YAPZH! (Yet Another Pi Zero Hub)

January 10, 2016 by Rud Merriam 22 Comments

You’d think just about all the permutations of adding a hub to the Raspberry Pi Zero were done. But you’d be wrong. [Daniel’s] approach is to put the Zero inside the existing case for the hub. The LogiLink hub used is in a nice metal case with mounting flanges on the side. It looks robust and not much like a typical consumer hub. This hack would serve well where the Zero and hub might take a few wacks.

It took some fiddling with the hub components but he made it work. The easy part was wiring the the power and USB test points on the Zero to the hub.

More challenging were the mechanical aspects to physically fit the Zero into the case. Four LEDs were removed since their only purpose was indicating if a cables were plugged into the hub. There are four electrolytic capacitors standing upright that occupied the space needed by the Pi. [Daniel] repositioned them to lie horizontally to provide room for the Zero.

With the Zero able to fit inside the case the next steps are to create mounting holes in the USB board and cut holes in the case to access the HDMI and USB ports and the SD card holder. Some finicky work with a Dremel provided the holes and the cutouts. Fortunately, the mounting holes on the Zero aligned with some open spaces on the USB board. If they don’t, some glue and standoffs might be sufficient.

The only aspect [Daniel] left for you to hack is access to the GPIO port. That would require another cutout to bring out a ribbon cable for controlling your world. After such a nicely detailed writeup with a plethora of pictures, he had to leave something for other hackers to do.

Raspberry Pi Zero – Programming Over USB

Raspberry Pi Zero – Turning The Pi Into A USB Gadget, Over USB

January 7, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 18 Comments

[gbaman] has figured out a simpler way to program the new Raspberry Pi Zero over USB without modifying the board. Why is this useful? One example which appealed to us was setting the Zero’s USB port up as a mass storage device. Imagine plugging in your Pi powered robot, dragging and dropping a Python script into the mass storage device that shows up, and pressing a button on the robot to run the new script. Pretty fancy for $5.00.

You can get the PI to emulate a whole range of devices from a USB MIDI controller to a simple USB serial interface. We’re excited to see what uses people come up with. Unfortunately the Pi Zero is still out of stock most everywhere as we wait for the next production run to finish. Though if you’ve got one, why not check out a few of our thoughts and experiences with the device!

[gbaman] based his work off the work done by [Dave-0] and others over at the Raspberry Pi forums. [LadyAda] also has a version of this hack, which we covered, that involves soldering a header to the pi and using a UART adapter.

[via Hacker News]

Turning The Pi Zero Into A USB Gadget

December 27, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 60 Comments

The Raspberry Pi Zero is limited, or so everyone says, and everyone is trying to cram a USB hub and WiFi adapter on this tiny, tiny board. One thing a lot of people haven’t realized is that the Raspberry Pi Zero comes with a USB OTG port, meaning it can function as a USB device rather than a USB host. This means the Raspi can become a serial device with just a USB cable, an Ethernet device, MIDI device, camera, or just about anything else you can plug into a USB port. Adafruit has your back with a tutorial for using the USB OTG port as a serial and Ethernet interface, and the possible applications are extremely interesting.

The only requirement for using the USB OTG port for device applications is an update to the kernel. This is easily installed by dumping a few files on an SD card and a employing bit of command line wizardry. The simplest example is setting up the Pi Zero as a USB serial device, allowing anyone to log into a serial console on the Pi with just a USB cable.

A slightly more interesting application is setting up the Pi as an Ethernet gadget. This effectively tunnels all the networking on the Pi Zero through a USB cable and a separate computer. The instructions are extremely OS-specific, but the end result is the same: you can apt-get on a Pi Zero to your heart’s desire with a new kernel loaded onto the SD card and a USB cable.

This experimentation is just scratching the surface of what is possible with the OTG port on the Pi Zero. MIDI devices are easy, and with a ton of GPIOs, the Pi Zero itself could become a very interesting musical instrument. Want the Pi Zero to be a storage device? That’s easy too. The USB Gadget will end up being one of the most exciting uses for the Pi Zero, and we can’t wait to see what everyone will come up with next.

Yet Another Pi Zero USB Hub

December 19, 2015 by James Hobson 36 Comments

It’s quite fascinating to see the world of hackers rise up and start messing around with new hardware as soon as it’s released. As everyone knows, the Raspberry Pi Zero only has two micro USB ports… a bit lacking for any computer — even one the size of a credit card. While there will probably be an official USB hub coming out someday, we’ve already seen a few home-made versions — though we think this might be the nicest layout so far!

