A very wide beige laptop sits on a wooden table. A hand manipulates a teal ball in a semicircle attached to the right sided of the device. The track ball and hand are outlined in white.

A Trackball Retro Laptop

August 19, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 6 Comments

While track pads and mice dominate the pointing device landscape today, there was a time when track balls were a major part of the scene. In order to really sell the retro chops of his portable computer, [Ominous Industries] designed a clip-on style track ball for his retro Raspberry Pi laptop.

Starting with a half circle shape, he designed the enclosure in Fusion360 to house the guts of a USB trackball. Using the pattern along a path feature of the software, he was able to mimic the groovy texture of the main device on the trackball itself. Flexures in the top of the track ball case with pads glued on actuate the buttons.

We appreciate the honesty of the cuts showing how often the Pi can get grumpy at the extra wide display in this video as well as the previous issues during the laptop build. The bezel around the screen is particularly interesting, being affixed with magnets for easy access when needing to work on the screen.

Retro portables are having a moment. We just covered the Pi Portable 84 and previously saw one inspired by the GRiD Compass . If you’re more interested in trackballs, maybe give this trackball ring or the Ploopy trackball a look?

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Cost-Optimized Raspberry Pi 5 Released With 2 GB RAM And D0 Stepping

August 19, 2024 by Maya Posch 42 Comments

When the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC was released last year, it came in 4 and 8 GB RAM variants, which currently retail from around $80 USD and €90 for the 8 GB variant to $60 and €65 for the 4 GB variant. Now Raspberry Pi has announced the launch of a third Raspberry Pi 5 variant: a 2 GB version which also features a new stepping of the BCM2712 SoC. This would sell for about $50 USD and feature the D0 stepping that purportedly strips out a lot of the ‘dark silicon’ that is not used on the SBC.

These unused die features are likely due to the Broadcom SoCs used on Raspberry Pi SBCs being effectively recycled set-top box SoCs and similar. This means that some features that make sense in a set-top box or such do not make sense for a general-purpose SBC, but still take up die space and increase the manufacturing defect rate. The D0 stepping thus would seem to be based around an optimized die, with as only possible negative being a higher power density due to a (probably) smaller die, making active cooling even more important.

As for whether 2 GB is enough for your purposes depends on your use case, but knocking $10 off the price of an RPi 5 could be worth it for some. Perhaps more interesting is that this same D0 stepping of the SoC is likely to make it to the other RAM variants as well. We’re awaiting benchmarks to see what the practical difference is between the current C1 and new D0 steppings.

Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip.

DIY Rabbit R1 Clone Could Be Neat With More Hardware

August 13, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 4 Comments

The Teenage Engineering badging usually appears on some cool gear that almost always costs a great deal of money. One such example is the Rabbit R1, an AI-powered personal assistant that retails for $199. It was also revealed that it’s basically a small device running a simple Android app. That raises the question — could build your own dupe for $20? That’s what [Thomas the Maker] did.

Meet Rappit. It’s basically [Thomas]’s take on an AI friend that doesn’t break the bank. It runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, which has the benefit of integrated wireless connectivity on board. It’s powered by rechargeable AA batteries or a USB power bank to keep things simple. [Thomas] then wrapped it all up in a cute 3D printed enclosure to give it some charm.

It’s software that makes the Rappit what it is. Rather than including a screen, microphone, or speakers on the device itself, [Thomas] interacts with the Pi-based device via smartphone. It makes it a less convincing dupe of the self-contained Rabbit R1, but the basic concept is the same. [Thomas] can make queries of the Rappit via a simple Android or iOS app he created called “Comfyspace,” and the Rappit responds with the aid of Google’s Gemini AI.

If you’re really trying to duplicate the trend of AI assistants, you really need standalone hardware. To that end, the Rappit design could really benefit from a screen, microphone, speaker, and speech synth. Honestly, though, that would only take you a few hours extra work compared to what [Thomas] has already done here. As it is, [Thomas] could simply throw away the Raspberry Pi and just use the smartphone with Gemini directly, right? But he chose this route of using the smartphone as an interface to keep costs down by minimizing hardware outlay.

If you want a real Rabbit R1, you can order one here. We’ve discussed controversy around the device before, too. Video after the break.

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Audio On Pi: Here Are Your Options

August 12, 2024 by Arya Voronova 35 Comments

There are a ton of fun Raspberry Pi and Linux projects that require audio output – music players, talking robots, game consoles and arcades, intelligent assistants, mesh network walkie-talkies, and much more! There’s no shortage of Pi-based iPods out there, and my humble opinion is that we still could use more of them.

