raspberry pi

1666 Articles

Automating 3D Printer Support Hardware

June 6, 2024 by 22 Comments

While 3D printers have evolved over the past two decades from novelties to powerful prototyping tools, the amount of support systems have advanced tremendously as well. From rudimentary software that required extensive manual input and offered limited design capabilities, there’s now user-friendly interfaces with more features than you could shake a stick at. Hardware support has become refined as well with plenty of options including lighting, ventilation, filament recycling, and tool changers. It’s possible to automate some of these subsystems as well like [Caelestis Workshop] has done with this relay control box.

This build specifically focuses on automating or remotely controlling the power, enclosure lighting, and the ventilation system of [Caelestis Workshop]’s 3D printer but was specifically designed to be scalable and support adding other features quickly. A large power supply is housed inside of a 3D printed enclosure along with a Raspberry Pi. The Pi controls four relays which are used to control these various pieces hardware along with the 3D printer. That’s not the only thing the Pi is responsible for, though. It’s also configured to run Octoprint, a piece of open-source software that adds web interfaces for 3D printers and allows their operation to be monitored and controlled remotely too.

With this setup properly configured, [Caelestis Workshop] can access their printer from essentially any PC, monitor their prints, and ensure that ventilation is running. Streamlining the print process is key to reducing the frustration of any 3D printer setup, and this build will go a long way to achieving a more stress-free environment. In case you missed it, we recently hosed a FLOSS Weekly episode talking about Octoprint itself which is worth a listen especially if you haven’t tried this piece of software out yet.

Raspberry Pi Files Paperwork With The London Stock Exchange

May 17, 2024 by 27 Comments

If you’re a regular visitor to the Raspberry Pi website and you have a sharp eye, you may have noticed during the last few days a new link has appeared in their footer. Labelled “Investor relations“, it holds links to the documents filed with the London Stock Exchange of their intention to float. In other words, it’s confirmation of their upcoming share offering.

It has been interesting to watch the growth of Raspberry Pi over the last twelve years, from cottage industry producing a thousand boards in China, to dominating the SBC market and launching their own successful silicon. Without either a crystal ball or a window into Eben Upton’s mind, we’re as unreliable as anyone else when it comes to divining their future path. But since we’re guessing that it will involve ever more complex silicon with a raspberry logo, it’s obvious that the float will give them the investment springboard they need.

For those of us who have been around for a long time this isn’t the first company in our corner of the technology world we’ve seen burn brightly. It’s not even the first from Cambridge. Appointing ourselves as pundits though, we’d say that Raspberry Pi’s path to this point has been surprisingly understated, based upon the strength of its products rather than hype, and while Eben is undoubtedly a well-known figure, not based upon a cult of personality. There is already a significant ecosystem around Raspberry Pi, we’d like to think that this move will only strengthen it. We may not be looking at the British Microsoft, but we don’t think we’re looking at another Sinclair either.

BreadboardOS, A Command Line Interface For The Pico

May 14, 2024 by 25 Comments

Operating systems! They’re everywhere these days, from your smart TV to your smartphone. And even in your microcontrollers! Enter BreadboardOS for the Raspberry Pi Pico.

BreadboardOS is built on top of FreeRTOS. It’s aim is to enable quick prototyping with the Pi Pico. Don’t confuse operating system with a graphical environment — BreadboardOS is command-line based. You’d typically interface with it via a serial terminal emulator, but joy of joys, it does support color!

Using BreadboardOS is a little different than typical microcontroller development. Creating an application involves adding a “service” which is basically a task in FreeRTOS parlance. The OS handles running your service for you. Via the text interface, you can query running services, and start or kill them at will.

Meanwhile, running df will happily give you stats on the flash usage of the Pi Pico, and free will tell you how full the memory is doing. If you really want to get raw, you can make calls to control GPIO pins, the SPI hardware, or other peripherals, and do it right on the command line.

BreadboardOS isn’t for everyone, but it could prove a useful tool if you like that way of doing things. It’s not the only OS out there for the Pi Pico, either!

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Raspberry Pi Narrates (And Tattles On) Your Cat, Nature Documentary Style

May 9, 2024 by 10 Comments

Detecting a cat with a raspberry pi and camera is one thing, but [Yoko Li]’s AI Raspberry Pi Cat Detection brings things entirely to another level by narrating your feline’s activities, nature documentary style.

