Raspberry Pi Used As A Squeezebox Server

December 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

rpi-squeezebox-server

[Jacken] loves his lossless audio and because of that he’s long been a fan of Squeezebox. It makes streaming the high-bitrate files possible. But after Logitech acquired the company he feels they’ve made some choices which has driven the platform into the ground. But there is hope. He figured out how to use a Raspberry Pi as a Squeezebox server so that he can keep on using his client devices and posted details about the RPi’s performance while serving high-quality audio.

First the bad news: the RPi board doesn’t have the horsepower necessary to downsample on the fly. He even tried overclocking but that didn’t really help. The good news is that this issue only affects older Squeezebox clients (he had the issue with V3) and only when playing tracks that are much higher quality than a CD (24-bit at 88.2Khz). He has no problem streaming those files to devices that can play them, and can even stream multiple files at once without any issues.

You can install the Sqeezebox server on your own Raspberry Pi by following this guide.

FireHero: Raspberry Pi Controlled Pyrotechnics

December 22, 2012 by Eric Evenchick 24 Comments

To put on a live pyrotechnic show at a music festival, [Chris] built the FireHero 3. The result is remotely controlled flames shooting up to 100 feet in the air.

The system is controlled by a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino. A server runs on the Pi and allows a remote computer to control the system. The Pi sends commands over serial to the Arduino, which switches solid state relays that actuate the valves.

There’s also some built in safety features: the system won’t boot unless you have the right key and RFID tag, and there are pressure transducers and temperature sensors to ensure the system is operating safely. A CO2 actuated valve can quickly stop fuel flow in an emergency.

Vaporized propane creates the fireballs. The vapor is created by heating the supply tank in a hot water bath. An accumulation tank stores the vapor and custom built manifolds distribute it to the various flame cannons. At each cannon, a silicon nitride hot surface igniter (HSI) is used to ignite the flames once the valve is opened.

After the break, watch a video the the FireHero making some flames.

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Raspberry Pi Laptop Is Just A Little Too Big For A Pocket

December 21, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

Over on the Parts People blog, [Nathan] created his own Raspberry Pi laptop. It’s got all the bells and whistles, including a keyboard, trackpad, battery, and even a 3D printed case.

Of course [Nathan]’s laptop contains a Raspi, but the other included parts are where this palmtop computer is turned into something useful. For powering the Pi and 3.5″ composite LCD, [Nathan] took apart the battery pack from an old Dell laptop. By throwing out the bits of plastic surrounding these rechargeable cells and reusing the battery connector, [Nathan] was able to power the Pi, and all the peripherals for 10 hours.

Also included in [Nathan]’s Raspi palmtop is a 64 GB SSD connected to the powered USB hub. This, along with the 4 GB boot SD card, provides more than enough storage for listening to a music library, or even watching a few TV shows on the 3.5″ screen,

Custom MOTD For The Raspberry Pi

December 20, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

motd

With so many uses for a Raspberry Pi in a headless configuration – especially with the impending release of the Raspi Model A – we’re surprised it has taken so long for someone to send in a way to create a custom message of the day that is displayed whenever you SSH into everyone’s favorite Linux board.

A MOTD is used by servers to display messages to new users, or simply system information for server admins. It’s a simple text file stored in /etc/motd, but with some proper beardly Unix wizardry it’s possible to display uptime, free memory, and even the weather wherever the Raspi is located.

[yanewby] over on the Raspberry Pi forums created a nice little MOTD that grabs weather data from the Internet and displays it alongside an ASCII rendering of the Raspberry Pi logo. Of course like everything in Unix, this MOTD can be modified to do just about anything, from checking your Twitter to sending a text message to your phone.

Manuel The Scottish Moose Speaks Your Tweets

December 19, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

The folks over at Torchbox needed a Christmas card this year. Previously, the most poplar holiday card was a web page that gave their visitors a chance to activate a ‘snow machine’ and spray confetti on a random employee, all while being streamed online. They wanted to replicate this bridge between virtual and real life interactions this year, and Manuel the talking moose was born.

Manuel needed a personality and interaction from random people on the Internet so the Torchbox team decided to make the fake moose head speak tweets in real-time with the help of a Raspberry Pi. The code running on the Raspi gets tweets with a #tbxmoose hashtag, sends that through a node.js script, and finally sent to the Festival speech synthesis system.

A few modifications needed to be done to Manuel before he was presented to the Internet. His jaw was chopped in half and a servo and animatronic controller were added for a proper presentation on Torchbox’s stream of Manuel’s random musings.

Using Arcade Monitors With The Raspberry Pi

December 17, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

mame

Along with the growing popularity of the Raspberry Pi, we’ve also seen a related uptick in MAME arcade cabinet builds. Putting this $35 computer in an arcade cabinet makes a lot of sense, but connecting it to one of the monitors found in old arcade cabinets is a bit of a pain. Luckily, [Celso] figured out how to connect a Raspi to one of these 15kHz RGB monitors, making for a much more accurate emulation of old arcade classics.

The Raspi only has two video outputs – an HDMI port and an RCA composite jack. The old arcade CRTs have an RGB input, so directly connecting a Raspi to one of these CRTs is a no-go.

The solution comes from two converters: one to convert the HDMI output to VGA, and another video downscaler that takes the 31kHz VGA signal and translates it into a 15kHz RGB signal. [Celso] settled on the GBS-8100 video converter, a rather uncommon piece of kit that can fortunately be found on a few Chinese eBay auctions.

After connecting the old arcade cabinet power supply to the Pi, hooking up an audio amp, and converting the controls to USB, [Celso] has a very accurate MAME machine.

Raspberry Pi Used To Automate A Dimmable Light Bulb

December 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

raspberry-pi-controlled-dimmer

[Stephen] took the safe route when getting his Raspberry Pi to dim an AC light bulb. He didn’t roll his own outlet box with a mains-rated relay inside, going with a mechanical connection instead of electrical. By attaching a servo motor to the dimmer knob the RPi can adjust the light level without risk of electric shock.

He is using the ServoBlaster package to drive the servo motor with the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins. That’s all fine and good by itself, but he went the extra mile and designed a few different levels of functionality around the pairing. The motivation behind the hack was to build a sunrise clock that had a lot of power when it comes to luminosity. But he also plied the RPi’s networking features to serve up a web-based control. It has a slider to set the light level, as well as breath (like a slow fade) and flash features.

The servo is a bit noisy when moving quickly, but the sunrise alarm takes 30 minutes so the gears don’t really make any noise at all. Check it out in the clip after the break.

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