KaboomBox Is A Firecracker Of A Music Player

October 23, 2023 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Ka-chunk. Let’s face it, 8-tracks were not that great. But the players, that’s another story. The Panasonic RQ-830S, aka the dynamite or TNT player is just one of many lovely designs that used to grace the shelves of electronics stores. Hackaday alum [Cameron Coward] came across a non-working model and used it to create the KaboomBox.

Just like before, all [Cameron] has to do is stick a tape in, and music starts playing. But now, instead of using rust on tape, the music is accessed via RFID and lives on an SD card inside the 8-track player.

Power it on, and a tiny LCD screen showing through the track number window first displays the KaboomBox logo, then shows a timer whenever it’s waiting for a tape. And just like before, pushing down on the plunger skips to the next track.

The new guts include a Raspberry Pi Pico and an RFID reader, plus a DF Player Mini to handle the digital-to-analog conversion and amplify the signal, and an SD card to store the music. Now, [Cameron] is only limited by the size of the SD card. Check out the demo video after the break.

We’ve seen all kinds of boomboxen around here, from the lit to the Bluetooth to the payphone variety.

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2023 Halloween Hackfest: Haunted Keyboard Is Free From Ghosting

October 20, 2023 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

This may look like another DIY mechanical keyboard, but it’s hiding a secret. [Mx. Jack Nelson] has combined Halloween and keyboards in glorious, haunted fashion. Type a line, any line into this bad boy and you get a spooky, sort of cryptic response generated by AI.

Essentially, a Raspberry Pi Pico W does all the work, it handles the keyboard matrix, connects to Wi-Fi, sends the input to ChatGPT, and spits the response out on the screen wherever the cursor happens to be. Incidentally, it turns out [Mx. Jack Nelson] used ChatGPT to generate much of the CircuitPython code.

The layout is a custom 40% that is heavily influenced by the Akko 40%, with the Ctrl, Alt, and Win keys replaced by Ctrl, Cmd, and Opt. This was [Mx. Jack Nelson]’s first PCB, and you never forget your first. You don’t want to miss the demo video after the break.

Are keyboards just not spooky enough for you? Here’s a creepy baby doll that does basically the same thing.

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A Typewriter For The Paperless Age

October 19, 2023 by Jenny List 9 Comments

Writing is, as any of the Hackaday crew will tell you, a task which requires concentration. For your best work there’s a need to be in that elusive Zone, and for some that means making the experience as distraction free as possible. For them there’s an entire class of minimalist word-processors and text editors which reduce the UI to nothing more than the text. [Adam Blumenberg] has taken this a step beyond software with his digital typewriter, a single-purpose Raspberry Pi-based cyberdeck that serves only for distraction-free writing.

There’s not a lot in the way of descriptive text at the above link but in a way there doesn’t need to be as the photographs tell the story. A mechanical keyboard and a wide but not very tall display fit with the Pi in a fairly rudimentary wooden case, and running Focuswriter it leaves very little in the way of distraction. In that sense it’s not quite so much a cyberdeck in its application as something more like the smart digital typewriters from a few decades ago without the printer, but we can see that it makes for a very handy writing implement. Sadly the job of writing for Hackaday requires constant access to online sources on a larger screen, or we’d be tempted to try one ourselves.

The one-purpose writing computer is an idea we’ve seen before from time to time, for example in this one with an e-paper display.

The Birdy44 Keyboard Is Something To Crow About

October 18, 2023 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

The funny thing about keyboard end game is that it usually involves more than one keyboard. Rare is the board that is great for both home and away. Having finished their dactyl build, [RalphCoder13] was looking to build something slimmer and more portable, and the Birdy44 was born.

This hand-wired beauty uses a pair of Waveshare RP2040 Zeros and features a pair of 40mm Cirque track pads that were salvaged from a Steam controller.

As you may have guessed, there are 44 Kailh Chocs that sit underneath a combination of MBK and 3D-printed keycaps. Our favorite part might be the tenting legs, which are optional and connect magnetically.

Part of portability is how you decide to carry the thing. You probably don’t want it naked and loose in your backpack if you can avoid it, right? To that end, he designed a nice little case for the halves. The original plan was to use magnets to hold them in place inside the topless case, but that didn’t work out so well, so he added wide elastic bands to stretch around the case.

Is this still not portable enough for you? Check out this folding split keyboard.

Via KBD

Solar Camera Built From Raspberry Pi

October 17, 2023 by Richard Baguley 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.

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

October 16, 2023 by Jenny List 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 Michael Shaub 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.

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