Raspberry Pi

1847 Articles

Solar Camera Built From Raspberry Pi

October 17, 2023 by 29 Comments

Ever since an impromptu build completed during a two-week COVID-19 quarantine back in 2020, [Will Whang] has been steadily improving his Raspberry Pi solar photography setup. It integrates a lot of cool stuff: multiple sensors, high bandwidth storage, and some serious hardware. This is no junk drawer build either, the current version uses a $2000 USD solar telescope (an LS60M with 200mm lens) and a commercial AZ-GTi mount.

He also moved up somewhat with the imaging devices from the Raspberry Pi camera module he started with to two imaging sensors of his own: the OneInchEye and the StarlightEye, both fully open source. These two sensors feed data into the Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module, which dumps the raw images into storage.

Because solar imaging is all about capturing a larger number of images, and then processing and picking the sharpest ones, you need speed. Far more than writing to an SD Card. So, the solution [Will] came up with was to build a rather complex system that uses a CF Express to NVME adapter that can keep up, but can be quickly swapped out.

Unfortunately, all of this hard work proved to be in vain when the eclipse came, and it was cloudy in [Wills] area. But there is always another interesting solar event around the corner, and it isn’t going anywhere for a few million years. [Will] is already looking at how to upgrade the system again with the new possibilities the Raspberry Pi 5 offers.

Continue reading “Solar Camera Built From Raspberry Pi” →

Why The RP1 Is The Most Important Product Raspberry Pi Have Ever Made

October 16, 2023 by 92 Comments

We’ve had about a week to digest the pending arrival of the Raspberry Pi 5, and it’s safe to say that the new board from Cambridge has produced quite some excitement with its enhanced specifications and a few new capabilities not seen in its predecessors. When it goes on general sale we expect that it will power a slew of impressive projects in these pages, and we look forward with keen anticipation to its companion Compute Module 5, and we sincerely hope eventually a Raspberry Pi 500 all-in-one. It’s the latest in a line of incrementally-upgraded single board computers from the company, but we think it conceals something of much greater importance than the improvements that marked previous generations. Where do we think the secret sauce lies in the Pi 5? In the RP1 all-in-one PCIe peripheral chip of course, the chip which provides most of the interfacing on the new board. Continue reading “Why The RP1 Is The Most Important Product Raspberry Pi Have Ever Made” →

A workbench with a 3D printer, a home-made frame of metal tubing and 3D printed brackets and phone holders. 3 iOS devices and 1 Android phone arranged around the printer with a clock and 3 different camera angles around the print bed

Even 3D Printers Are Taking Selfies Now

October 16, 2023 by 1 Comment

We love watching 3D prints magically grow, through the power of timelapse videos. These are easier to make than ever, due in no small part to a vibrant community that’s continuously refining tools such as Octolapse. Most people are using some camera they can connect to a Raspberry Pi, namely a USB webcam or CSI camera module. A DSLR would arguably take better pictures, but they can be difficult to control, and their high resolution images are tougher for the Pi to encode.

If you’re anything like us, you’ve got a box or drawer full of devices that can take nearly as high-quality images as a DSLR, some cast-off mobile phones. Oh, that pile of “solutions looking for a problem” may have just found one! [Matt@JemRise] sure has, and in the video after the break, you can see how not one but four mobile phones are put to work.

Continue reading “Even 3D Printers Are Taking Selfies Now” →

Debian Bookworm Comes To The Raspberry Pi, And Wayland Is Now Default

October 13, 2023 by 48 Comments

It must have been a busy week for the PR department at Raspberry Pi, with the launch of their latest single-board computer, the Pi 5. Alongside the new board comes something else, an updated Raspberry Pi OS version.

This is built from Debian 12 “Bookworm”, and supplants the previous “Bullseye” version. As well as the new OS base it comes with a pile of Pi-specific upgrades including an optimsied version of Mozilla Firefox. Probably most important is that henceforth (at least on 64-bit boards) its desktop will use the Wayland compositor rather than X11 to draw and manipulate windows. This is a development that has been in the works for a very long time — it must be almost a decade since the first Raspberry Pi blog entry about Wayland — so it’s welcome at last to see it.

The new tweaks as well as Wayland are supposed to deliver a much faster Pi experience, so we thought we’d break out the stopwatch and do some rough real-world tests. The bench 8GB Pi 4 here has a vanilla 64-bit Bullseye installed, so off we went to measure boot time, Chromium browser opening time, and Hackaday load time. It was time to download the new 64-bit Bookworm image and do the same. Have we just downloaded a power-up?

