The octagonal wooden box described in the project. On the left, outer surface of the box is shown, with "Say Friend And Come In" inscription, as well as a few draings (presumably from Lord of The Rings) and two metallic color stars that happen to serve as capacitative sensor electrodes. On the right, underside of the lid is shown, with all the electronics involved glued into CNC-machined channels.

Say Friend And Have This Box Open For You

March 28, 2022 by Arya Voronova 13 Comments

Handcrafted gifts are special, and this one’s no exception. [John Pender] made a Tolkien-inspired box for his son and shared the details with us on Hackaday.io. This one-of-a-kind handcrafted box fulfills one role and does it perfectly – just like with the Doors of Durin, you have to say ‘friend’ in Elvish, and the box shall unlock for you.

This box, carefully engraved and with attention paid to its surface finish, stands on its own as a gift. However, with the voice recognition function, it’s a project complicated enough to cover quite a few fields at once – woodworking, electronics, and software. The electronics are laid out in CNC-machined channels, and LED strips illuminate the “Say Friend And Come In” inscriptions once the box is ready to listen. If you’re wondering how the unlocking process works, the video embedded below shows it all.

Two solenoids keep the lid locked, and in its center is a Pi Zero, the brains of the operation. With small batteries and a power-hungry board, power management is a bit intricate. Two capacitive sensors and a small power management device are always powered up. When both of the sensors are touched, a power switch module from Pololu wakes the Pi up. It, in turn, takes its sweet time, as fully-fledged Linux boards do, and lights up the LED strip once it’s listening.

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Putting The RP2040 On A Stamp

March 28, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 22 Comments

In the electronics world, a little one-inch square board with castellated edges allows a lot of circuitry to be easily added in a small surface area. You can grab a prepopulated module, throw it onto your PCB of choice, and save yourself a lot of time routing and soldering. This tiny Raspberry Pi 2040 module from [SolderParty] ticks all those boxes.

With all 30 GPIO broken out, 8MB of onboard flash, and a NeoPixel onboard, you have plenty to play with on top of the already impressive specs of the RPi2040. Gone are the days of in-circuit programmers, and it uses a UF2 bootloader to make it easy B to transfer new images over USB. Rust, MicroPython, Arduino, and the PicoSDK are all development options for code. All the KiCad files, BOM, schematics, and firmware are up on GitHub under a CERN license for your perusal pleasure. They’ve helpfully included footprints as well as a reference carrier board design.

It is a handy little project that might be good to keep in mind or just use as a reference design for your efforts. We have a good overview of the RPi2040 from an STM perspective. If you’re curious about what you could even use this little stamp for, why not driving an HDMI signal?

Tiny Pinball Is As Cute As Pi

March 27, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 8 Comments

Pinball machines are large, complex, and heavy boxes of joy and delight. However, when you don’t have the money or space for one, you have to make your own mini Raspberry Pi-powered one.

With access to a local makerspace and a bit of extra free time, [Chris Dalke] had plans to capture the flavor of a full-scale pinball machine in a small package. Laser-cut Baltic birch forms the enclosure, and a screen makes up the playing field rather than a physical ball. An Arduino Uno handles the three buttons, the four LED matrixes, and a solenoid for haptic feedback, communicating

with the Pi via serial. Unfortunately, even with a relatively decent

volume inside, it is still a tight squeeze.

Rather than use an off-the-shelf pinball game, [Chris] wrote his own in C using raylib and raygui, two handy libraries that can be included in the project quickly. SQLLite3 writes high scores out to disk. All in all, an inspiring project that has a very high level of polish.

If you’re looking for a tiny pinball machine but want more of the classic pinball feel, why not look at this scale pinball machine?

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A Macintosh-inspired desk ornament, next to a sceenshot of a classic Macintosh computer desktop

‘Desk Accessory’ Pays Homage To Macintosh

March 21, 2022 by Chris Wilkinson 9 Comments

The retrocomputing community are experts at keeping vintage Apple iron running, but if you’re looking for a simpler way to pay homage to the original Mac, check out this Raspberry Pi powered ‘desk accessory’ by [John Calhoun], fittingly called ‘SystemSix’.

Housed inside a delightfully Mac-shaped piece of laser-cut acrylic, SystemSix is powered by as Raspberry Pi 3, with the graphics displayed on a sizeable 5.83″ e-ink panel. While it resembles a kind of retro-futuristic take on the ‘classic’ Macintosh, SystemSix is the illusion of a fully interactive computer. While non-interactive, the fake desktop is every bit as charming as a real Macintosh display, albeit scaled down. The desktop updates automatically with new information, and presently includes a calendar, dithered lunar phase graphic, and a local weather report.

Clearly calling it a ‘desk accessory’ is a neat play on words. The original Macintosh implemented simple desk accessory programs, such as the calculator and alarm clock, that could run alongside the main application in memory. This was the only way to run more than one application on the Macintosh, before MultiFinder added rudimentary cooperative multitasking in 1987. As such, SystemSix is a functional, stylish and quite literal ‘desk accessory’.

[John] has the full project write-up over on GitHub, and goes into great detail about maintaining the Macintosh aesthetic. For example, the lunar phase graphic uses ‘Atkinson’ dithering. This technique was pioneered by Apple programmer Bill Atkinson, the author of MacPaint and the QuickDraw toolbox on the original Macintosh (and later, Hypercard).

