How fast can a Raspberry Pi Pico go? Well, apparently the answer is 1 GHz if you freeze it and give it over twice the voltage it normally gets. Oh, one catch. After a few minutes, the chip will fry itself.
That’s the results reported by [David] who took a Peltier cooler and a pretty serious over-voltage. The dhrystone scores went from around 200 to over 1100. Of course, there’s that pesky early death to worry about, so you probably won’t want to try this at home.
Even before the chip bites the dust, there are other problems to address. For example, once you get much over 250 MHz, the Pico’s SPI flash can’t keep up, so all the software you want to run has to be put in RAM first. You’ll also want to do some poking at the system clock parameters.
Honestly, we enjoy overclocking PCs or just about anything else. The good news is if you fry a Pico, it won’t make a sizable dent in your wallet. It is also a fun way to learn a bit more about the internals of the processor. According to [David], the cooler took the part to -40 C. We wonder how it would fare in a bath of LN2?
The Raspberry Pi Pico is what you might call the board of the moment, thanks to its combination of affordability, features, and continued availability during the component shortage. We have seen plenty of great projects using it, and the latest to float past is [todbot]’s PicoStepSeq, an extremely compact MIDI sequencer.
All the components are mounted on a PCB, with the sequencer’s eight steps selected by a row of buttons with integrated LEDs. The interface is via an SSD1306 OLED, and there is also a rotary encoder. Software comes courtesy of CircuitPython, and the output is delivered via a 3.5 mm TRS jack. Finally the whole is wrapped in a 3D printed enclosure.
The result is a sequencer that could almost be a product in its own right, and we think anyone whose interests lie in electronic music should find straightforward enough to build. All the files and information required to build your own can be found in the linked repository, and he’s placed a Tweet with a video online which we’ve embedded below the break.
We’ve seen plenty of environmental monitoring setups here on Hackaday — wireless sensors dotted around the house, all uploading their temperature and humidity data to a central server hidden away in some closet. The system put together by [Andy] from Workshopshed is much the same, except this time the server has been designed to be as bright and bold as possible.
The use of Mosquitto, InfluxDB, Node Red, and Grafana (M.I.N.G) made [Andy] think of Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon, which in turn inspired the enclosure that holds the Raspberry Pi, hard drive, and power supply. Some 3D printed details help sell the look, and painted metal mesh panels make sure there’s plenty of airflow.
While the server is certainly eye-catching, the sensors themselves are also worth a close look. You might expect the sensors to be based on some member of the ESP family, but in this case, [Andy] has opted to go with the Raspberry Pi Pico. As this project pre-dates the release of the wireless variant of the board, he had to add on an ESP-01 for communications as well as the DTH11 temperature and humidity sensor.
For power each sensor includes a 1200 mAh pouch cell and a Pimoroni LiPo SHIM, though he does note working with the Pico’s energy saving modes posed something of a challenge. A perfboard holds all the components together, and the whole thing fits into an understated 3D printed enclosure.
[Gregory] had a TV that didn’t support automatically turning on when the power was applied. This is frustrating when you like to leave devices switched hard off when not in use to save on standby energy draw. Thus, there needed to be a way to send the screen an on signal when his multi-monitor setup was powered on.
A simple circuit paired with a Pi Pico was pressed into service. The Pico flashes an IR LED, squirting out the requisite code to tell the TCL branded TV to switch on. [Gregory] figured out the codes by using an Arduino to read the output of the TV’s remote with an IR sensor. The hook here is the code is written in MicroPython, using IR libraries from [Peter Hinch].
Now, when [Gregory] powers up his rig, the IR sender will trigger the TV to switch on. It’s a little frustrating that the auto-on function wasn’t available in the factory, but regardless, now everything’s working as it should. If you want to do this in reverse, consider building a TV-B-Gone or a silencer for the boomboxes used by dancing grandmas!