Both tests were done with an everyday boot, after the first-time OS set-up, and with all browser caches emptied. First up was a significant boost, with Bookworm booting in 37.14 seconds to Bullseye’s 53.5, but the Chromium opening was a little more disappointing. On Bullseye it took 7.15s, while Bookworm’s Chromium managed a more pedestrian 9.13s. The new Firefox takes only 7.95s to open. Both Chromium browsers load Hackaday in about 1.8s, while the new Firefox did the same job in a shade over 3s.

So allowing for our stopwatch reaction time and the ad-hoc nature of the test, this is a faster-booting OS, but the underlying hardware is still the limiting factor. We’re disappointed to see that there’s no update for the x86 version of the Raspberry Pi Desktop, and we hope they’ll be able to rectify this in the future.

Dial Up A Tune On The Jukephone

October 10, 2023 by 9 Comments

What do you do when you find a nice corded phone with giant buttons out in the wild? You could pay $80/month for a landline, use a VOIP or Bluetooth solution instead, or do something a million times cooler and turn it into a jukebox.

Now when the receiver is lifted, [Turi] hears music instead of a dial tone or a voice on the other end. But playback isn’t limited to the handset — there’s a headphone jack around back.

To listen to a track, he can either dial one in directly, or call up a random track using one of the smaller buttons below. A handy directory organizes the tunes by the hundreds, putting children’s tracks between 1-99 and the intriguing category “hits” between 900-999.

The phone’s new guts are commanded by a Raspberry Pi Pico, which is a great choice for handling the key matrix plus the rest of the buttons. As you may have guessed, there’s an DF Player Mini mp3 player that reads the tracks from an SD card. Everything is powered by a rechargeable 18650 battery.

Jukephone is open source, and you’ll find more pictures on [Turi]’s blog post. Be sure to check out the very brief build and demo video after the break.

Continue reading “Dial Up A Tune On The Jukephone” →

Raspberry Pi Reveals A Little About Their RP1 Peripheral

October 10, 2023 by 50 Comments

The Raspberry Pi 5 is the new hotness from the Cambridge-based single board computer vendor, thanks in part to its new wonder-chip peripheral that speeds up much of its interfacing with the world. The RP1 hangs of the CPU’s PCIe bus and takes on many functions previously in the SoC, and those curious about it now have a little bit of information. Eben Upton has posted an article about the chip, and there’s a partial datasheet and a video in which the engineers talk about the chip as well.

The datasheet is intended to help anyone wishing to write a hardware driver for a Pi 5, and they admit that it doesn’t reveal everything on the silicon. We don’t expect them to put this chip up for sale on its own because doing so would enable their competitors to produce something much closer to a Pi 5 clone. It does reveal a few nuggets, though; there are a couple of Cortex M3 cores for housekeeping, and alongside all the interfaces we know from earlier boards it has, perhaps most interestingly for Hackaday readers, a 12-bit analogue-to-digital converter. This has always been on our Pi wishlist and is a welcome addition.

So, if you read the datasheet and watch the video below, you’ll learn a lot about the interfaces and how to talk to them, but not quite so much about the full workings of the chip itself. They hint that there’s more to be released, but since the Pi people have a history of not letting go of the family silver, we won’t expect the keys to the kingdom.

Have a read of our Pi 5 launch coverage.

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Reveals A Little About Their RP1 Peripheral” →

Peggyboard Will Have You Climbing The Walls Repeatedly

October 3, 2023 by 2 Comments

When you can’t climb actual rocks all the time, what do you do to train and keep sharp? You go to a rock-climbing gym, naturally. But what do you do when it’s 2020 and your rock-climbing gym has shuttered for the foreseeable? You build the best darn rock-climbing wall possible, and you outfit it with an LED for every hold and write an app that lets you plan your route and repeat it later.

This is essentially a DIY version of something called a Moonboard, which, aside from being expensive, was quickly going out of stock back in 2020. [Pegor] started the Peggyboard by building a climbing woody, which is a legendary home climbing wall built by a legendary climber about 20 years ago.

The Peggyboard is Raspberry Pi-powered and has a rather nice app going for it, which [Pegor] has kindly decided to open source.

On the initial screen, the user can select a route and assign the holds as either starting holds, foot holds, hand holds, or finishing holds, each with a different color LED. Another screen lets the user choose a previously-saved route, then apply it to the Peggyboard’s LEDs with the light bulb icon.

Don’t know where to get started building your own climbing wall? You can 3D print climbing holds, you know.