Retropie Gaming Table

November 17, 2013 by James Hobson 4 Comments

rasp pi gaming table

[Jody] just finished the write up on this awesome coffee table he’s been working on. It’s an all-in-one gaming table that makes use of Retropie.

When they finally got rid of the kids’ train-play-set table, they needed something to replace it. Eager to use his new collection of tools (including a 3D printer and a laser cutter!), [Jody] decided to build this thing from scratch. He admits he isn’t a very skilled woodworker, but we think he did an excellent job!

The screen is an old laptop LCD that [Jody] took apart and refitted into the nice wood frame you see above. He’s added speakers with 3D printed grills, and the whole thing turns on and off when the screen is lifted, all thanks to a pantry door switch he installed. In the side compartments he has wireless keyboards, mice, and xBox 360 controllers to play the games with. He and his son have already put many hours into the classic Cave Story, first released back in 2004.

There’s a great build log on his site, so if you’re interested in making your own, check it out!

Google Glass? How About This Home-brew Solution?

November 17, 2013 by James Hobson 22 Comments

[Codeninja] has been sending us some great hacks over the years, and we’ve just learned that his attention has been on building wearable computers lately! He’s currently on his third iteration of a Google Glass-like prototype, which features a motorized element which allows for the retraction of the screen.

There’s not too much info on his blog about them, but we do know he’s using a Raspberry Pi, a few small servos, and a pico LCD screen. Most of the frame is 3D printed, and it also features a hidden camera, accelerometers, and a few environmental sensors.

He’s uploaded an animated gif of the mechanism that moves the display away from his eye, and it looks straight out of some science fiction movie — check it out after break!

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Battery Backup For RasPi Keeps Your Data Safe

November 17, 2013 by Marsh 17 Comments

We’ve all raised a clench fist in anger over lost data, and it’s usually the result of unjustified optimism and lack of planning. [George] shared his solution that prepares for the worst: a circuit that provides backup power to a RasPi and its hard drives. [George’s] Pi setup runs as both an Apple Time Machine server and a website backup server, and a power outage could corrupt the data stored on the Pi’s attached hard drives.

Rather than turn to commercial solutions, however, [George] wanted to take advantage of the Pi’s low power consumption and create an inexpensive custom circuit that would safely and automatically power down the devices upon loss of power. To detect a power failure, the build connects one of the Pi’s GPIOs to an opto-isolator, which—through a zener diode—connects to the 12V wall adapter: though [George] welcomes suggestions for alternative methods of safely identifying a mains power loss. The rest of the circuit serves as a trickle charger for the two attached 9V batteries and as a regulator to supply the correct voltage to the RasPi. Power MOSFETs connected to a GPIO handle the delayed power off.

You can view (and edit!) the circuit online here and find the relevant source code on [George’s] website. If you want to build your own RasPi file server, try cramming all the parts into an old optical drive enclosure.

Real-Life Raspi-Controlled Redstone Lamp

November 16, 2013 by Marsh 2 Comments

redstone-lamp

Minecraft fanatics keep finding impressive ways to bring 8-bit components into the real world, and [Chris Tompson’s] Redstone Lamp Replica is no exception. [Chris] wanted to extend his connection to the game world by not only replicating this block, but also by controlling its light-up effect when an in-game cube is lit.

The lamp is a product of the gang at Hive76, who worked together to develop a quick prototype using the Minecraft Python client pyCraft, an Arduino, a transistor and a temporary papercraft lamp mockup. Hive76 member [Kyle] pitched in to write the plugin for pyCraft, which listens for an on/off message and sets one of the RasPi’s GPIO pins accordingly. The hardware for the actual lamp was designed to smooth out the 8-bit quality into something a bit more precise. The result are laser-cut pieces of MDF with a zebra wood veneer laminated on top. The interior was finished off with amber cathedral glass and then the cube’s sides were glued together. The RasPi, PCB and LEDs fit inside, all snugly affixed together.

Swing over to the Hive76 project page for more details and links to the plugin, and see the video demonstration below. For another Minecraft-inspired real-life project, check out [Bill’s] take on the BatBox.

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Automated Aquarium Is Kitchen-Sinky

November 15, 2013 by Marsh 16 Comments

fishtankAutomation

People have been converting their old Power Macs and Mac G5s into fish tanks for a few years now, but [Hayden’s] Internet-enabled tank is probably the most awesome ever crammed into an aquarium along with the water and the fish—and we’ve seen some fascinating builds this summer. After gutting the G5 and covering the basic acrylic work, [Hayden] started piling on the electronics: a webcam, timed LED lighting, an LCD for status readouts, filter and bubble control via a servo, an ultrasonic sensor to measure water levels, thermometer, scrolling matrix display, an automatic feeding mechanism, and more. He even snuck in the G5’s old mainboard solely for a cool backdrop.

The build uses both a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino Mega, which sit underneath the tank at the base. The Pi provides a web interface written in PHP and jQuery, which presents you with the tank’s status and allows changes to some settings. Nearly every component received some form of modification. [Hayden] stripped the webcam of its case and replaced the enclosure with a piece of acrylic and a mountain of silicone, making it both waterproof and slim enough to fit in the appropriate spot. Though he decided to stick with an Amazon-bought Eheim fish feeder, he disabled the unit’s autofeed timer and tapped in to the manual “feed” button to integrate it into his own system.

It’d take half of the front page to explain the rest of this thing. We’ve decided to let the aquarium tell you the rest of its features in the video below. Yeah…it can talk.

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Unbricking A Router With A Raspi

November 15, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

About a decade ago, [Mansour] learned of the Linksys WRT54G, a wireless router that’s been shoved into just about every project under the sun. After learning of this device’s power, he decided a firmware upgrade was in order. Unfortunately, he accidentally bricked this router and left it sitting on a shelf for a few years.

Idle devices are the devil’s playthings, and when [Mansour] discovered a Samsung hard drive with a an SDRAM that was compatible with the WRT54G, he decided he would have a go at repairing this ancient router. There was only one problem: the most popular utility for programming the router through the JTAG header required a PC parallel port.

No problem, then, as [Mansour] had a Raspberry Pi on hand. The parallel port utility bit-banged the new firmware over to the router, something the GPIO port on the Pi could do in spades. By adding Pi support to the debricking utility, [Mansour] had a functional WRT54G with just a little bit of patience and a few wires connecting the GPIO and JTAG header.

Raspberry Pi Driven 128×32 LED Sign

November 14, 2013 by James Hobson 12 Comments

Looks like a commercial LED display sign… right? Not even close. This is a project of [Jon’s] from over a year ago, and it is a very impressive 128×32 LED display board, driven using a single Raspberry Pi.

It’s made of eight “P10” 32×16 LED panels that he bought off of eBay, housed in a wooden frame he built himself. The display runs off of a single Raspberry Pi and can receive a video signal from anything with an Ethernet port. The individual boards are daisy-chained in a rather odd arrangement to minimize cable length, which [Jon] says helps with clocking the data fast — he’s able to parse 2 bits per pixel to refresh the display at an impressive 400+ frames per second.

To power the display, he’s using a single ATX power supply with the Pi connected to the standby 5V power line. This is to avoid a voltage drop which might cause the Pi to crash — when all LEDs are on the display can draw a healthy 32A of juice. The P10’s use shift registers to serially load the pixel data. At any time, the 4096 pixel display can have 1024 pixels on, which means a fairly fast clock is required to update the display.

[Jon] has shared all the source code on his blog, and has a fairly in-depth explanation of all the systems used. Check it out for yourself, and don’t forget to stick around after the break to see the display in action!

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