It’s not immediately clear to us why one would need a mouse for the original PlayStation (though we’re sure there’s no shortage of folks eager to jump down into the comments and tell us), but if you ever desire adding improved pointing capabilities to the nearly three decade old console, this project from [Vojtěch Salajka] is certainly one to keep an eye on.
The aptly named “USB to PlayStation Mouse” project does exactly what it sounds like — adapts a generic USB mouse into an input device for Sony’s classic console. Putting one together requires a Raspberry Pi Pico, a 5 V DC-DC USB boost module with female USB-A connector, and a sacrificial controller or peripheral to provide the cable and proprietary connector.
With the hardware assembled per the simple wiring diagram, you just plug the Pico into your computer and copy over the firmware file. [Vojtěch] notes that you’ll need to unplug the mouse before attempting to upload the firmware, presumably because the data pins on the two USB ports have been tied together.
Don’t worry about having to find some obscure title to try out your new peripheral either, [Vojtěch] says the mouse works in the system’s main menu if you boot it without a disc in the drive. Now all you need is a few Raspberry Pi Pico PlayStation Memory Cards to complete the whole set.
In terms of units sold, it’s no secret that the GameCube was one of Nintendo’s poorest performing home consoles. You could argue increased competition meant sales of the quirky little machine were destined to fall short of the system’s legendary predecessors, but that didn’t keep the Wii from outselling it by a factor of five a few years later. Still, enough incredible games were released for the GameCube that the system still enjoys a considerable fanbase.
Now, with the release of PicoBoot by [webhdx], we suspect the GameCube is about to gain a whole new generation of fans. With just a Raspberry Pi Pico, some jumper wires, and a widely available third-party SD card adapter, this open source project bypasses the console’s original BIOS so it can boot directly into whatever homebrew application the user selects. With how cheap and easy to perform this modification is, we wouldn’t be surprised if it kicked off something of a renaissance for GameCube homebrew development.
Installation takes just five wires.
In the video after the break, [Tito] of Macho Nacho Productionsprovides a rundown of this new project, including a fantastic step-by-step installation guide that covers everything from soldering the jumper wires to the console’s motherboard to getting the firmware installed on the Pico. He then demonstrates booting the console into various community developed front-ends and tools, showing just how versatile the modification is. While some will see this as little more than an easier way to run bootleg games, we can’t help but be excited about what the future holds now that getting your own code to run on the system is so easy.
Alright, maybe it’s not so easy. To solder on the five wires that will eventually snake their way to the GPIO pins of the Pi Pico, you’ll need to strip the console all the way down to the main board. That wouldn’t be too bad itself, but unfortunately to reach two of the connections you’ll need to remove the system’s massive heatsink — which means you’ll need to clean up the old sticky thermal pads and apply new ones if you don’t want your GameCube to turn into a GameCrisp. It’s nothing that would scare off the average Hackaday reader, but it might give pause to those less handy with an iron.
The release of PicoBoot comes hot on the heels of the revelation that the Raspberry Pi Pico can be used not only as an N64 flash cart but as a supercharged PlayStation Memory Card. These projects would all be significantly improved with a custom RP2040 board, and no doubt that’s the direction they’ll eventually head, but it’s hard not to be impressed by what the low-cost microcontroller development board is capable of in its native form. Especially now that it comes in WiFi flavor.
It’s almost hard to believe these days, what with modern game consoles packing terabytes of internal storage, but there was a time when the totality of your gaming career would be stored on an external memory card that held just a few megabytes of save data. Of course, before that you had to write down a sequence of random letters and numbers to pick up where you left off, but that’s a story for another day.
While the memory card concept might be quaint to the modern gamer, its modular nature does provide the hacker with some interesting avenues to explore. For example, take a look at the very impressive PicoMemcard project from [Daniele Giuliani]. Hardware wise, it doesn’t get much simpler than this. You just take the PCB from a cheap (or dead) PlayStation memory card, and solder seven jumpers to the edge connector contacts so you can plug them into the Pico. Then you’ve just got to upload the firmware to the Pico, and you’re done. Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Pico Replaces PlayStation Memory Card”→
