Raspberry Pi

1848 Articles

Primes In A Box

November 7, 2016 by 6 Comments

Lots of useful things come in boxes. Shoes, soldering irons and… prime numbers? This simple project from [WhiskyTangoHotel] puts a list of prime numbers in a handy box. Press a button, get a prime.

Sure, it isn’t brain surgery: all that it is happening is that a Raspberry Pi is reading a number from a text file, then showing it on an LCD screen. But it’s well-documented project that shows how to tie together a number of things on the Pi, like writing to an I2C display and using a button to trigger a clean shutdown.

It might be a good starting project for the younger hacker or if you have a Pi pining for something to do. If you’re looking for more easy Raspberry Pi projects, check out our Enlightened Pi Contest.

Pi Zero Powered Skateboard

November 6, 2016 by 29 Comments

There’s something to be said for whizzing around town on your own automatic personal transport. It’s even better when you’ve built it yourself. That’s just what [The Raspberry Pi Guy] did – built a Wiimote controlled, Raspberry Pi Zero powered skateboard and whizzed around Cambridge to show it off.

It’s a fairly simple build – skateboard, battery, motor and mount, controller, Wiimote and Pi Zero. The Raspberry Pi controls the motor controller which in turn controls the motor speed. The Python code that [The Raspberry Pi Guy] wrote comes in at around a hundred lines and manages the motor controller and the Bluetooth connection to the Wiimote, which is used to control the board’s speed while the user controls the steering. [The Raspberry Pi Guy] says he’s gotten up to 30 km/h on the skateboard, which, given a powerful enough motor and a non-bumpy surface isn’t hard to believe.

It may seem a bit of overkill, running a bit of Python on a Raspberry Pi to run a motor (others have done it with something simpler) but it’s a fun project nonetheless. [The Raspberry Pi Guy] describes where he got the parts to put the skateboard together and has released the Python code on his GitHub page.

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Icehat on a Raspberry Pi Zero

Give Your RPi A Cool FPGA Hat

November 5, 2016 by 32 Comments

Need additional, custom IO for your Raspberry Pi? Adding an FPGA is a logical way to expand your IO, and allow for high speed digital interfaces. [Eric Brombaugh]’s Icehat adds a Lattice iCE5LP4K-SG48 FPGA in a package that fits neatly on top of the Raspberry Pi Zero. It also provides a few LEDs and Digilent compatible PMOD connectors for adding peripherals. The FPGA costs about six bucks, so this is one cheap FPGA board.

The FPGA has one time programmable memory, but can also be programmed over SPI. This allows the host Pi to flash the FGPA with the latest bitstream at boot. Sadly, this particular device is not supported by the open source Icestorm toolchain. Instead, you’ll need Lattice’s iCEcube2 design software. Fortunately, this chip is supported by the free license.

Icehat is an open source hardware design, but also includes a software application for flashing a bitstream to the FPGA from the Pi and an example application to get you started. All the relevant sources can be found on Github, and the PCB is available on OSHPark.

While this isn’t the first pairing of a Raspberry Pi and FPGA we’ve seen, it is quite possibly the smallest, and can be built by hand at a low cost.

Bake A Fresh Raspberry Pi: Never Struggle To Configure A Pi Again

November 4, 2016 by 21 Comments

[David Ferguson] has put together a nice little tool called Pi Bakery. Half MIT Scratch, half configuration utility, it puts a nice visual face on all the various start-up scripts, and kludges that the Raspberry Pi community uses to configure the popular single board computer.

Raspberry Pi’s are a little weird. They mostly get crammed into the slots microcontrollers used to live in. The nice part about microcontrollers is that they just turn on and start going. There’s no OS to boot. No file system to mount. Of course the downside to microcontrollers is often that there’s no OS to boot and file system to mount. Regardless, mostly you’ve got to spend a bit configuring a Raspbian install before a Raspberry Pi really starts to encroach on the microcontroller’s territory.

Pi Bakery abstracts all this. You can drag blocks, representing scripts, in the order you’d like them run. If you want to your Pi to boot up, connect to WiFi, and then start a VNC server it’s as easy a dragging the blocks in the right order and filling in the blanks. You can see an example of it in operation in the video after the break.

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Wii U RetroPie Console Looks Gorgeous

November 1, 2016 by 8 Comments

What to do with your broken gaming consoles? Gut it and turn it into a different gaming console! Sudomod forum user [banjokazooie] has concocted his own RetroPie console from the husk of a WiiU controller — an ingenious demonstration of how one can recycle hardware to a perfectly suited purpose.

[banjokazooie] actually used an original shell for this build, but if you happen to have a broken controller around — or know someone who does — this is a great use for it. A Raspberry Pi 3 is the brains of this operation (not counting [banjokazooie]), and it features a 6.5″ HDMI display, a Teensy 2.0 setup for the inputs, a headphone jack with automatic speaker disconnection, dual 3400 mAh batteries, an external SD card slot, and a lot of hard work on the power supply circuit — although [banjokazooie] reports that the hardest part was cutting to size a custom PCB to mount it all on. The original plan was to see if the idea was possible, and after a three month effort, it appears to work beautifully.

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SSH Enters The Mosh Pit

November 1, 2016 by 8 Comments

With so many systems depending on Linux, the secure shell SSH has become a staple for many developers. If you are connected to your Raspberry Pi via a cable or a wireless router a few feet away, SSH can provide you with an encrypted connection straight to the box. However, if you have a system out in a swamp somewhere with intermittent slow network access, SSH can be a real pain. When your IP address can change (for example, roaming on a cellular network), SSH has problems, too.

To combat these and other problems, you might consider an open source program called Mosh (mobile shell). There’s two parts to Mosh. One part works as a server while the other is the client application. Neither of these require root access. You can see a video about Mosh below.

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Pi Cart: 2,400 Games In One

November 1, 2016 by 14 Comments

What’s the quickest way to turn one game into 2,400? Cram a Raspberry Pi Zero running RetroPie into an NES cartridge and call it Pi Cart.

This elegant little build requires no soldering — provided you have good cable management skills and the right parts. To this end, [Zach] remarks that finding a USB adapter — the other main component — small enough to fit inside the cartridge required tedious trial and error, so he’s helpfully linked one he assures will work. One could skip this step, but the potential for couch co-op is probably worth the effort.

Another sticking point might be Nintendo’s use of security screws; if you have the appropriate bit or screwdriver, awesome, otherwise you might have to improvise. Cutting back some of the plastic to widen the cartridge opening creates enough room to hot glue in the USB hub, a micro USB port for power, and an HDMI port in the resulting gap. If you opted to shorten the cables, fitting it all inside should be simple, but you may have to play a bit of Tetris with the layout to ensure everything fits.

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