[Richard Hawthorn] threw this PCB design together to give the Pi Zero four USB 2.0 ports. It can be attached by either a USB connector, or by soldering 4 pins between the two boards. It can either be powered off of the Pi Zero, or with an external power connector jack. In a future design he hopes to add pogo pins so it can just be attached and detached whenever you need it.

It’s a bit more involved than simply strapping a mini USB hub to the back of your Pi, but if you’re interested in a more sleek solution, [Richard’s] got all the details on his GitHub.

Solder More USB Ports To The Raspberry Pi Zero

December 12, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 58 Comments

Slowly, Raspberry Pi Zeros are falling into the hands of everyone who wants one. Quickly, though, it was realized that one USB port wasn’t enough, and having a single USB OTG port was only just the most economical solution. The Pi Zero does have a lot of test points exposed on the back, and [Peter van der Walt] is clever enough to come up with a 4-port hub you can solder directly to the Pi Zero.

[Peter] has a bit of experience with USB ports on the Pi, and the test points available on the bottom of this cheap and wonderful board provide everything you need to break out the single USB OTG port to a USB hub. We’ve seen this done before with a few tenuous solder connections between the Zero and an off-the-shelf USB hub. [Peter]’s build does it by soldering a USB hub directly to the Pi through these test points. It’s the first purpose built bit of hardware designed for the express purpose of giving the Pi four USB ports while only making it a sliver thicker.

The chip [Peter] is using for the build is the TI TUSB2046B, a device that turns a single USB port into a 4-port hub. This is a part that only costs about $2 in quantity, and the USB connectors themselves are only about $0.60 if you want to build a thousand of these solderable USB hubs. Now you see why the Pi Foundation didn’t include a whole host of ports on the Pi Zero, but it does mean you should be able to pick this board up for under $10 when it’s inevitably cloned in China.

[Peter] doesn’t have this board working yet. In fact, he’s only just sent the Gerbers off to the PCB fab. There will be an update once [Peter] gets the boards back and solders up the tiny but tolerable 0603 parts.

Audio Streaming On The Cheap With An RPi Zero

December 10, 2015 by Eric Evenchick 29 Comments

The minuscule size of the Raspberry Pi Zero makes it perfect for hacks where size is a factor. For example, a small, standalone device for getting streaming audio into your speakers. The RPi Zero doesn’t have an audio output on board, so PolyVection paired it up with their PlainDAC to build a minimal audio streaming device.

Their build uses a few lines from the GPIO header to drive an I2S digital to analog converter. The DAC is a PCM5142 from Texas Instruments that provides high quality sound output, and contains a built in programmable DSP.

The hardware fits into a 3D printed case, coming in at 68 mm by 48 mm. There’s no WiFi inside, but this can be added with an external USB device for wireless streaming. The DAC used is supported by the Linux kernel, so a simple configuration is all that’s needed to pipe audio out.

Once you have a device like this assembled, you can install a server like Music Player Daemon to remotely control the device and cue up internet radio channels.

Raspberry Pi $2 WiFi Through Epic SDIO Hack

December 9, 2015 by Elliot Williams 99 Comments

These are the times that we live in: the Raspberry Pi Zero comes out — a full freaking Linux computer on a chip for $5 — and people complain that it doesn’t have this or that. Top place on the list of desiderata is probably a tie between audio out and WiFi connectivity. USB is a solution for both of these, but with one USB port it’s going to be a scarce commodity, so any help is welcome.

Hackaday.io hacker [ajlitt] is looking for a way out of the WiFi bind. His solution? The Raspberry Pi series of chips has a special function on a bunch of the GPIO pins that make it easier to talk to SDIO devices. SDIO is an extension of the SPI-like protocol that’s used with SD memory cards. The idea with SDIO was that you could plug a GPS or something into your PDA’s SD card slot. We don’t have PDAs anymore, but the SDIO spec remains.

[ajlitt] dug up an SDIO driver for the ESP8089 chip, and found that you can liberate the ESP8266’s SPI bus by removing a flash memory chip that’s taking up the SPI lines. Connect the SPI lines on the ESP8266 to the SDIO lines on the Raspberry Pi, and the rest is taken care of by the drivers. “The rest”, by the way, includes bringing the ESP’s processor up, dumping new firmware into it over the SPI/SDIO lines to convince it to act as an SDIO WiFi adapter, and all the rest of the hardware communication stuff that drivers do.

The result is WiFi connectivity without USB, requiring only some reasonably fine-pitch soldering, and unlike this hack you don’t have to worry about USB bus contention. So now you can add a $2 WiFi board to you $5 computer and you’ve still got the USB free. It’s not as fast as a dedicated WiFi dongle, but it gets the job done. Take that, Hackaday’s own [Rud Merriam]!

Thanks [J0z0r] for the tip!