe-request profiles Linger has seen. We’re not sure the price point on this device is quite down to “throwie” level, but we’d love to see some of these installed in the local mall.  Continue reading “Linger Keeps You Around After You’ve Gone” →

Get Up Close To Your Soldering With A Pi Zero Microscope

April 26, 2017 by 57 Comments

Do your Mark 1 Eyeballs no longer hold their own when it comes to fine work close up? Soldering can be a literal pain under such conditions, and even for the Elf-eyed among us, dealing with pads at a 0.4-mm pitch is probably best tackled with a little optical assistance. When the times comes for a little help, consider building a soldering microscope from a Pi Zero and a few bits and bobs from around the shop.

Affordable commercial soldering scopes aren’t terribly hard to come by, but [magkopian] decided to roll his own by taking advantage of the streaming capabilities of the Raspberry Pi platform, not to mention its affordability. This is a really simple hack — nothing is 3D-printed or custom milled. The stage base is a simple aluminum project box for heat resistance and extra weight, and the arm is a cheap plastic dial caliper. The PiCam is mounted to the sliding jaw of the caliper on a scrap of plastic ruler. The lens assembly of the camera needs to be hacked a little to change the focal length to work within 10 centimeters or so; alternatively, you could splurge and get a camera module with an adjustable lens. The Pi is set up for streaming, and your work area is presented in glorious, lag-free HDMI video.

Is [magkopian]’s scope going to give you the depth perception of a stereo microscope? Of course not. But for most jobs, it’ll probably be enough, and the fact that it can be built on the cheap makes it a great hack in our book.

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This Hacker Fit An Entire RetroPie In An Altoids Tin

April 23, 2017 by 29 Comments

A few months ago, [wermy] built the mintyPi, a Raspberry Pi-based gaming console that fits inside an Altoids tin. It’s amazing — there’s a composite LCD, an audio DAC, and a chopped up Nintendo controller all connected to a Raspberry Pi for vintage gaming goodness on the road. Now, there’s a new mintyPi. The mintyPi 2.0 vastly improves over the earlier generation of this groundbreaking mint-based gaming console with a better screen, better buttons, customized 3D printed bezels, and better audio. Truly, we live in a Golden Age.

Version two of mintyPi uses 3D printed parts and includes a real hinge to keep the display propped up when the Altoids tin is open. Instead of a DAC-based audio solution, [wermy] is using a USB sound card for clearer, crisper sound. This version also uses the new, wireless version of the Raspberry Pi Zero. The Raspberry Pi Zero W allows this Altoids tin to connect to the Internet or, alternatively, gives the user the ability to dump ROMs on this thing without having to connect it to a computer.

For the software, this retro Altoids video game machine is running RetroPie, a very popular way to get retro video games running under low-power Linux machines. Everything is in there, from the NES to Amstrad to the Sega Master system.

Right now, there aren’t a whole lot of details on how [wermy] created the mintyPi 2.0, but he promises a guide soon. Until then, we’ll just have to drool over the video embedded below.

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The Raspberry Pi As An IR To WiFi Bridge

April 23, 2017 by 28 Comments

[Jason] has a Sonos home sound system, with a bunch of speakers connected via WiFi. [Jason] also has a universal remote designed and manufactured in a universe where WiFi doesn’t exist. The Sonos can not be controlled via infrared. There’s an obvious problem here, but luckily tiny Linux computers with WiFi cost $10, and IR receivers cost $2. The result is an IR to WiFi bridge to control all those ‘smart’ home audio solutions.

The only thing [Jason] needed to control his Sonos from a universal remote is an IR receiver and a Raspberry Pi Zero W. The circuit is simple – just connect the power and ground of the IR receiver to the Pi, and plug the third pin of the receiver into a GPIO pin. The new, fancy official Raspberry Pi Zero enclosure is perfect for this build, allowing a little IR-transparent piece of epoxy poking out of a hole designed for the Pi camera.

For the software, [Jason] turned to Node JS, and LIRC, a piece of software that decodes IR signals. With the GPIO pin defined, [Jason] set up the driver and used the Sonos HTTP API to send commands to his audio unit. There’s a lot of futzing about with text files for this build, but the results speak for themselves: [Jason] can now use a universal remote with everything in his home stereo now.

Ultrasonic Raspberry Pi Piano

April 22, 2017 by 9 Comments

Cheap stuff gets our creative juices flowing. Case in point? [Andy Grove] built an eight-sensor HC-SR04 breakout board, because the ultrasonic distance sensors in question are so affordable that a hacker can hardly avoid ordering them by the dozen. He originally built it for robotics, but then it’s just a few lines of code to turn it into a gesture-controllable musical instrument. Check out the video, embedded below, for an overview of the features.

His Octasonic breakout board is just an AVR in disguise — it reads from eight ultrasonic sensors and delivers a single SPI result to whatever other controller is serving as the brains. In the “piano” demo, that’s a Raspberry Pi, so he needed the usual 5 V to 3.3 V level shifting in between.

The rest is code on the Pi that enables gestures to play notes, change musical instruments, and even shut the Pi down. The Pi code is written in Rust, and up on GitHub. An Instructable has more detail on the hookups.

All in all, building a “piano” out of robot parts is surely a case of having a hammer and every problem looking like a nail, but we find some of the resulting nail-sculptures arise that way. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an eight-sensor ultrasonic setup before, either. Is 2017 going to be the year of ultrasonic sensor projects? Continue reading “Ultrasonic Raspberry Pi Piano” →