The project is ostensibly aimed at tattling on the housecats by detecting forbidden behavior such as trespassing on the kitchen counter. But we daresay that’s overshadowed by the verbose image analysis, which describes the scene in its best David Attenborough impression.

This feline exemplifies both the beauty and the peaceful nature of its kind. No email will be sent as the cat is not on the kitchen counter.

Hard to believe that just a few years ago this cat detector tool was the bee’s knees in cat detection technology. Things have certainly come a long way. Interested? The GitHub repository has everything needed to roll your own and we highly recommend watching it in action in the video, embedded below.

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Mostly Printed CNC Gets A Few Upgrades

May 7, 2024 by 9 Comments

The Mostly Printed CNC is famous for two things. First, being made mostly from 3D printed parts and commonly available steel tubing. Second, because of the materials used, its rigidity isn’t fantastic. But any CNC router is better than no CNC router, and [Alan Reiner]’s “Mostly Mostly Printed CNC” upgrades the base MPCNC into a much more capable unit.

MPCNC purists may want to look away, as the video below shows [Alan] committing the heresy of adding linear rails to his machine. The rails were sourced from VEVOR and at less than $100 for 10 meters, it must have been hard to resist. The rigidity wasn’t amazing — witness the horrific chatter at around the 5:15 mark — but [Alan] sorted that out with some aluminum extrusion and printed adapters.

Those upgrades alone were enough to let [Alan] dive into some aluminum cutting, but he also wanted to address another gripe with his base build: the Z-axis backlash. The fix there was to add another lead screw nut on an adjustable carrier. By tweaking the relative angles of the two opposed nuts, almost all of the backlash was taken up. [Alan] also replaced the motor coupling on the Z axis with a Lovejoy-style coupler, to remove as much axial compliance as possible.

Along with the motion control mods, [Alan] improved work holding and added an enclosure to tame the chip beast, along with some upgrades to the control electronics. The results are pretty good and appear well worth the modest added expense. Maybe a wireless controller can be next on the upgrade list?

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RISC OS Gets An Update

May 4, 2024 by 12 Comments

There should be rejoicing among fans of the original ARM operating system this week, as the venerable RISC OS received its version 5.30 update. It contains up-to-date versions of the bundled software as well as for the first time, out-of-the-box WiFi support, and best of all, it can run on all Raspberry Pi models except the Pi 5. If you’ve not encountered RISC OS before, it’s the continuing development of the OS supplied with the first ARM product, the Acorn Archimedes. As such it’s a up-to-date OS but with an interface that feels like those of the early 1990s.

We like RISC OS here, indeed we reviewed the previous version this year, so naturally out came the Hackaday Pi 3 and an SD card to run it on. It’s as smooth and quick as it ever was, but sadly try as we might, we couldn’t get the Pi’s wireless interface to appear in the list of available network cards. This almost certainly has more to do with us than it does the OS, but it would have been nice to break free from the tether of the network cable. The included Netsurf 3.11 browser is nippy but a little limited, and just as it was during our review, sadly not capable of editing a Hackaday piece or we’d be using it to write this.

It’s great to see this operating system still under active development, and we can see that it so nearly fulfills our requirement here for a lightweight OS on the road. For those of us who used the original version, then called Arthur, it’s a glimpse of how desktop computing could, or perhaps even should, have been.

A cyberdeck/portable PC sits on a deck rail in the sun.

T3rminal Cyberdeck Has Looks To Die For

May 1, 2024 by 7 Comments

One of the greatest things about the hacker ecosystem is that whole standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants thing. Somebody makes something and shares it, and then someone else takes that thing and remixes it, sometimes making it objectively better. For their T3rminal cyberdeck, [calebholloway08] was inspired by a number of projects and came up with something that looks simply fantastic.

Whether you want to call this beauty a cyberdeck or a mobile PC, the guts are what you might expect — a Raspberry Pi 4, an affordable mini keyboard, and a touch screen. But this one took some doing, as in [calebholloway08] had to do a little bit of surgery on the Pi 4, the PiSugar S plus power supply platform, and the display. But you shouldn’t let that stop you from standing on the shoulders of giants, as [calebholloway08] provides (or guides you towards) clear instructions for all three mods.

One thing [calebhollway08] would have done differently was to use something other than a 18650 battery for power, like a 21700. The question is, what will you do differently?

Maybe this is a little too small for you. If so, check out this EMP-protected cyberdeck.