Hackaday Prize Entry: Boots And Cats And Boots And Cats

September 8, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Electronic drums are pricey, but the drums themselves are actually very easy to make. By simply putting a few piezos on some rubber mats, you can make a set of electronic drums. The real trick, and the expensive bit, is in the drum module. This module has inputs for the high hat, snare, toms, and bass drum to turn the repetitive thwaking of a stick on a rubber mat into drum sounds.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Jeremy] isn’t building a set of electronic drums. He’s building a drum module, complete with touchscreen interface and a GUI.

This isn’t [Jeremy]’s first go at building a drum module – his first implementation was RaspiDrums, an add-on for the Raspberry Pi that used accelerometers instead of piezos. The software works well enough with a USB sound card to serve as a set of real electronic snare.

Now [Jeremey] is moving up to a full kit, and the power of the Raspberry Pi means he can easily add a touch screen to his device. Right now the efforts are going into building a GUI using Gtkmm, and wrapping everything up into a front panel that makes sense and is easy to use. The drums themselves are a solved problem, making this Hackaday Prize entry a fantastic polish on an already great project.

31415926 (That’s Roughly Π Times 10 Million Raspberries)

September 8, 2016 by Jenny List 57 Comments

The Raspberry Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton has announced that their ten millionth eponymous single-board computer has been sold since their launch back in February 2012. It’s an impressive achievement, especially so since their original sales expectations were for a modest ten thousand. For those of us who watched the RS and Farnell websites crumble under the strain of so many would-be purchasers on that leap day morning four and a half years ago their rapidly exceeding that forecast came as no surprise, but still, it’s worth a moment’s consideration. They passed the Sinclair ZX Spectrum’s British record of 5m computers sold back in February 2015, leaving behind the Pi’s BBC Micro spiritual ancestor on 1.5m sold long before that.

Critics of the Pi will point out that its various versions have rarely been the most powerful small single board computer on the market, or even at times the cheapest. They will also point to the closed-source nature of the Broadcom binary blob that underpins Pi operating systems, and even the sometimes unpredictable nature of the Pi Foundation with respect to its community, product availability and launches. But given that the Pi Foundation’s focus is not on our side of the community but on using the boards as a tool to introduce young people to computing, it’s fair to say that they’ve done a pretty good job of ensuring that a youngster can now get their hands on a useful and easily programmable computer much more easily than at any time in the past.

Would we be in the same position of being able to buy a capable Linux computer for near-pocket-money prices had the Raspberry Pi not been released? Probably so, in fact certainly so. The hardware required to deliver these products has inevitably fallen into a more affordable price bracket, and we would certainly have plenty of boards at our fingertips. They would probably have Allwinner or maybe Mediatek processors rather than the Pi’s Broadcom part, but they would be very likely to deliver equivalent performance at a similar cost. Where the Raspberry Pi’s continued success has come from then has not necessarily been from its hardware but from its community and software. The reliability and ease of use delivered by the Raspbian Linux distribution that Just Works for the parent putting a Pi in front of their child, and the wealth of expert information on the Raspberry Pi forums to get them through any Pi-related troubles are what has given the Pi these sales figures. The boards themselves are almost incidental, almost any hardware paired with that level of background information would likely have met with similar success. Comparing the Pi software experience with for example one of their most capable competitors, it’s obvious that the software is what makes the difference.

It’s likely that Raspberry Pi sales will continue to climb, and in years to come we’ll no doubt be reporting on fresh milestones on ever more powerful revisions of their product. But it’s also likely that their competition will up their software game and their position in the hearts and minds of single board computer users might be usurped by a better offering. If this increased competition in the single board computer market delivers better boards with more for the hardware developer community, then we’re all for it.

Nexmon Turns Nexus 5 (and RPi3!) Into WiFi Toolkit

September 8, 2016 by Elliot Williams 22 Comments

Back in the day, when wardriving was still useful (read: before WPA2 was widespread), we used to wander around with a Zaurus in our pocket running Kismet. Today, every cellphone has WiFi and a significantly more powerful processor inside. But alas, the firmware is locked down.

Enter the NexMon project. If you’ve got a Nexus 5 phone with the Broadcom BCM4339 WiFi chipset, you’ve now got a monitor-mode, packet-injecting workhorse in your pocket, and it looks a lot less creepy than that old Zaurus. But more to the point, NexMon is open. If you’d like to get inside what it took to reverse-engineer a hole into the phone’s WiFi, or make your own patches, here’s a great starting place.

But wait, there’s more! The recently released Raspberry Pi 3 has a similar Broadcom WiFi chipset, and has been given the same treatment, turning your RPi 3 into a wireless-sniffing powerhouse. How many Raspberry Pi “hacks” actually hack the Raspberry Pi? Well, here’s one.

