Raspberry Pi Software Comes To PC, Mac

December 22, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has put a lot of work into their software stack. You need only look at a few of the Allwinnner-based Pi clones for the best evidence of this, but the Pi Foundation’s dedication to a clean and smooth software setup can also be found in Noobs, their support for the Pi Hardware, and to a more limited extent, their open source GPU driver offerings.

Now the Pi Foundation is doing something a bit weird. They’re offering their default Raspberry Pi installation for the Mac and PC. Instead of Flashing an SD card, you can burn a DVD and try out the latest the Pi ecosystem has to offer.

A few months ago, PIXEL became default distribution for the Raspberry Pi. This very lightweight distribution is effectively the Knoppix of 2016 – it doesn’t take up a lot of resources, it provides enough software to do basic productivity tasks, and it’s easy to use.

Now PIXEL is available as a live CD for anything that has i386 written somewhere under the hood. The PC/Mac distribution is the same as the Pi version; Minecraft and Wolfram Mathematica aren’t included due to licensing constraints. Other than that, this is the full Pi experience running on x86 hardware.

One feature that hasn’t been overlooked by a singular decade-old laptop in the Pi Foundation is Pixel’s ability to run on really old hardware. This is, after all, a lightweight distribution for the Raspberry Pi, so you shouldn’t be surprised to see this run on a Pentium II machine. This is great for a school in need of upgrading a lab, but the most interesting thing is that we now have a new standard in Linux live CDs and Flash drives.

Raspberry Pi Camera Flash

December 22, 2016 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

The Raspberry Pi Camera is a great tool; it allows projects that require a camera to be put together quickly and on a budget. Plus, having a Linux back end for a little processing never hurt anybody. What can be difficult however, is imaging in low light conditions. Most smartphones have an LED flash built in for this purpose. [Wim Van Gool] decided to follow suit and build an LED flash for the Raspberry Pi.

The project consists of a custom PCB with surface-mount LEDs in an attractive concentric layout. This is a good way to get a nice even distribution of light, particularly when taking photos close up. The board is designed around the Texas Instruments TPS61169 LED driver, which is controlled by a PWM signal from the Raspberry Pi. The flash mounts as a Raspberry Pi HAT, and there’s a hole routed in the centre to allow the camera to fit in nice and snug when using standard 11mm standoffs. It might seem simple, but it’s an impressively tidy piece of engineering and a testament to [Wim]’s abilities.

The Raspberry Pi Camera turns up in all sorts of projects — like these far-seeing PiNoculars.

An Eye-Catching Raspberry Pi Smart Speaker

December 21, 2016 by Anool Mahidharia 15 Comments

[curcuz]’s BoomBeastic mini is a Raspberry Pi based smart connected speaker. But don’t dis it as just another media center kind of project. His blog post is more of a How-To guide on setting up container software, enabling OTA updates and such, and can be a good learning project for some. Besides, the design is quite elegant and nice.

The hardware is simple. There’s the Raspberry-Pi — he’s got instructions on making it work with the Pi2, Pi2+, Pi3 or the Pi0. Since the Pi’s have limited audio capabilities, he’s using a DAC, the Adafruit I2S 3W Class D Amplifier Breakout for the MAX98357A, to drive the Speaker. The I2S used by that part is Inter-IC Sound — a 3 wire peer to peer audio bus — and not to be confused with I2C. For some basic visual feedback, he’s added an 8×8 LED matrix with I2C interface. A Speaker rounds out the BoM. The enclosure is inspired by the Pimoroni PiBow which is a stack of laser cut MDF sheets. The case design went through four iterations, but the final result looks very polished.

On the software side, the project uses Mopidy — a Python application that runs in a terminal or in the background on devices that have network connectivity and audio output. Out of the box, it is an MPD and HTTP server. Additional front-ends for controlling Mopidy can be installed from extensions, enabling Spotify, Soundcloud and Google Music support, for example. To allow over-the-air programming, [curcuz] is using resin.io which helps streamline management of devices that are hard to reach physically. The whole thing is containerized using Docker. Additional instructions on setting up all of the software and libraries are posted on his blog post, and the code is hosted on GitHub.

