Atari 2600 Has A Raspberry Pi Hiding Under The Hood

June 26, 2013 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

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Seriously, the drawer pull on this Atari 2600 is not stock. Don’t they know this voids the warranty? The thing is, you won’t actually find any of the original internals anyway. When building this portable emulator housed in a 2600 case [Linear Nova] was careful to ensure that everything could be restored to its original condition (except for two hinges mounted on the back) sometime down the road. That’s a good goal to set for yourself. We think the build is the fun part of most projects and often wonder what to do with them when they’re done and our interest has waned.

A seven-inch LCD screen was attached to the underside of the lid using Velcro. When tilted up it’s at a nice viewing angle for the player. [Linear] prefers to use a Wii remote as the control this portable video game emulator. It connects to the Raspberry Pi over Bluetooth using a USB dongle. The advantage of this is that you just throw the remote inside the case too. For now there are two power cords, one for the RPi and the other for the LCD screen but he plans to add a power hub in the future to narrow this down to one. We wonder it that would also be a good time to add his own rechargeable battery pack option? There should be enough room for an RC style pack.

Raspberry Pi Bitcoin Miner

June 23, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 85 Comments

Mining bitcoins is becoming a fool’s errand, but there’s always some new piece of hardware coming out that allows those hard-core miners to keep ahead of the curve. One such piece of hardware are new custom ASIC devices that are just as fast as an FPGA while being much less expensive. A lot of these ASIC devices come in interesting packages that look just like a large USB thumb drive. Of course this is the perfect opportunity to show off what the Raspberry Pi can do by mining Bitcoins at rates comparable to the best graphics used in mining today.

The Raspberry Pi simply doesn’t have enough horsepower to mine bitcoins at any worthwhile rate. There are, however, USB ASIC devices that will mine for you at about the same speed as a high-end graphics card. Since multiple ASIC devices can be controlled through a USB hub, it’s simply a matter of plugging a USB hub into a Raspberry Pi, loading up CGminer, and letting your new PiMiner loose on a mining pool.

The Adafruit Pi Miner uses one of their really cool LCD character displays and keypad to display the current mining rate, accepted shares, and enough information for you to calculate how long it will take to break even with your Pi powered mining rig. How long that will be for this four device rig we’ll leave to the comments section.

Raspberry Pi Replaces A Volvo Nav System

June 17, 2013 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

[Reinis] has a Volvo S80. One of the dashboard features it includes is a 6.5″ LCD screen which periscopes up to use as a navigation system. The problem is that Volvo stopped making maps for it around five years ago and there are no maps at all for Latvia where he lives. So it’s worthless… to you’re average driver. But [Reinis] is fixing it on his own by replacing the system with a Raspberry Pi.

That link leads to his project overview page. But he’s already posted follow-ups on hardware design and initial testing. He’s basing the design around a Raspberry Pi board, but that doesn’t have all the hardware it needs to communicate with the car’s systems. For this he designed his own shield that uses an ATmega328 along with a CAN controller and CAN transceiver. The latter two chips patch into the CAN bus on the car’s On Board Diagnostic system. We didn’t see much about the wiring, but the overview post mentions that the screen takes RGB or Composite inputs so he must be running a composite video cable from the trunk to the dashboard.

Telegraph Sounder Clicks Out Email Messages

June 12, 2013 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

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[Patrick Schless] is excited to show off the project he took on about nine months ago. After finding an antique telegraph sounder he wired it up to an Arduino to see if he could make it tick. The successful experiment laid the ground work for different hardware that would make it into a morse code email reader.

He doesn’t know much about the background of the old hardware, but driving it is relatively simple. It’s basically a magnetic relay so you need to have a transistor for switching and a flyback diode for protection. Once those components are in place it’s just a matter of toggling a bit. [Patrick] knew he wanted to pull messages from an online source, so he set his Arduino aside and grabbed a Raspberry Pi. It worked like a charm. His plan was to put this on a bookshelf in perpetuity so he went the extra mile, designing his own PCB and having it spun using the OSH Park service. The project is finished with this low-profile laser-cut base which houses all of the electronics.

Now if he wants to respond to his emails in Morse code he needs to build this keyboard.

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Automated Programming And Testing Jig Built With Raspberry Pi

June 10, 2013 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

[Doug Jackson] makes word clocks, and he must be doing quite a bit of business. We say that because he put together a programming and test bed for the clock circuit boards.

This is a great example to follow if you’re doing any kind of volume assembly. The jig lets the populated PCB snap into place, making all the necessary electrical connections. This was made possible by a package of goods he picked up on eBay which included rubber spacers to separate the board from the acrylic mounting plate, pogo pins to make the electrical connections, and a spring-loaded board clamp seen to the left in this image.

The switch in the lower right connects power to the board and pulls a Raspberry Pi GPIO pin high. The Python script running on the RPi polls that pin, executing a bash script which programs the ATmega169 microcontroller using the GPIO version of AVRdude. We looked through his Python script and didn’t see code for testing the boards. But the image above shows a “Passed” message on the screen that isn’t in his script. We would wager he has another version that takes the hardware through a self test routine.

We first saw one of [Doug’s] word clocks back in 2009 and then again a few months later. The look of the clock is fantastic and it’s nice to see the project is still going strong.

Learning Letters, Particularly R, F, I, & D

June 10, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

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After [yohanes] picked up a toy at a yard sale – a Leap Frog Letter Factory Phonics – he thought he could do better. The toy originally asked a child to find a letter, and after digging one of 26 plastic characters out of a plastic tub and placing them on the Letter Factory’s sensor, would play a short musical ditty. [yohanes]’ version does the same, but because he made it himself it is infinitely more expandable.

The letters for [yohanes]’ version are RFID tagged. This, combined with a cheap RFID module and a bluetooth module means a Raspberry Pi can read RFID cards from across the room. From there, it’s a simple matter of writing up some Python to ask his toddler for a letter, reading the bits coming from a bluetooth, and keeping score.

The build isn’t over by a long shot. [yohanes] still needs to make his build multilingual by adding Indonesian and Thai. There’s also a possibility of adding a spelling game to make it more interesting.