We first learned of this project from a talk given at the MetaRhein-Main Chaos Days conference which took place last weekend. The NexMon talk (in German, but with slides in English) is just one of the many talks, all of which are available online.

The NexMon project is a standout, however. Not only do they reverse the WiFi firmware in the Nexus 5, but they show you how, and then apply the same methods to the RPi3. Kudos times three to [Matthias Schulz], [Daniel Wegemer], and [Matthias Hollick]!

Raspberry Pi Walkie Talkie Mumbles To Friends

September 7, 2016 by Richard Baguley 30 Comments

His kids wanted walkie talkies, so [Daniel Chote] built one. The TalkiePi is a neat project built around a Raspberry Pi running Mumble, the open-source voice chat system that his kids can share with their siblings and friends.

It’s easy enough to choose the Raspberry Pi, and Mumble is pretty well known. But what’s the easiest way you can think of to add microphone and speakers to the RPi? We applaud [Daniel’s] choice to equip it with the guts of a USB speakerphone. Mumble lets you choose voice activation or keyboard input — in this case an added button makes it push-to-talk, as you would expect in a traditional walkie talkie.

He put all of this into a nicely designed 3D case with a few LEDs, so it is easy to tell that it is ready to transmit. [Daniel] isn’t quite finished yet, though: he’s now working on a new version that is portable, battery powered and uses a Raspberry Pi Zero for the ultimate walkie talkie. We can’t wait to see someone take this to the extreme and include a cellular-modem. But then again, anywhere you can get on WiFi this rig should work, it’s not relegated to a single LAN, and that already far outperforms walkie talkies of yore.

Music Player For The Ability-Impaired

September 4, 2016 by Cameron Coward 19 Comments

Most of the hacks we come across here at Hackaday don’t require much more than being “cool” to get our attention. But, every so often we find something that goes a step beyond that and does something truly good for the world. This is one such project, and its goal couldn’t be anymore altruistic: to allow the elderly to enjoy music, even when their declining vision and motor skills make traditional devices difficult to use.

It’s hard to overstate how important music is to people; there are few forms of art more emotionally effective. So, it was a major loss when an elderly relative of [DusteD] was no longer able to operate their CD player. Luckily, [DusteD] was there with an ingenious solution that uses RFID cards to play music from an always-on Raspberry Pi.

Continue reading “Music Player For The Ability-Impaired” →

Raspberry Pi Chiptune Player Rocks A Sound Chip From The 80’s

September 4, 2016 by Donald Papp 13 Comments

Sometimes it’s worth doing something in an inefficient way. For example, it might be worth it in order to learn something new, or just to use a particular part. [Deater] did just that with the Raspberry Pi AY-3-8910 Chiptune Player (with LED visualizers!)

The venerable General Instrument AY-3-8910 series sound chips were common in older hardware like home computers and game consoles as well as sound cards for the Apple II family. They were capable of generating three channels of square waves with various effects. Developers eventually squeezed every little bit of performance out with clever hacks. The Raspberry Pi has more than enough power to do all this in software, but as [Deater] puts it, it’s far more interesting to use an actual AY-3-8910 from the 80’s. Some LED bar graphs and matrices round out the whole system.

All the code for the Raspberry Pi AY-3-8910 chiptune player can be found on [deater]’s github repository for the project. A video of the player banging out some sounds is embedded after the break.

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Chiptune Player Rocks A Sound Chip From The 80’s” →

Bathroom Status Reporting Hack Eliminates Lines, Frustration

September 4, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield 20 Comments

In a lot of ways, portable toilets are superior to standard indoor-plumbing-style toilets. This is mostly due to the fact that they have a status indicator on the door. It’s a shame that no indoor bathrooms have figured this out yet, especially in office buildings where your awkward coworkers bang on every door rather than just check for feet in the huge gap that for some reason exists between the floor and the stall door. Anyway, [Chris] and [Daniel] came up with a solution for this issue, which also eliminates wait time for bathrooms in their office.

Their system is an automated bathroom status indicator that reports information about the bathroom’s use over WiFi. Since the bathrooms at their facility are spread out, it was helpful to be able to look up which bathroom would be free at any given moment. Several Raspberry Pis form the nerves of the project. Custom sensors were attached to a variety of different door locks to detect status. Each Pi reports back over WiFi. This accomplishes their goal of being subtle and simple. They also point out that they had to write very little code for this project since there are so many Unix and embedded hardware tools available to them. Checking the status of the bathroom can be as simple as running netcat.

If you’re looking to roll out your own bathroom status monitor solution, [Chris] and [Daniel] have made their code available on GitHub. There are a number of other ways to automate your bathroom, too, like switching the exhaust fan on when it gets too smelly or humid, or even creating a device that dispenses your toilet paper for you.