And in case you were wondering – yes, this is the [John Calhoun], who programmed Glider for Macintosh. Now recently retired from Apple, we’re really excited to see what other Macintosh-inspired creations he comes up with. Maybe he will come back around to his Mac-powered MAME cabinets that we covered all the way back in 2005. Or perhaps a sleeper battlestation, like the iMac G4 lampshade that was upgraded with an M1 processor.

Cluster Your Pi Zeros In Style With 3D Printed Cray-1

March 21, 2022 by Tom Nardi 36 Comments

From a performance standpoint we know building a homebrew Raspberry Pi cluster doesn’t make a lot of sense, as even a fairly run of the mill desktop x86 machine is sure to run circles around it. That said, there’s an argument to be made that rigging up a dozen little Linux boards gives you a compact and affordable playground to experiment with things like parallel computing and load balancing. Is it a perfect argument? Not really. But if you’re anything like us, the whole thing starts making a lot more sense when you realize your cluster of Pi Zeros can be built to look like the iconic Cray-1 supercomputer.

This clever 3D printed enclosure comes from [Kevin McAleer], who says he was looking to learn more about deploying software using Ansible, Docker, Flask, and other modern frameworks with fancy sounding names. After somehow managing to purchase a dozen Raspberry Pi Zero 2s, he needed a way to keep them all in a tidy package. Beyond looking fantastically cool, the symmetrical design of the Cray-1 allowed him to design his miniature version in such a way that each individual wedge is made up of the same identical set of 3D printed parts.

In the video after the break, [Kevin] explains some of the variations the design went through. We appreciate his initial goal of making it so you didn’t need any additional hardware to assemble the thing, but in the end you’ll need to pick up some M2.5 standoffs and matching screws if you want to build one yourself. We particularly like how you can hide all the USB power cables inside the lower “cushion” area with the help of some 90-degree cables, leaving the center core open.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody build their own tiny Cray-1. A particularly dedicated hacker built his own 1/10th scale replica of the 1970s supercomputer powered by an FPGA back in 2010, and eventually got to the point of trying to boot original software on it.

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ApocaPi Now Is A Cyberdeck For What Comes After

March 15, 2022 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

The end of the world seems closer now than ever before, even in the 1980s. But you, dear Hackaday reader, will want more than just a bug-out bag full of C-rations and waterproof matches. You will need the technological version of a bug-out bag — a mil-spec-esque cyberdeck, which is exactly what [hammerandhandmi] is in the middle of perfecting.

That’s not some kind of fancy cake pan — it’s a Pelican 1170 case lined with conductive foil tape. You see, [hammerandhandmi] has various reasons not elaborated upon for doing this, including EMP protection. Inside is an 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4B donning a Pi Juice UPS HAT and sipping from a fancy power supply. The main charging source for the old Mac book battery is solar via a large panel that’s external to cyberdeck. A smaller, secondary panel lives inside for backup purposes. There’s also an MPPT charge controller for to support the different battery chemistries. [hammerandhandmi] chose the Pelican 1170 because they need to mount it to the back of an LC2 Alice rucksack frame. The 1170 is wider than the popular 1150, and is in fact almost the exact width of the LC2 frame.

The point of this build is to maintain power for the purpose of preserving knowledge — all that stuff we’ll need to rebuild humanity. There will be much information available up via FOSS offline browser Kiwix, plus an atlas, some military field manuals, a lot of survival info, all of the books Project Gutenberg has to offer, plus a handful of movies and a few game ROMs so [hammerandhandmi] can live out the rest of their days in what is hopefully some kind of solar punk utopia.

Provided there’s enough time to implement it all, [hammerandhandmi] plans to add an SDR with antenna hookup, GPS unit, 12 V port, a couple of SSDs, a powered USB hub, and maybe an RFID reader. But the coolest part is that they ultimately want to connect everything up to a HUD mounted in a ballistic helmet. See? The apocalypse could be awesome. It’s up to us!

We often see cyberdecks with mechanical keyboards, like this cherry Pi number. But the salvaged keeb from a 1989 Compaq laptop might be just as future-proof.

Rugged Cyberdeck Makes The Case For Keeping Things Water-Tight

March 12, 2022 by Kristina Panos 15 Comments

Many people build cyberdecks just for the heck of it, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. On the other hand, [cyzoonic]’s rugged ‘deck is a bit more purpose-built. In this instance, the purpose is software-defined radio.

Underneath those sweet custom-cut panels lies a Raspberry Pi 3B and a BOM full of parts that can be had on Ali Express. There’s also an ESP32 that takes input from the keypad plus the 5 buttons that control the display, and the two potentiometers. [cyzoonic] can dial in frequencies with the knobs, or by punching in digits on the keypad.

One of the problems with using a Pelican case is this — how do you install any type of panel without compromising the case’s water-tightness? [cyzoonic] mentions in the comments that Pelican makes a bracket that allows for panels and things to be screwed down without breaching the case. But in this case, [cyzoonic] made their own brackets in a similar fashion.

Another problem with Pelican cases (and cyberdecks in general that are built into hinged boxen) is something that doesn’t get enough attention: typing ergonomics. Personally, we take comfortable and ergonomic typing fairly seriously, and would love to see a cyberdeck that speaks to this issue.

In the meantime, we’ll have to take [cyzoonic]’s word that while it’s not terribly comfortable to type with the ‘deck on a tabletop, sitting on the floor hunched over the thing like a true hacker is much better. This is a work in progress (at least the IO project anyway), so we’ll be tuning back in occasionally to see if any more instructions appear.

Speaking of ergonomic cyberdecks, here’s the one that drew the line in the sand for us — [Tinfoil_Haberdashery]’s lovely ErgoDox-based NUC machine.