A Raspberry Pi Arcade Stick

November 30, 2013 by Marsh 7 Comments

There are plenty of Raspberry Pi arcade builds out there, but rarely do we come across something as sleek as [Jochen Zurborg’s] RasPi Arcade Stick. The build combines everything you’d expect from other RasPi arcade projects, but manages to pack everything into the form factor of a portable stick modeled on the Neo Geo 4’s button layout. It may not be as small as the tiny MAME cabinet from last year, but it definitely delivers a more authentic arcade experience.

[Jochen] had previously developed an add-on PCB for the Pi called the PiJamma, which simplifies connections from the RasPi’s GPIOs by providing a JAMMA interface for the controller(s). The Pi and the PiJamma sit inside a custom-made acrylic enclosure and hook up to the buttons and joystick above. Rather than try to fit the Pi directly against a side panel for access to the various outputs, [Jochen] rerouted the USB, HDMI, and headphone jacks and arranged them into a tidy row on the back side of the box. The top piece of the enclosure consists of a sheet of aluminum wrapped in custom artwork, with an additional sheet of acrylic on top for protection. [Jochen] also modified each of the arcade buttons to include LEDs that illuminate the buttons’ acrylic holder, and the case itself appears to have been cut into slats on each side to provide better ventilation.

Check out his project blog for further details and for a huge gallery of progress photos, then see a quick video of the RasPi Arcade Stick after the break.

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Windows CE On A Raspberry Pi

November 27, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 55 Comments

From all the BSDs and Linuxes to extraordinarily odd operating systems, it seems just about every OS has been ported to the Raspberry Pi. All except Windows, that is, but a few people are working on it.

This build comes to us from [ideeman] who wanted to show off his Raspi running Windows Compact Embedded. It technically works, but there are still a few problems. In his own words:

Unfortunately, as it is now, I can’t really control it through anything else than via the kernel transport layer (through serial, directly to visual studio, and I still get lots of checksum errors, must me from the cheapo USB<==>TTL 3.3V adapter I’m using). The original developer (dboling) is still struggling with native USB drivers, but as you can see, he already got a (unaccelerated) running display driver.

If you’re interested, I can send you the compiled kernel image, but I don’t think you’ll do really much without the serial debugging provided through Visual Studio 2008 (+Platform builder 7.0)… I’m not sure it can be legally released to the public though.

While running Windows Compact Embedded isn’t as cool as running Windows RT on a Raspi, the latter will never happen. Windows RT requires 1 GB of RAM and a 1 GHz ARM v7 processor, neither of which the Pi has. Still, it’s a very impressive hack and with a few more devs on board, [dboling] and [ideeman] might end up with a truly functional system.

Below are pics of [ideeman]’s Raspi running WinCE. For [ideeman], feel free to link to a torrent in the comments.

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Raspberry Pi Emulates An Amiga 500 Floppy Drive

November 26, 2013 by Adam Fabio 58 Comments

[Maurizio] loves using his Amiga 500. His classic piece of hardware has been serving him well for years, except for the floppy drive, which recently gave out on him. No problem for [Maurizio], he just cracked his case open and added a Raspberry Pi as a real-time floppy emulator. [Maurizio] didn’t want to make any permanent changes to his A500 case, and more importantly he wanted to use the Amiga’s original floppy drive interface. The latter placed some rather stringent timing requirements on his design.

The interface hardware is relatively simple. Most of the circuit is dedicated to level shifting from the 5v Amiga 500 to the 3.3V Raspberry Pi. A 74LS06 Hex inverter converts the signals to the open collector outputs the A500 requires. [Maurizio] powered his Raspberry Pi from the floppy power connector of the Amiga. His model A Raspberry Pi works fine, but a model B would pull a bit more power (700ma) than the Amiga floppy power supply is capable of providing (550ma). The user interface side of the equation is simple: Two buttons, one used to switch disks, and one to “Write to SD”. Live disk images are stored in the Raspberry Pi’s ram, so the user needs to hit the “Write to SD” button to store any changes to disk before swapping floppies.

The software is perhaps the most interesting portion of this build. [Maurizio] is emulating a floppy drive in real-time – this means emulating MFM encoding in real time. Calls have to be made with a timing accuracy of 2 microseconds. The Pi’s stock Linux Operating system was just not going to cut it. [Maurizio] coded his drive emulator “bare metal”, directly accessing the Arm Processor on the Raspberry Pi. This gave him access to the entire processor, and allowed him to meet the hard timing requirements of the floppy interface.

