Raspberry Pi: The Perfect Machine For Old DOS Games

March 26, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 62 Comments

DOS

There’s a treasure trove of excellent yet ancient games made for DOS that are nearly unplayable on modern computers. Awesome games like the Lucasarts SCUMM adventures, the original Civilization and SimCity, Starflight, the King’s Quest series and even Leisure Suit Larry aren’t played much today because of the near impossibilities of getting them to run on modern hardware or setting up an emulator with proper sound.

[Patrick] has been doing his best to help out classic gamers with an x86 emulator for the Raspberry Pi. It’s designed to be a very capable DOS box with 20 MB of extended memory, a 640×480 display with 256 colors, an ~20MHz 486 emulated CPU, and a Soundblaster 2.0 sound card.

There’s still a lot of work to be done, but outside of finding a 20-year-old computer, emulation on a Raspberry Pi it probably the most authentic DOS gaming experience you’ll get.

Rogue Pi: A RPi Pentesting Dropbox

March 24, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 4 Comments

A pentesting dropbox is used to allow a pentester to remotely access and audit a network. The device is dropped onto a network, and then sets up a connection which allows remote access. As a final project, [Kalen] built the Rogue Pi, a pentesting dropbox based on the Raspberry Pi.

The Rogue Pi has a few features that make it helpful for pentesting. First off, it has a power on test that verifies that the installation onto the target network was successful. Since the install of a dropbox needs to be inconspicuous, this helps with getting the device setup without being detected. A LCD allows the user to see if the installation was successful without an additional computer or external display.

Once powered on, the device creates a reverse SSH tunnel, which provides remote access to the device. Using a reverse tunnel allows the device to get around the network’s firewall. Aircrack-ng has been included on the device to allow for wireless attacks, and a hidden SSID allows for wireless access if the wired network has issues. There is a long list of pentesting tools that have been built to run on the Pi.

Check out a video demonstration of the dropbox after the break.

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Hacked Interactive R2D2 Controlled By Raspberry Pi

March 23, 2013 by Ryan Fitzpatrick 2 Comments

hacked-R2D2-controlled-by-raspberry-pi

Ah R2D2. Probably one of the most recognized little robots on the planet. There have to be a hundred different toys of R2 out there, but one of the more impressive is the 30th Anniversary Interactive edition. Complete with all kinds of bells and whistles, it’s about as realistic as they come. One Star Wars fan found himself in possession of a broken Interactive R2, and with his girlfriend’s birthday coming up, decided to do a little droid surgery to create the ultimate gift.

Giving Anakin a run for his money, all the controls for this R2 unit were custom built. A Raspberry Pi running Rasbian acts as the brain. Facial recognition was implemented using OpenCV. Voice commands in either English or Chinese were made possible by PocketSphinx. Some of the other features he included are: message recording and playback, ultrasonic distance detection, motion detection, wifi, and a rechargeable battery. Many of those features were included in the original toy, but since this unit was broken, had to be rebuilt from scratch.

In the end, it must have impressed his girlfriend – she’s now his wife. Good work Jedi. Check out some build photos and a video demonstration after the break.

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WSPR Transmitter Shows True Value Of Raspberry Pi For Hacking

March 21, 2013 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

wspr

Don’t get us wrong, we love our Raspberry Pi. But if you’re merely running a Linux image without adding a hardware hack into the mix you’re missing out on part of the power for which the platform was developed. This project is a great example of how to embrace the Raspberry Pi’s ability to deliver both low-level hardware access, and solid embedded Linux performance. [Dan Ankers] and [Threeme3] have developed a program which turns the RPi in to a WSPR transmitter. The GitHub readme shares many of the details on how it was done. But you’ll also want to dig through the .c file to see how they’re making use of the GPIO header pins.

[William Meara] sent in the tip for this. He’s been featured on Hackaday previously for his work with WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Report). It’s an amateur radio protocol which lets you communicate over very long distances using relatively weak transmitters. The trick is to use computing power to find the signal hidden in all the noise. Be warned that you do need a HAM license to try this out, but otherwise all you need to connect to the board is a low-pass filter and an antennae.

[via SolderSmoke]

[Photo credit: WSPR hompage]

Raspberry Pi As A Spotify Server With MPD Control

March 14, 2013 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

The Raspberry Pi has been very popular as a streaming music player. Sure, the only audio out option on the board is an analog stereo jack, but you can use a USB audio device to improve upon that if you wish. [Wouter van Wijk] wanted to use his RPi as a Spotify server. It’s a bit tricky to get everything configured for this, so he decided to give back by publishing a ready to use Spotify server image for the Raspberry Pi.

The project is call the Pi MusicBox. Like some of the RPi Pandora setups we’ve seen he included the ability to use the hardware as an AirPlay device too. To connect to the Spotify service he uses the Mopidy package. It can also play tracks from local storage (including the home network). It’s even capable of mixing the two sources in the same queue. Possibly the best part is that it can be controlled with any Music Player Daemon (MPD) client like the smart phone screenshots seen above.

If you’re interested, check out his GitHub repo for the project.

Minimalist User Interface For Headless Raspberry Pi Applications

March 13, 2013 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

minimial-ui-for-headless-rpi

[Jason Birch] just finished building a beautifully simple user interface for the Raspberry Pi. The goal was to keep it small and intuitive while still providing a range of functionality. His add-on hardware gives feedback using several LEDs and a four-line character LCD screen. It provides control using just four momentary press switches.

The base for the add-on hardware is a chunk of protoboard the same size as the Pi itself. This is just slightly wider than the LCD screen, leaving room along the top for the row of buttons with different colors of LEDs in between them. Look closely in that nest of point-to-point wiring and you’ll find the dual pin-socket which mates with the RPi GPIO header. One important note from [Jason] mentions that the LCD screen R/W pin must be tied to ground. This keeps it from going into read mode, which would push 5V over the I/O pins, potentially damaging the 3.3V tolerant header on the RPi.

Throw in a battery and that pretty much covers the hardware. To see how he’s using it you’ll want to view the video clip after the break.

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Wiimote Controlled RPi Robot

March 7, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 24 Comments

[Brian] has brought together a powerful collection of hardware to build a robot. The end goal is to have a robot that’s controlled by a Wiimote.

The Wiimote communicates over Bluetooth with a Raspberry Pi, which is running a Python script. This script uses the CWiid Python module to communicate with the controller, and [Brian] has detailed instructions on getting the Wiimote working with a RPi. The RPi controls an ATmega based development board over SPI, which drives an h-bridge to control the two DC motors that move the robot.

[Brian]’s code for this could be helpful for anyone looking to control their RPi with a Wiimote. Since Wiimotes and Bluetooth dongles are fairly cheap nowadays, this is a great way to drop in wireless control to any RPi project, or even to control your media center from the couch.

After the break, check out a video of the build in action

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