Clay is a shapeless raw material that’s waiting to be turned into awesomeness by your creativity. So is the Raspberry Pi. [Dorison Hugo] brought the two together in his artfully crafted SNES micro – a tiny retro gaming console sculpted from clay.
Raspberry Pi Zero112 Articles
Game Pie Advance Brings Retro Gaming To Your Fingertips
We love our Game Boy and RetroPie mods here at Hackaday because the Raspberry Pi Zero has made it easier than ever to carry a pocket full of classic games. [Ed Mandy] continues this great tradition by turning a matte black Game Boy Advance into a RetroPie handheld.
Details are scant on how [Mandy] built his Game Pi Advance, but we can glean a few details from the blog post and video. A Raspberry Pi Zero running RetroPie appears to be piggybacking on a custom PCB that slots neatly into the GBA case. This provides easy access to the Pi Zero’s USB and micro HDMI via the cartridge slot to connect to an external screen, as well as a second controller to get some co-op NES and SNES action on. It’s worth noting here that [Mandy] has foregone adding X and Y buttons in the current version.
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Hackaday Links: August 21, 2016
Are you in New York? What are you doing this week? Hackaday is having a party on Wednesday evening. come on out!
How about a pub in Cambridge? Hackaday and Tindie will be there too, on Wednesday evening. It’s a bring-a-hack, so bring a hack and enjoy the company of your fellow nerds. If this goes late enough we can have a trans-Atlantic Hackaday meetup.
Portable emulation machines are all the rage, and [Pierre] built one based on the Raspberry Pi Zero. It’s small, looks surprisingly comfortable to hold, and is apparently it’s fairly inexpensive to build your own.
For the last year or so, the Raspberry Pi Zero has existed. This came as a surprise to many who couldn’t buy a Raspberry Pi Zero. In other news, Ferraris don’t exist, and neither do Faberge egg omelets. Now, the Raspberry Pi shortage is officially over. They’re in stock everywhere, and we can finally stop listening to people who call the Pi Zero a marketing ploy.
No Starch Press is having another Humble Bundle. Pay what you want, and you get some coding books. They have Python, Haskell, and R, because no one should ever have to use SPSS.
[Reg] wrote in to tell us about something interesting he found while cruising eBay. The used and surplus market is awash in Siemens MC45/MC46 cellular modem modules. They’re a complete GSM ‘cellular modem engine’, with an AT command set, and cost about $10 each. Interfacing them with a board requires only two (strange) connectors, SIM and SD card sockets, and a few traces to through-hole pads. Anyone up for a challenge? A breakout board for this cellular modem could be very useful, should someone find a box full of these modules in a surplus shop.
On this page, about halfway down the page, is an LCD driver board. It turns a video signal into something a small, VGA resolution LCD will understand. This driver board is unique because it is completely hand-made. This is one of those small miracles of a soldering iron and copper clad board. If anyone out there is able to recognize these parts, I’d love for you to attempt an explanation in the comments.
A few weeks ago, the RTL8710 WiFi module showed up on the usual online marketplaces. Initially, we thought it was a competitor to the ever-popular ESP8266, offering a small microcontroller, WiFi, and a bunch of useful output pins. A module based on the RTL8710, the RTL-00, is much more than a competitor. It’s pinout compatible with the ESP8266. This module can be swapped into a project in place of the ESP-12, probably the most popular version of the ESP8266. This is genius, and opens the door to a lot of experimentation with the RTL8710.
Hackaday Prize Entry: Solar WiFi Rover Roves At Night
[TK] has a stretch goal for his RC car project — enabling it to recharge on solar power during the day and roam around under remote Internet control at night. It’s like a miniature, backyard version of NASA’s Curiosity rover.
Right now, he’s gotten a Raspberry Pi Zero and a camera on board, and has them controlling the robot over WiFi. He looks like he’s having a great time piloting it around his house. Check out the video down below for (crashy) remote-controlled operation.