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Mathematica And Wolfram On The Raspberry Pi

November 24, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

[Stephen Wolfram], possibly the only person on Earth who wants a second element named after him, is giving away Mathematica for the Raspberry Pi.

For those of you unfamiliar with Mathematica, it’s a piece of software that allows you to compute anything. Combined with the educational pedigree of the Raspberry Pi, [Wolfram] and the Pi foundation believe the use of computer-based math will change the way students are taught math.

Besides bringing a free version of Mathematica to the Raspberry Pi, [Wolfram] also announced the Wolfram language. It’s a programming language that keeps most of its libraries – for everything from audio processing, high level math, strings, graphs, networks, and even linguistic data – on the Internet. It sounds absurdly cool, and you can check out a preliminary version of the language over on the official site.

While a free version of Mathematica is awesome, we’re really excited about the new Wolfram language. If it were only an interactive version of Wolfram Alpha, we’d be interested, but the ability to use this tool as a real programming language shows a lot of promise for some interesting applications.

Raspi Mini Laser Engraver

November 23, 2013 by Marsh 9 Comments

If you’ve got a lot of spare parts lying around, you may be able to cobble together your own laser engraver without too much trouble. We’ve already seen small engraver builds that use an Arduino, but [Jeremy] tipped us off to [Xiang Zhai’s] version, which provides an in-depth guide to building one with a Raspberry Pi.

[Xiang] began by opening up two spare DVD writeable drives, salvaging not only their laser diodes but the stepper motors and their accompanying hardware, as well as a handful of small magnets near each diode. To assemble the laser, he sourced an inexpensive laser diode module from eBay and used a vise to push the diode into the head of the housing. With the laser snugly in place and the appropriate connecting wires soldered on, [Xiang] whipped up a laser driver circuit, which the Raspi will later control. [Xiang] worked out the stepper motors’ configuration by following [Groover’s] engraver build-(we featured it a few years back)-attaching the plate that holds the material to be engraved onto one axis and the laser assembly to the other.

Check out [Xiang’s] project blog for details explaining the h-bridge circuits as well as the Python code for the Raspi. As always, if you’re attempting any build involving a laser, please use all necessary precautions! And if you need more information on using DVD burners for their diodes, check out this hack from earlier in the summer

Raspis And Arduinos For FM Broadcast Streaming

November 20, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 74 Comments

radio

The biggest Internet provider in Portugal needed a system to turn FM broadcast stations in Angola, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique into a web stream. Like every good project, the people in charge of the engineering turned to Hackaday staples – Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and TP-Link routers, all stuffed into an awesome modular rackmount cabinet

Each module in this gigantic rackmount system includes an Arduino, a Raspberry Pi, a Silicon Labs Si4705 FM receiver chip, and a TI USB audio capture chip that allows the Pi to turn the audio out from the radio receiver into an audio stream. All the Pis are connected to a 24 port Ethernet switch and to a separate master Raspi that converts data received from each module into an icecast stream.

The engineering behind each module is pretty impressive – they’re all hot swappable, have remote shutdown capability, and have voltage divider on the backplane to detect where in the rack it’s placed. It’s a very cool piece of engineering and a very cool example of using off-the-shelf hardware to do something that could be much, much harder.

Raspberry Pi Smart TV

November 20, 2013 by James Hobson 25 Comments

[Tony] decided his “smart” LED TV wasn’t quite smart enough. So he stuffed a Raspberry Pi in it.

Upon opening the case of his 40″ Hisense Smart LED TV, he discovered that the logic board actually had two unused USB pads — what luck! He tapped off of them to get 5V @ 500mA to power the Pi… Later on he realized this wasn’t the ideal solution — when the TV turned off, it cut the Pi’s power too. So he pulled out his multimeter and probed the board, this time finding a 5V source that remained on while the unit was plugged in.

Next up was the placement of the Raspberry Pi. The included speakers on this particular TV weren’t that good, and since [Tony] uses a surround sound system anyway, he decided to make use of their space better. Cutting out the grill and removing the whole assembly left him with more than enough room to store the Pi and mount a 3D printed LAN and USB port cover!

He’s running Raspbmc which lends the TV tons of functionality. If you don’t mind voiding your warranty, this is a great hack!