There’s a couple of “To-Do’s” on his list which would make this even more interesting. Synced audio being one: in a multi-device environment, have the possibility to sync them and reproduce the same audio. The other would be to add an Emoji and Equalizer display mode for the LED matrix. Let [curcuz] know if you have any suggestions.

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A Menorah For The 21st Century

December 21, 2016 by James Hobson 4 Comments

For those new and experienced, this time of year is a great chance for enterprising makers to apply their skills to create unique gifts and decorations for family and friends. [Mike Diamond] of What I Made Today built a phone controlled, light-up menorah. It’s a charming way to display some home automation know-how during the holidays.

Expanding on his previous project — a pocket-sized menorah — a Raspberry Pi Zero with a WiFi dongle, some LEDs, wire, and tea lights suffice for the materials, while setting-up Blynk on the Raspberry Pi and a phone to control the lights ties it together after mounting it in an old monitor housing.

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Pi Keeps Cool At 1.5 GHz

December 20, 2016 by Al Williams 43 Comments

Hackers have a long history of overclocking CPUs ranging from desktop computers to Arduinos. [Jacken] wanted a little more oomph for his ~~Pi Zero~~-Raspberry Pi-based media center, so he naturally wanted to boost the clock frequency. Like most overclocking though, the biggest limit is how much heat you can dump off the chip.

[Jacken] removed the normal heat sink and built a new one out of inexpensive copper shim, thermal compound, and super glue. The result isn’t very pretty, but it does let him run the ~~Zero~~ Pi at 1.5 GHz reliably. The heat sink is very low profile and doesn’t interfere with plugging other things into the board. Naturally, your results may vary on clock frequency and stability.

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Massive Pixel Display Holiday Decoration

December 20, 2016 by James Hobson 15 Comments

Decorating for the holidays is serious business! Finding themselves surrounded by neighbours who go big, redditor [wolfdoom] decided that this was the year to make a strong showing, and decided to build an oversized pixel LED display.

Demonstrating resourcefulness in their craft, [wolfdoom] found an old fluorescent light grid pattern to prevent bleed from one pixel to the next. Reusing this grid saves many hours of precision-cutting MDF — to be substituted with many hours of cutting the plastic with decidedly more room for error. Attaching the resulting grid to a sheet of plywood, and 576(!) drilled holes later, the LEDs were installed and laboriously wired together.

A Plastic light diffusing sheet to sell the pizel effect and a little help from their local maker space with the power circuit was enough to keep this project scrolling to completion — after the requisite period of basement-dwelling fabrication.

Despite some minor demotion attributed to a clumsy daughter, the massive 4×4 display remained a suitably festive decoration. For now the control system remains in [wolfdoom]’s basement, but with plans to incorporate it into the display’s frame down the road.

One of the more interesting LED matrix builds we saw this year is the one that uses 1575 beer bottles. For a more interactive holiday decorations, Halloween usually takes the cake — like this animated door knocker.

[via /r/DIY]

LED Tetris Table

December 18, 2016 by Jenny List 7 Comments

No hackspace is complete without an arcade game project or two. Usually these projects are time-worn generic cabinets scarred by the frustrated kicks of a million teenagers, the decades-old Japanese CRT monitors inside of which are ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. You are lucky if you catch them on a rare moment of functioning, and their owners are always hovering ready to attend to any soon-to-expire electronics.

York Hackspace have done things a little differently though. Their member [John] has an arcade game project, but instead of an aged cabinet he’s produced his own tabletop game with an array of multicolour addressable LED strips powered by a Raspberry Pi. Each LED sits in its own foam cell under the translucent surface, so it forms a low resolution color block display.

It’s a Tetris game in its first incarnation, but there is also a copy of Snake underway for it. If it catches your attention you can write your own games, because all its resources are available in a GitHub repository.

This is one of many Tetris interfaces we’ve seen over the years. Largest was probably this skyscraper, but this oscilloscope version is particularly well-executed. One of our most recent forays into Tetris-land though is also one of the most technically interesting, a 446-byte implementation in a master boot record.