We can’t wait to see if solar power is remotely possible (tee-hee!) as an option for this vehicle. The eventual plan to connect it via 3G cellular modem is still off in the future, and will probably demand more of the smarts of the Raspberry Pi than at present. But we love the idea of a long-running autonomous vehicle, so we’re pulling for you, [TK]!
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Another Small Linux Computer With Pi In Its Name
Since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi, the embedded Linux scene has been rocked by well supported hardware that is produced in quantity, a company that won’t go out of business in six months, and a huge user base. Yes, there are a few small problems with the Raspberry Pi and its foundation – some stuff is still closed source, the Foundation itself plays things close to their chests, and there are some weird binary blobs somebody will eventually reverse engineer. Viewed against the competition, though, nothing else compares.
Here’s the NanoPi Neo, the latest quad-core Allwinner board from a company in China you’ve never heard of.
The NanoPi Neo is someone’s answer to the Raspberry Pi Zero, the very small and very cheap single board Linux computer whose out-of-stock percentage has led some to claim it’s completely fake and a media conspiracy. The NanoPi Zero features an Allwinner H3 quad-core Cortex-A7 running at 1.2 GHz, 256MB RAM, with a 512MB version being released shortly. Unlike the Raspberry Pi Zero, the NanoPi Neo features a 10/100 Ethernet port. No, it does not have PoE.
As with anything comparing itself to the Raspberry Pi Zero, only two things are important: size and price. The NanoPi Neo is a mere 40mm square, compared to the 65x30mm measurements of the Pi Zero. The NanoPi Neo is available for $7.99, with $5 shipping to the US. Yes, for just three dollars more than a Pi Zero with shipping, you get a poorly supported Linux board. What a time to be alive.
If you’re looking for another wonderful tale of what happens with cheap, powerful ARM chips and contract manufacturers in China, check out my review of the Pine64.
Ikea Projection Lamp Makeover Adds LED Matrix And Raspberry Pi Zero
If you’re like us, it’s hard to walk through an Ikea without mentally hacking everything there into something else. The salad bowl? Parabolic antenna. Drawer slides? Linear motion rails. Storage containers? Etching tank. We admit that we still haven’t figured out what to do with that 1,000-pack of tea lights.
[Alain Mauer] pulled off an Ikea hack that we’ve always dreamed about. In particular, he took the Sprida projector lamp and wedged an 8×8 LED matrix and Raspberry Pi Zero into it.
The lamp in question is essentially a slide projector for kids. Before [Alain] got to it, it had an LED in the back, a mount for a slide in the middle, and a focusing lens on the front. His mod is simplicity itself: remove the LED and transparency, and place the LED matrix in the focal plane where the slide used to be. Reverse images on the LED in software to compensate for the lens, and you’re done.
The video says “Raspberry Pi Zero with WiFi” and the project title promises “IoT”, but we don’t see the WiFi in the build. We’re guessing that [Alain] will get around to it — it’s easily doable. (Doh! There’s a tiny USB WiFi dongle providing the obligatory wireless connection.) Anyway, the point is the projection, and we love it, and we’d be lying if we said it didn’t make us think about RGB matrices.
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Hackaday Prize Entry: Raspberry Pi Zeros And Drones
How do you get eyeballs on a blog post? Put Raspberry Pi Zero in the headline. How do you get even more eyeballs? Put the word drone in there too. Lucky for us, there’s one very special project in the Hackaday Prize that combines both. It’s the Pi0drone from [Victor], and it’s exactly what it looks like: a flying Raspberry Pi Zero.
[Victor] has been working on the PXFmini, a ‘shield’ or ‘hat’ for the Raspberry Pi that integrates a barometer, IMU, and a few PWM outputs into a very small form factor that is just a shade larger than the Raspberry Pi Zero itself. It comes with standard connector ports for UART and I2C to attach GPS and on screen display for FPV flying.
Of course, there are dozens of flight controllers for drones and quads out there, but very few are running Linux, and even fewer platforms are as well supported as the Raspberry Pi. To leverage this, [Victor] is running Dronecode on the Pi for mission planning, real autopilot, and everything else that turns a remote controlled quadcopter into a proper drone. It works, and it’s flying, and you can check out the video proof below.
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