Slack, Backwards Compatible With 1982

November 29, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Slack is great, but there are a few small problems with the current implementations. There isn’t a client for Palm, there isn’t a client for the Newton, and there isn’t a client for the Commodore 64. The last of these severe oversights was recently fixed by [Jeff Harris]. He built a native Slack client in 6502 assembly for the Commodore 64.

When dealing with network applications and the C64, the first question that comes to mind is how to talk to the outside world. There are C64 NICs, and ESP dongles, but for this build [Jeff] turned to the C64 Userport. This card edge combination of a serial and parallel port allows the C64 to talk to anything with RS-232, and with a simple adapter, [Jeff] got his old computer talking to a Raspberry Pi connected to the Internet.

The C64 Slack client itself is written in 6502 assembly, and features everything you would expect. The Pi is required to talk to the Slack API, though, and uses a NodeJS app to translate the bits from the C64 to something the API can understand.

Does it work? Of course it does. Slack is just text, after all, and there doesn’t seem to be any PETSCII weirdness here. You can check out a video of the build in action below.

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Controlling A Game Room With Amazon Echo

November 27, 2016 by Cameron Coward 2 Comments

If there are two things we love here at Hackaday, it’s games and automating mundane tasks by adding a lot of electronics and voice control. A game room is, therefore, the perfect sandbox for projects that get us excited in all of the right ways. Liberty Games, a UK-based games room company, already had a really impressive game room (as you might expect). They’ve just posted an awesome build log showcasing how they went about automating mundane game room tasks by adding a lot of electronics and voice control.

There were four tasks that Liberty Games wanted to be able to complete with voice control: releasing billiards balls on their pool table, adding credits to an arcade machine, releasing pinballs on a pinball machine, and control of a CD jukebox. For all of these tasks, they used an Amazon Echo, which already has built-in support for adding new “skills” (Amazon’s term for user-created Alexa commands). These skills allow the Echo to communicate with other devices using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).

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The Most Flexible Synthesizer Is DIY, Raspberry Pi

November 26, 2016 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

[Ivan Franco] sent us this great synthesizer project that he’s working on. Or maybe it’s more like a synthesizer meta-project: a synthesizer construction set. You see, what Pryth has is a Raspberry Pi inside that’s running a custom distribution that includes SuperCollider to generate the sound, OSC for the communication layer, and a Teensy with up to 80 (!) multiplexed analog inputs that you’ll connect up to whatever hardware you desire.

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Raspberry Pi Radio Makes The Sweet Music Of Bacteria

November 25, 2016 by Al Williams 5 Comments

We’ve noticed a lot of musical groups are named after insects. Probably has something to do with the Beatles. (If you study that for a while you’ll spot the homophonic pun, and yes we know that the Crickets inspired the name.) There’s also Iron Butterfly, Adam Ant, and quite a few more. A recent art project by a Mexican team — Micro-ritmos — might inspire some musical groups to be named after bacteria.

The group used geobacter — a kind of bacteria found in soil — a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino, and a camera to build an interesting device. As it looks at the bacteria and uses SuperCollider to create music and lighting from the patterns. You can see a video of Micro-ritmos, below.

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Levitating Table Makes The Sound Of This Holochess Jukebox

November 22, 2016 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

A bubbling Wurlitzer juke would be a prized addition to the classic picture of a man cave — brass-railed bar, kegerator, pool table, tin signs and neon on the walls. But it would take a particularly geeky abode to give a proper home to this Millenium Falcon holochess table jukebox. And a particularly awesome one at that.

It all started with a very detailed and realistic replica of a holochess table made by [Jim Shima]’s friend. A lot of time and care went into the prop, and [Jim] was determined not to alter the look while installing the media player gear, consisting of a Raspberry Pi running OSMC and a 160-watt power amp.

The speakers were problematic – there was nowhere convenient to mount them except under the brushed aluminum playing surface of the table. The sound quality was less than acceptable, so rather than poke unsightly holes in the table, [Jim] devised a servo to lift the table while the music is playing.

An LCD monitor and wireless keyboard slightly detract from the overall look; we’ll give [Jim] a pass until he can come up with a holographic display to finish the build right. But we are disappointed that he didn’t use “Mad About Me” by Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes as the demo tune in the video below.

