ClockworkPi Unveils New PicoCalc Handheld

March 14, 2025 by Tom Nardi 34 Comments

Do you like scientific calculators? Don’t bother answering that question, you’re reading Hackaday so we already know the answer. We also know you’re a fan of building things yourself and open source, which makes us fairly sure you’ll be just as interested in the recently announced ClockworkPi PicoCalc as we are.

On the surface, it looks like a chunky scientific calculator, though on further inspection you’ll note it comes equipped with a QWERTY keyboard. But open up the case and what you’ve really got is an elaborate carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Pico. The PicoCalc supports all variants of the microcontroller, but realistically we can’t think of any reason that you wouldn’t just use the latest version.

With the MCU connected, you’ll have access to the PicoCalc’s 320×320 4-inch IPS screen, backlit I2C-connected keyboard, SD card slot, 8 MB PSRAM, and dual PWM speakers. Power is provided by a pair of 18650 cells (which you’ll need to supply on your own), and the board has the necessary circuitry to charge them up over USB-C.

Everything is housed in an injection molded case, but the project page says all the necessary CAD files will be eventually be released under the GPL v3 so you can 3D print or CNC your own enclosure. For now though, the only thing of note that seems to be in the PicoCalc GitHub repository is a PCB schematic.

The software side of things is a little less clear. The page mentions a BASIC interpreter, MP3 playback, and support for various programming languages, but we get the impression that’s just a list of stuff you can run on the Pi Pico. There are a few images that clearly show the PicoCalc actually being used as a calculator however, so there may be an official firmware yet to be revealed.

The PicoCalc kit is on sale now, and will set you back $75 USD — which actually includes a first-generation Pi Pico, on the off chance that you don’t already have a few laying around. We’ve been impressed with the previous offerings from ClockworkPi, so assuming this new kit maintains that same build quality, it seems like a fair enough price.

Homebrew Traffic Monitor Keeps Eyes On The Streets

March 11, 2025 by Tom Nardi 63 Comments

How many cars go down your street each day? How fast were they going? What about folks out on a walk or people riding bikes? It’s not an easy question to answer, as most of us have better things to do than watch the street all day and keep a tally. But at the same time, this is critically important data from an urban planning perspective.

Of course, you could just leave it to City Hall to figure out this sort of thing. But what if you want to get a speed bump or a traffic light added to your neighborhood? Being able to collect your own localized traffic data could certainly come in handy, which is where TrafficMonitor.ai from [glossyio] comes in.

Continue reading “Homebrew Traffic Monitor Keeps Eyes On The Streets” →

Gonzo Film Making With The Raspberry Pi

February 28, 2025 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

Gonzo journalism has been a hip thing since the 1970s or so, a way of covering a story in a compelling format with more subjectivity and less objectivity. The style has since been applied to all sorts of media, including film—and indeed, the makers of the Gonzo Pi.

The Gonzo Pi is a camera with an open source design, yes, but it’s also a lot more than that. It’s intended to be an entire platform for film-making, all in the one housing. Camera-wise, the design combines a Raspberry Pi with the requisite first-party High Quality Camera, and warps it up in a 3D printed housing. You can build it up with a viewfinder and whatever old-school C-mount or 8 mm film lenses you can lay your hands on.

Beyond that, there’s an editing platform baked in to the device. It’s not unlike the tools in so many social media apps these days. The idea of the Gonzo Pi is that rather than shooting a whole ton of footage and takes and poring over them in great detail later, instead, you run and gun with the device and edit as you go. You can shoot retakes as you need, and even dub in more audio as necessary as you compose your film on the hoof. It’s intended to change the way you make films by virtue of its unique compositional paradigm.

We’ve featured some neat homebrew cameras before, to be sure, but none that quite put the edit suite right in the box.

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A Precisely Elegant Cyberdeck Handheld

February 27, 2025 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

[Nicholas LaBonte] shows off a Cyberdeck Handheld that demonstrates just how good something can look when care and attention goes into the design and fabrication. He wanted to make something that blended cyberpunk and nautical aesthetics with a compact and elegant design, and we think he absolutely succeeded.

On the inside is a Raspberry Pi and an RTL-SDR. The back of the unit is machined from hardwood, and sports a bronze heat sink for the Raspberry Pi. The front has a prominent red PSP joystick for mouse input and a custom keyboard. The keyboard is especially interesting. On the inside it’s a custom PCB with tactile switches and a ATmega32U4 running QMK firmware — a popular choice for DIY keyboards — and presents to the host as a regular USB HID device.

The keys are on a single plate of little tabs, one for each key, that sits between the front panel and press on the tact switches inside.

