Meet Cucumber, The Robot Dog

June 27, 2025 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Robots can look like all sorts of things, but they’re often more fun if you make them look like some kind of charming animal. That’s precisely what [Ananya], [Laurence] and [Shao] did when they built Cucumber the Robot Dog for their final project in the ECE 4760 class.

Cucumber is controllable over WiFi, which was simple enough to implement by virtue of the fact that it’s based around the Raspberry Pi Pico W. With its custom 3D-printed dog-like body, it’s able to move around on its four wheels driven by DC gear motors, and it can flex its limbs thanks to servos in its various joints. It’s able to follow someone with some autonomy thanks to its ultrasonic sensors, while it can also be driven around manually if so desired. To give it more animal qualities, it can also be posed, or commanded to bark, howl, or growl, with commands issued remotely via a web interface.

The level of sophistication is largely on the level of the robot dogs that were so popular in the early 2000s. One suspects it could be pretty decent at playing soccer, too, with the right hands behind the controls. Video after the break.

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Converting An E-Paper Photo Frame Into Weather Map

June 21, 2025 by John Elliot V 6 Comments

Here’s a great hack sent in to us from [Simon]. He uses an e-paper photo frame as a weather map!

By now you are probably aware of e-paper technology, which is very low power tech for displaying images. E-paper only uses energy when it changes its display, it doesn’t draw power to maintain a picture it has already rendered. The particular e-paper used in this example is fairly large (as e-paper goes) and supports color (not just black and white) which is why it’s expensive. For about US$100 you can get a 5.7″ 7-color EPD display with 600 x 448 pixels.

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Upgrading An Old Espresso Machine

June 14, 2025 by Maya Posch 25 Comments

The Francis! Francis! X1 espresso machine in its assembled state. (Credit: Samuel Leeuwenburg)

Recently, [Samuel Leeuwenburg] got his paws on a Francis! Francis! X1 (yes, that’s the name) espresso machine. This is the espresso machine that is mostly famous for having been in a lot of big TV shows in the 1990s. In the early 2000s, the X1 even became a pretty good espresso machine after the manufacturer did some more tinkering with it, including changing the boiler material, upgrading the pump, etc.

In the case of the second-hand, but rarely used, machine that [Samuel] got, the machine still looked pretty good, but its performance was pretty abysmal. After popping the machine open the boiler turned out to be pretty much full of scale. Rather than just cleaning it, the boiler was upgraded to a brass version for better heat retention and other perks.

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When Wireless MIDI Has Latency, A Hardwired Solution Saves The Day

June 7, 2025 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

[Moby Pixel] wanted to build a fun MIDI controller. In the end, he didn’t build it just once, but twice—with the aim of finding out which microcontroller was most fit for this musical purpose. Pitted against each other? The ESP32 and Raspberry Pi Pico.

The MIDI controller itself is quite fetching. It’s built with a 4 x 4 array of arcade buttons to act as triggers for MIDI notes or events. They’re assembled in a nice wooden case with a lovely graphic wrap on it. The buttons themselves are wired to a microcontroller, which is then responsible for sending MIDI data to other devices.

At this point, the project diverges. Originally, [Moby Pixel] set the device up to work with an ESP32 using wireless MIDI over Bluetooth. However, he soon found a problem. Musical performance is all about timing, and the ESP32 setup was struggling with intermittent latency spikes that would ruin the performance. Enter the Raspberry Pi Pico using MIDI over USB. The hardwired solution eliminated the latency problems and made the controller far more satisfying to use.

There may be solutions to the latency issue with the wireless ESP32 setup, be they in code, hardware configuration, or otherwise. But if you want to play with the most accuracy and the minimum fuss, you’ll probably prefer the hardwired setup.

Latency is a vibe killer in music as we’ve explored previously.

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The five picos on two breadboards and the results of image convolution.

PentaPico: A Pi Pico Cluster For Image Convolution

May 20, 2025 by John Elliot V 22 Comments

Here’s something fun. Our hacker [Willow Cunningham] has sent us a copy of their homework. This is their final project for the “ECE 574: Cluster Computing” course at the University of Maine, Orono.