To help you in figuring out your projects, let’s talk about all the ways you can use to get audio out of a Pi or a similar SBC. Not all of them are immediately obvious and you ought to know the ropes before you implement one of them and get unpleasantly surprised by a problem you didn’t foresee. I can count at least five ways, and they don’t even include a GPIO-connected buzzer!

Let’s rank the different audio output methods, zoning in on things like their power consumption, and sort them by ease of implementation, and we’ll talk a bit about audio input options while we’re at it.

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Pi Pico SDR On A Breadboard

August 12, 2024 by Al Williams 26 Comments

How hard is it to make a fully standalone SDR? [101 Things] shows you how to take a breadboard, a PI Pico, and two unremarkable chips to create a capable radio. You can see the whole thing in the video below.

The design uses a standard Tayloe demodulator. There’s also an encoder and an OLED display for a user interface. You might also want to include some PC speakers to get a bit more audio out of the device.

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The UMPC powered up, case-less showing the black PCB, with the display standing upwards and showing a blue colour scheme desktop with a CLI terminal open. To the right of it is one of the UMPCs that served as an inspiration for this project.

Bringing The UMPCs Back With A Pi Zero

August 3, 2024 by Arya Voronova 12 Comments

Miss PDAs and UMPCs? You wouldn’t be the only one, and it’s a joy to see someone take the future into their own hands. [Icepat]’s dream is reviving UMPCs as a concept, and he’s bringing forth a pretty convincing hardware-backed argument in form of the Pocket Z project. For the hardware design, he’s hired two engineers, [Adam Nowak] and [Marcin Turek], and the 7-inch Pocket Z7 version is coming up quite nicely!

The Hackaday.io project shows an impressive gallery of inspiration devices front and center, and with these in mind, the first version of the 7-inch UMPC sets the bar high. With a 1024×600 parallel RGB (DPI) touchscreen display, an ATMega32U4-controlled keyboard, battery-ready power circuitry, and a socketed Pi Zero for brains, this device shows a promising future for the project, and we can’t wait to see how it progresses.

While it’s not a finished project just yet, this effort brings enough inspiration all around, from past device highlights to technical choices, and it’s worth visiting it just for the sentiment alone. Looking at our own posts, UMPCs are indeed resurfacing, after a decade-long hiatus – here’s a Sidekick-like UMPC with a Raspberry Pi, that even got an impressive upgrade a year later! As for PDAs, the Sharp memory LCD and Blackberry keyboard combination has birthed a good few projects recently, and, who can forget about the last decade’s introductions to the scene.

D+ and D- wires from a USB cable connected to GPIO pins on the Pi Pico, using a female header plugged onto the jumper wires

Need A USB Sniffer? Use Your Pico!

August 3, 2024 by Arya Voronova 21 Comments

Ever wanted to sniff USB device communications? The usual path was buying an expensive metal box with USB connectors, using logic analyzers, or wiring devboards together and hacking some software to make them forward USB data.

Now, thanks to [ataradov]’s work, you can simply use a Pi Pico – you only need to tap the D+ and D- pins, wire them to RP2040’s GPIOs, and you can sniff communication between your computer and any low-speed (1.5 Mbps) or full-speed (12 Mbps) devices. On the RP2040 side, plug the Pico into your computer, open the virtual serial port created, and witness the USB packets streaming in – for the price of a Pico, you get an elegant USB sniffer, only a little soldering required.

[ataradov] also offers us a complete board design with a RP2040 and a USB hub on it, equipped with USB sockets that completely free us from the soldering requirement; it’s an open-source KiCad design, so you can simply order some sniffers made from your favourite fab! This project is a great learning tool, it’s as cheap and easy to make as humanly possible, and it has big potential for things like reverse-engineering old and new systems alike. Just couple this hack with another Pico doing USB device or host duty, maybe get up to date with USB reverse-engineering fundamentals, and you could make a Facedancer-like tool with ease.

Need to reach 480 Mbit/s? [ataradov] has a wonderful board for you as well, that we have covered last year – it’s well worth it if a device of yours can only do the highest speed USB2 can offer, and, it offers WireShark support. Want WireShark support and to use a Pico? Here’s a GitHub project by another hacker, [tana]. By now, merely having a Pi Pico gives you so many tools, it’s not even funny.