raspberry pi

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A photo of the PiStorm68K circuit board

PiStorm68K Offers Supercharged Retro Amiga Experience

January 6, 2026 by 10 Comments

[AmiCube] has announced their new PiStorm68K special edition MiniMig accelerator board. This board was developed to replace the 68000 CPU in a MiniMig — a recreation of the original Amiga chipset in an FPGA allowing a real genuine 68000 CPU to operate.

The PiStorm68K itself can host a real genuine 68000 CPU but it can also host various Raspberry Pi models which can do emulation of a 68000. So if you combine a PiStorm68K with a MiniMig you can, at your option, boot into an emulated environment with massively increased performance, or you can boot into an original environment, with its reliable and charming sluggishness.

In the introduction video below, [AmiCube] uses the SYSINFO utility software to compare the CPU speed when using emulation (1531 MIPS) versus the original (4.47 MIPS), where MIPS means Millions of Instructions Per Second. As you can see the 68000 emulated by the Raspberry Pi is way faster than the original. The Raspberry Pi also emulates a floating-point unit (FPU) which the original doesn’t include and a memory management unit (MMU) which isn’t used.

If you’re interested in old Amiga tech you might also like to read about Chip Swap Fixes A Dead Amiga 600 or The Many-Sprites Interpretation Of Amiga Mechanics.

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Hands On WIth The Raspberry Pi Compute Module Zero

January 5, 2026 by 34 Comments

We are all familiar enough by now with the succession of boards that have come from Raspberry Pi in Cambridge over the years, and when a new one comes out we’ve got a pretty good idea what to expect. The “classic” Pi model B+ form factor has been copied widely by other manufacturers as has their current Compute Module. If you buy the real Raspberry Pi you know you’ll get a solid board with exceptionally good software support.

Every now and then though, they surprise us, with a board that follows a completely different path, which brings us to the one on our bench today. The Compute Module Zero packs the same quad-core RP3 system-on-chip (SoC) and Wi-Fi module as the Pi Zero 2 W with 512 MB of SDRAM onto a tiny 39 mm by 33 mm postage-stamp module. It’s a Pi, but not as you know it, so what is it useful for? Continue reading “Hands On WIth The Raspberry Pi Compute Module Zero” →

Raspberry Pi Gets Desktop Form Factor

December 28, 2025 by 26 Comments

Before the Raspberry Pi came out, one cheap and easy way to get GPIO on a computer with a real operating system was to manipulate the pins on an old parallel port, then most commonly used for printers. Luckily, as that port became obsolete we got the Raspberry Pi, which has the GPIO and a number of other advantages over huge desktop computers from the 90s and 00s as well. But if you really miss that form factor or as yearn for the days of the old parallel port, this build which puts a Raspberry Pi into a mini ITX desktop case is just the thing for you.

There are a few features that make this build more than just a curiosity. The most obvious is that the Pi actually has support for PCIe and includes a single PCIe x1 slot which could be used for anything from a powerful networking card to an NVMe to a GPU for parallel computing in largely the same way that any desktop computer might them. The Pi Compute Module 5 that this motherboard is designed for doesn’t provide power to the PCIe slots automatically though, but the power supply that can be installed in the case should provide power not only to the CM5 but to any peripherals or expansion cards, PCIe or otherwise, that you could think of to put in this machine.

Of course all the GPIO is also made easily accessible, and there are also pins for installing various hats on the motherboard easily as well. And with everything installed in a desktop form factor it also helps to improve the cable management and alleviate the rats-nest-of-wires problems that often come with Pi-based projects. There’s also some more information on the project’s Hackaday.io page. And, if you’re surprised that Raspberry Pis can use normal graphics cards now, make sure to take a look at this build from a few years ago that uses completely standard gaming GPUs on the Pi 5.

The Music Of The Sea

December 22, 2025 by 8 Comments

For how crucial whales have been for humanity, from their harvest for meat and oil to their future use of saving the world from a space probe, humans knew very little about them until surprisingly recently. Most people, even in Herman Melville’s time, considered whales to be fish, and it wasn’t until humans went looking for submarines in the mid-1900s that we started to understand the complexities of their songs. And you don’t have to be a submarine pilot to listen now, either; all you need is something like these homemade hydraphones.

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The Unusual Pi Boot Process Explained

December 21, 2025 by 26 Comments

If you’ve ever experimented with a microprocessor at the bare metal level, you’ll know that when it starts up, it will look at its program memory for something to do. On an old 8-bit machine, that program memory was usually an EPROM at the start of its address space, while on a PC, it would be the BIOS or UEFI firmware. This takes care of initialising the environment in both hardware and software, and then loading the program, OS, or whatever the processor does. The Raspberry Pi, though, isn’t like that, and [Patrick McCanna] is here to tell us why.

The Pi eschews bringing up its ARM core first. Instead, it has a GPU firmware that brings up the GPU. It’s this part of the chip that then initialises all peripherals and memory. Only then does it activate the ARM part of the chip. As he explains, this is because the original Pi chip, the BCM2835, is a set-top-box chip. It’s not an application processor at all, but a late-2000s GPU that happened to have an ARM core on a small part of its die, so the GPU wakes first, not the CPU. Even though the latest versions of the Pi have much more powerful Broadcom chips, this legacy of their ancestor remains. For most of us using the board it doesn’t matter much, but it’s interesting to know.

Fancy trying bare metal Pi programming? Give it a go. We’ve seen some practical projects that start at that level.

Instant Sketch Camera Is Like A Polaroid That Draws

November 28, 2025 by 19 Comments

These days, everyone’s got a million different devices that can take a passable photo. That’s not special anymore. A camera that draws what it sees, though? That’s kind of fun. That’s precisely what [Jens] has built—an instant sketch camera!

The sketch camera looks like a miniature drawing easel, holding a rectangular slip of paper not dissimilar in size to the Polaroid film of old. The 3D-printed frame rocks a Raspberry Pi controlling a simple pen plotter, using SG90 servos to position the drawing implement and trace out a drawing. So far, so simple. The real magic is in the image processing, which takes any old photo with the Pi camera and turns it into a sketch in the first place. This is achieved with the OpenCV image processing library, using an edge detection algorithm along with some additional filtering to do the job.

If you’ve ever wanted to take Polaroids that looked like sketches when you’re out on the go, this is a great way to do it. We’ve featured some other great plotter builds before, too, just few that are as compact and portable as this one. Video after the break.

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Damaged Pocket Computer Becomes Portable Linux Machine

November 28, 2025 by 43 Comments

The Sharp PC-G801 was an impressive little pocket computer when it debuted in 1988. However, in the year 2025, a Z80-compatible machine with just 8 kB of RAM is hardly much to get excited about. [shiura] decided to take one of these old machines and upgrade it into something more modern and useful.

The build maintains the best parts of the Sharp design — namely, the case and the keypad. The original circuit board has been entirely ripped out, and a custom PCB was designed to interface with the membrane keypad and host the new internals. [shiura] landed on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W to run the show. It’s a capable machine that runs Linux rather well and has wireless connectivity out of the box. It’s paired with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller that handles interfacing all the various parts of the original Sharp hardware. It also handles the connection to the 256×64 OLED display. The new setup can run in ESP32-only mode, where it acts as a classic RPN-style calculator. Alternatively, the Pi Zero can be powered up for a full-fat computing experience.

The result of this work is a great little cyberdeck that looks straight out of the 1980s, but with far more capability. We’ve seen a few of these old pocket computers pop up before, too.

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