It was enjoyable going through the process of having a good look at everything in this project. The project is a “cluster” of 5x Raspberry Pi Pico microcontrollers — with one head node as the leader and four compute nodes that work on tasks. The software for both types of node is written in C. The head node is connected to a workstation via USB 1.1 allowing the system to be controlled with a Python script.

The cluster is configured to process an embarrassingly parallel image convolution. The input image is copied into the head node via USB which then divvies it up and distributes it to n compute nodes via I²C, one node at a time. Results are given for n = {1,2,4} compute nodes.

It turns out that the work of distributing the data dwarfs the compute by three orders of magnitude. The result is that the whole system gets slower the more nodes we add. But we’re not going to hold that against anyone. This was a fascinating investigation and we were impressed by [Willow]’s technical chops. This was a complicated project with diverse hardware and software challenges and they’ve done a great job making it all work and in the best scientific tradition.

It was fun reading their journal in which they chronicled their progress and frustrations during the project. Their final report in IEEE format was created using LaTeX and Overleaf, at only six pages it is an easy and interesting read.

For anyone interested in cluster tech be sure to check out the 256-core RISC-V megacluster and a RISC-V supercluster for very low cost.

ClockworkPi Unveils New PicoCalc Handheld

March 14, 2025 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

Do you like scientific calculators? Don’t bother answering that question, you’re reading Hackaday so we already know the answer. We also know you’re a fan of building things yourself and open source, which makes us fairly sure you’ll be just as interested in the recently announced ClockworkPi PicoCalc as we are.

On the surface, it looks like a chunky scientific calculator, though on further inspection you’ll note it comes equipped with a QWERTY keyboard. But open up the case and what you’ve really got is an elaborate carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Pico. The PicoCalc supports all variants of the microcontroller, but realistically we can’t think of any reason that you wouldn’t just use the latest version.

With the MCU connected, you’ll have access to the PicoCalc’s 320×320 4-inch IPS screen, backlit I2C-connected keyboard, SD card slot, 8 MB PSRAM, and dual PWM speakers. Power is provided by a pair of 18650 cells (which you’ll need to supply on your own), and the board has the necessary circuitry to charge them up over USB-C.

Everything is housed in an injection molded case, but the project page says all the necessary CAD files will be eventually be released under the GPL v3 so you can 3D print or CNC your own enclosure. For now though, the only thing of note that seems to be in the PicoCalc GitHub repository is a PCB schematic.

The software side of things is a little less clear. The page mentions a BASIC interpreter, MP3 playback, and support for various programming languages, but we get the impression that’s just a list of stuff you can run on the Pi Pico. There are a few images that clearly show the PicoCalc actually being used as a calculator however, so there may be an official firmware yet to be revealed.

The PicoCalc kit is on sale now, and will set you back $75 USD — which actually includes a first-generation Pi Pico, on the off chance that you don’t already have a few laying around. We’ve been impressed with the previous offerings from ClockworkPi, so assuming this new kit maintains that same build quality, it seems like a fair enough price.

A Pi Pico Makes A Spectrum Laptop

December 23, 2024 by Jenny List 9 Comments

There are many retrocomputer emulation projects out there, and given the relative fragility of the original machines as they enter their fifth decade, emulation seems to be the most common way to play 8-bit games. It’s easy enough to load one on your modern computer, but there are plenty of hardware options, too. “The computer we’d have done anything for back in 1983” seems to be a phrase many of them bring to mind, but it’s so appropriate because they keep getting better. Take [Stormbytes1970]’s Pi Pico-powered Sinclair ZX Spectrum mini laptop (Spanish language, Google Translate link), for example. It’s a slightly chunky netbook that’s a ZX Spectrum, and it has a far better keyboard than the original.

On the PCB is the Pico, the power supply circuitry, an SD card, and a speaker. But it’s when the board is flipped over that the interesting stuff starts. In place of the squidgy rubber keyboard of yore, it has a proper keyboard,. We’re not entirely sure which switch it uses, but it appears to be a decent one, nevertheless. The enclosure is a slick 3D-printed sub-netbook for retro gaming on the go. Sadly, it won’t edit Hackaday, so we won’t be slipping one in the pack next time we go on the road, but we like it a lot.

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