Playing With The Minecraft API And A Raspberry Pi

February 16, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

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It hasn’t been a week since Minecraft for the Raspberry Pi has been released, and already we’re seeing some cool builds that bridge our analog world with Minecraft voxel land. [Martin] got his hands on the Raspi version of Minecraft and decided to take advantage of the API Mojang threw into the build by making a huge analog block clock that keeps real world time in the Minecraft universe.

Basically, [Martin] created a small Python script that draws the face and hands of a clock in a Minecraft world. The Minecraft API comes with neat functions such as drawCircle, and drawLine, so making a real clock face is as simple as getting the system time and doing a bit of trig.

After the break you can check out [Martin]’s Minecraft clock in action. If you’re running the Pi version of Minecraft, you can also get this running on your machine with the code on [Martin]’s git.

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Raspberry Pi As A Plug-in Hash Harvester

February 14, 2013 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

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Plug in the power and Ethernet and this Raspberry Pi board will automatically collect Windows hashes from computers on the network. With a couple of RPi boards on hand [Travis] was searching for more hacks to try with them. This made a great little test to see how the board performs with the well established attack.

To start he booted into the standard Raspbian distribution. From there he loads the Metasploit framework which brings most of the necessary tools into play. It uses the Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol (WPAD) to request hashes from any Windows machines listening on the network. Some version of the OS respond with LM hashes, others don’t. The importance of this and the particulars of using rainbow tables to crack the hashes is explained in this article on the subject.

We wouldn’t mind having a little hardware hack that adds a couple of LEDs to the GPIO header so you know when the RPi is done collecting the data.

Hacking A Coffee Machine For A Better Brew

February 14, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 33 Comments

Senseo coffee makers are automated brewers that use coffee pods. [Ronald] had one, but wasn’t satisfied with the quality of the coffee it produced. His solution was to hack it apart and build his own automatic coffee machine with the innards.

The coffee brewing part of the system is controlled by an ATmega8. This reads the temperature using the NTC sensor from the original machine and actuates the various parts of the Senseo machine, and the added grinder. The timing was all done by trial and error, optimizing for the best cup of coffee.

Keeping with the trend of adding Raspberry Pis to everything, [Ronald] connected one to this build for remote control. He runs a very hacked version of LCD2USB which deals with communicating with the RPi. An Apache web server hosts a PHP script to provide a user interface, which runs a C program to tell the system to start brewing.

Unfortunately, [Ronald] didn’t give us a link to his web interface, so we can’t remotely brew him coffee. However he did provide all of the source for the project in his write up.

Minecraft For RPi Released

February 11, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 12 Comments

Mojang, the folks behind Minecraft, have officially released Minecraft: Pi Edition. This free version of the popular game is optimized to run on the Raspberry Pi hardware, and has an API that exposes the game’s internals to a variety of programming languages.

Mojang intends this release to be an educational tool for teaching and learning programming. Since the API provides instant feedback in the game, it could be an interesting way to make learning to code fun for people of all ages.

Having access to the API on a RPi also means that the game can be connected to the real world. For example, using Python and the RPi.GPIO, pins on the GPIO header can be used for output or input. This creates a slew of possible hacks that interface with the game.

Any ideas on what you’d like to do with Minecraft on a RPi? Let us know in the comments. Also, we coincidentally just printed a minecraft pick on our 3d printer. There’s a time lapse video of it after the break!

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Better PWM On The Raspberry Pi

February 10, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

[Thomas] wanted to play around with a few high-power LEDs and a RaspberryPi. LED controllers usually require some form of PWM to change the brightness of a LED, and unfortunately the Pi only has one PWM pin. [Thomas] could have gotten around this with a custom chip or even an Arduino hanging off the Pi’s USB port. He opted to go with software-based PWM, and did so in a way that is far superior to bit banging a pin.

Conventional wisdom says PWM without a real-time operating system is dumb – right up there with starting a land war in Asia. Turning a pin on and off in a while loop will eat up all the processor power in the Pi, so [Thomas] looked for a better way to do things. He came across the ServoBlaster project by [Richard Hirst] that creates pulses of different lengths by playing with direct memory access; [Richard] created a circular buffer that is read every 10μs. With 2000 values in the buffer, he can control eight different pins with very little impact on CPU usage.

For [Thomas], though, [Richard]’s project wasn’t enough. It was originally written for servos and is only able to drive PWM pins up to about 12%. A quick rewrite of [Richard]’s code allowed [Thomas] to control eight pins with PWM varying from 0% to 100% – and be able to do other things with his Pi in the process.

[Thomas] now has a 40 Watt RGB LED powered by a Raspberry Pi burned into his retina, and the satisfaction of a really clever way of giving the Pi more PWM pins.

NASA Inspired Circadian Rhythm Lights

February 8, 2013 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

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After reading about an initiative between NASA and Boeing to develop lights for the International Space Station [Rasathus] decided to give it a go at building his own. The project uses RGB pixels to build a circadian rhythm light installation. Without the normal rise and fall of the sun the sleep wake schedule for the astronauts can be pretty rough. This uses color and intensity of light in a well-defined schedule to help alleviate that. [Rasathus] is trying to bring his project in well under the $11.1 million mark which was established for the ISS.

The light modules he’s using are from a strand of LEDs from Adafruit. Each is driven by a WS2801 controller, a common driver used for easy and complicated projects like this huge ball of light which our own [Jesse Congdon] tackled. The board above is the start of an adapter board for interfacing with the Raspberry Pi GPIO header. [Rasathus] wanted to make certain he didn’t fry the control electronics so he built some protection into this adapter. The control software is covered in the second portion of the write up. We’ve embedded the video from that post after the break.

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Raspberry Pi Is Right At Home Inside Of A Game Boy

February 8, 2013 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

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[Matt] still has his original Game Boy from when he was a kid. He wanted to pull it out and play some of the classics but alas, the screen was broken and he couldn’t find a source for a drop-in replacement. In the end he ordered a used unit and pulled the screen from that one. This left him with a pile of leftover Game Boy parts which turned into a Raspberry Pi case project.

Since the RPi doesn’t have a power switch he thought it would be pretty neat to incorporate the Game Boy power switch. He was able to cut out one section of the original PCB that included the switch and one mounting hole. This kept the switch aligned with the case and gave him some pads to solder the incoming USB cable and the jumper wires to the RPi board. In the image above the power LED is on. He mentions that there was an issue with that circuit; the voltage drop across the LED was messing up the feed to the Pi so it’s disabled for now.

We’ve embedded a couple of images of everything inside the case after the break. If you’re a fan of this hack you should also take a look at the Game Boy hard drive enclosure which uses the same pixel art printed on paper effect for the screen window.

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