How did he make those slick-looking keys? It’s actually a single plate that sits between the front panel and the switches themselves. [Nicholas] used a sheet of polymer with a faux-aluminum look to it and machined it down, leaving metal-looking keys with engraved symbols as tabs in a single panel. It looks really good, although [Nicholas] already has some ideas about improving it.

On the right side is the power button and charging port, and astute readers may spot that the power button is where a double-stack of USB ports would normally be on a Raspberry Pi 5. [Nicholas] removed the physical connectors, saving some space and connecting the USB ports internally to the keyboard and SDR.

As mentioned, [Nicholas] is already full of ideas for improvements. The bronze heat sink isn’t as effective as he’d like, the SDR could use some extra shielding, and the sounds the keyboard ends up making could use some work. Believe it or not, there’s still room to spare inside the unit and he’d maybe like to figure out a way to add a camera, GPS receiver, or maybe a 4G modem. We can’t wait! Get a good look for yourself in the video, embedded below.

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Lorem Ipsum 36? Dolor Sit Amet Keyboard!

February 6, 2025 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

You know, it’s a tale as old as custom mechanical keyboards. [penkia] couldn’t find any PCBs with 36 keys and Gateron low-profile switch footprints, so they made their own and called it the LoremIpsum36. Isn’t it lovely?

This baby runs on an RP2040, which sits flush as can be in a cutout in the PCB. This maneuver, along with the LP switches in hard-to-find SK-33 sockets results in quite the thin board.

[penkia] says that despite using a 3 mm tray for added rigidity, the entire thing is thinner than the Nuphy Air60 v2, which is just over half an inch (13.9 mm) thick. For keycaps, [penkia] has used both XVX profile and FKcaps’ LPF.

And yeah, that area in the middle is crying out for something; maybe a trackball or something similar. But [penkia] is satisfied with it as-is for the first version, so we are, too.

Do you like 36-key boards, but prefer curves? Check out the Lapa keyboard, which doubles as a mouse.

A Raspberry Pi HAT with retro LED displays and a buttons, sitting on the keys of a laptop.

Good-Looking HAT Does Retro Displays Right

February 5, 2025 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

Mick Jagger famously said that you cain’t always get what you want. But this is Hackaday, and we make what we want or can’t get. Case in point: [Andrew Tudoroi] is drawn to retro LEDs and wanted one of Pimoroni’s micro-LED boards pretty badly, but couldn’t get his hands on one. You know how this ends — with [Andrew] designing his first PCB.

The Pitanga hat is equally inspired by additional fruit that [Andrew] had lying around in the form of an 8devices Rambutan board. (Trust us, it’s a fruit.) With some research, he discovered the HT16K33 LED driver, which checked all the boxen.

The first version worked, but needed what looks like a couple of bodge wires. No shame in that! For the next revision, [Andrew] added buttons and decided to make it into a Raspberry Pi HAT.

This HAT is essentially a simple display with a basic input device, and a beauty at that. You can see all the various cool displays that [Andrew] tried both here and in the project log. Although he included pads for an ARM M0 microcontroller, he never did populate it. Maybe in the future.

Of course, this project was not without its challenges. For one thing, there was power compatibility to wrestle with. The Pi can sometimes work with I²C devices at 5 V, but this isn’t ideal long-term. So [Andrew] put the LED driver on the 3.3 V I²C bus. Despite the data sheet calling for 4.5 to 5.5 V, the setup worked fine. But for better reliability, [Andrew] threw a dedicated I²C logic level converter chip into the mix.

Don’t forget, you can run a noble amassment of HATs with the PiSquare.

JTAG & SWD Debugging On The Pi Pico

January 18, 2025 by Tom Nardi 20 Comments

[Surya Chilukuri] writes in to share JTAGprobe — a fork of the official Raspberry Pi debugprobe firmware that lets you use the low-cost microcontroller development board for JTAG and SWD debugging just by flashing the provided firmware image.

We’ve seen similar projects in the past, but they’ve required some additional code running on the computer to bridge the gap between the Pico and your debugging software of choice. But [Surya] says this project works out of the box with common tools such as OpenOCD and pyOCD.

As we’ve cautioned previously, remember that the Pi Pico is only a 3.3 V device. JTAG and SWD don’t have set voltages, so in the wild you could run into logic levels from 1.2 V all the way to 5.5 V. While being able to use a bare Pico as a debugger is a neat trick, adding in a level shifter would be a wise precaution.

Looking to get even more use out of those Pi Picos you’ve got in the parts bin? How about using it to sniff USB?