It’s a nice build, and you’ll want to check out [Jim]’s Hyperdyne Labs for more drool-worthy props and effects. And for another fandom jukebox, look over this jukebox that’s bigger on the inside.

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The Raspberry Pi 2 Gets A Processor Upgrade

November 21, 2016 by Jenny List 28 Comments

A rumor that has been swirling around the Raspberry Pi hardware community for a significant time has proven to have a basis in fact. The Raspberry Pi 2 has lost its BCM2836 32-bit processor, and gained the 64-bit BCM2837 processor from its newer sibling, the Raspberry Pi 3. It seems this switch was made weeks ago without any fanfare on the release of the Pi 2 V1.2 board revision, so we are among many news sources that were caught on the hop.

The new board is not quite a Pi 3 masquerading as a Pi 2 though. The more capable processor is clocked at a sedate 900MHz as opposed to the Pi 3’s 1.2GHz and there is no Bluetooth or WiFi on board, but the new revision will of course benefit from the extra onboard cache and the 64-bit cores.

This move almost certainly has its roots in saving the cost of BCM2836 production in the face of falling Pi 2 sales after the launch of the Pi 3. It makes sense for the Foundation to keep the Pi 2 in their range though as the board has found a home in many embedded products for which the Pi 3’s wireless capabilities and extra power consumption are not an asset.

Avid collectors of Pi boards will no doubt be running to add this one to their displays, but given that the Pi 2 sells for the same price as a Pi 3 we suspect that most Hackaday readers will go for the faster board. It is still a development worth knowing about though, should you require a faster Pi that is a little less power-hungry. The full specification for the revised board can be found on the Raspberry Pi web site.

The Pi has come a long way since the morning in 2012 when our community brought down the RS and Farnell websites trying to buy one of the first models. This BCM2837 board joins a BCM2837-powered Compute Module as well as the Pi 3. It’s worth reminding you though that there are other players to consider, earlier this year we brought you a look at the Odroid C2, and of course the infamous Apple Device.

Pi 2 header image: Multicherry [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Editorial Note: We originally covered this in Sunday’s Links article but thought it warranted another, expanded mention.

Hackaday Links: November 20, 2016

November 20, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

The Raspberry Pi 2 is getting an upgrade. No, this news isn’t as big as you would imagine. The Raspberry Pi 2 is powered by the BCM2836 SoC, an ARM Cortex-A7 that has served us well over the years. The ‘2836 is going out of production, and now the Raspberry Pi foundation is making the Pi 2 with the chip found in the Raspberry Pi 3, the BCM2837. Effectively, the Pi 2 is now a wireless-less (?) version of the Pi 3. It still costs $35, the same as the Pi 3, making it a rather dumb purchase for the home hacker. There are a lot of Pi 2s in industry, though, and they don’t need WiFi and Bluetooth throwing a wrench in the works.

So you’re using a Raspberry Pi as a media server, but you have far too many videos for a measly SD card. What’s the solution? A real server, first off, but there is another option. WDLabs released their third iteration of the PiDrive this week. It’s a (spinning) hard disk, SD card for the software, and a USB Y-cable for powering the whole thing. Also offered is a USB thumb drive providing 64 GB of storage, shipped with an SD card with the relevant software.

Mr. Trash Wheel is the greatest Baltimore resident since Edgar Allan Poe, John Waters, and Frank Zappa. Mr. Trash Wheel eats trash, ducks, kegs, and has kept Inner Harbor relatively free of gonoherpasyphilaids for the past few years. Now there’s a new trash wheel. Professor Trash Wheel will be unveiled on December 4th.

YOU MUST VOICE CONTROL ADDITIONAL PYLONS. With an ‘official’ StarCraft Protoss pylon and a Geeetech voice recognition module, [Scott] built a voice controlled lamp.

Everyone loves gigantic Nixie tubes, so here’s a Kickstarter for a gigantic Nixie clock. There are no rewards for just the tube, but here’s a manufacturer of 125mm tall Nixies.

Here’s an interesting think piece from AdvancedManufacturing.org. The STL file format is ancient and holding us all back. This much we have known since the first Makerbot, and it doesn’t help that Thingiverse is still a thing, and people don’t upload their source files. What’s the solution? 3MF and AMF file formats, apparently. OpenSCAD was not mentioned in this think piece.