raspberry pi

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Hackaday Links: August 21, 2016

August 21, 2016 by 32 Comments

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.

One Man, A Raspberry Pi, And A Formerly Hand Powered Loom

August 20, 2016 by 5 Comments

[Fred Hoefler] was challenged to finally do something with that Raspberry Pi he wouldn’t keep quiet about. So he built a machine assist loom for the hand weaver. Many older weavers simply can’t enjoy their art anymore due to the physical strain caused by the repetitive task. Since he had a Pi looking for a purpose, he also had his project.

His biggest requirement was cost. There are lots of assistive looms on the market, but the starting price for those is around ten thousand dollars. So he set the rule that nothing on the device would cost more than the mentioned single board computer. This resulted in a BOM cost for the conversion that came in well under two hundred dollars. Not bad!

The motive parts are simple cheap 12V geared motors off Amazon. He powered them using his own motor driver circuits. They get their commands from the Pi, running Python. To control the loom one can either type in commands into the shell or use the keyboard. There are also some manual switches on the loom itself.

In the end [Fred] met his design goal, and has further convinced his friends that the words Raspberry Pi are somehow involved with trouble.

Continue reading “One Man, A Raspberry Pi, And A Formerly Hand Powered Loom” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Raspberry Pi Password Manager

August 19, 2016 by 28 Comments

Every week there’s new a new website that has been compromised and the passwords of a few hundred thousand accounts have been leaked to a pastebin. To protect yourself you can change your passwords often, not reuse passwords, and use long compilcated strings; all of these techniques are far beyond the capacity for human memory, or even a Post-it note. Thus the age of electronic password keepers began.

Electronic password keepers are simple devices that save your passwords and can recall them over a USB connection. The Raspberry Pi Zero functions perfectly fine as a USB device, leading [gir] to build the Raspi Zero WiFi Enable Hardware Password Manager for the Hackaday Prize.

This USB gadget uses pass, the ‘standard unix password manager’ to store all the passwords. Everything is controlled by a few buttons, a small OLED display, and of course the Raspi’s ability to become a USB HID device. This allows the Pi Zero to type passwords in just like a USB keyboard.

It’s a great project, and since the Pi Zero actually exists now, much to the surprise of its many detractors, the perfect entry for the Hackaday Prize.

The HackadayPrize2016 is Sponsored by:

Add Robotic Farming To Your Backyard With Farmbot Genesis

August 19, 2016 by 29 Comments

Growing your own food is a fun hobby and generally as rewarding as people say it is. However, it does have its quirks and it definitely equires quite the time input. That’s why it was so satisfying to watch Farmbot push a weed underground. Take that!

Farmbot is a project that has been going on for a few years now, it was a semifinalist in the Hackaday Prize 2014, and that development time shows in the project documented on their website. The robot can plant, water, analyze, and weed a garden filled with arbitrarily chosen plant life. It’s low power and low maintenance. On top of that, every single bit is documented on their website. It’s really well done and thorough. They are gearing up to sell kits, but if you want it now; just do it yourself.

The bot itself is exactly what you’d expect if you were to pick out the cheapest most accessible way to build a robot: aluminum extrusions, plate metal, and 3D printer parts make up the frame. The brain is a Raspberry Pi hooked to its regular companion, an Arduino. On top of all this is a fairly comprehensive software stack.

The user can lay out the garden graphically. They can get as macro or micro as they’d like about the routines the robot uses. The robot will happily come to life in intervals and manage a garden. They hope that by selling kits they’ll interest a whole slew of hackers who can contribute back to the problem of small scale robotic farming.

Retrofitting A Vintage Intercom To Run Amazon Alexa

August 19, 2016 by 17 Comments

The Amazon Echo is a pretty cool piece of tech: it lets you ask questions, queue up music, find out the weather, and more, without having to do anything but talk. But, the device itself is a bit pricey, and looks a little boring. What if you could have all the features of the Echo, but in a cool retro case and at a cheaper price?

Well, you can, and that’s exactly what [nick.r.brewer] did, using a ’50s intercom and a Raspberry Pi. He picked the vintage intercom up at an antique store for $20, and the Raspberry Pi Zero is less than $10. So, for about $30 (and some parts most of us have lying around) he was able to build a cool looking device with all of the capabilities of the Amazon Echo.

The hardware portion of the build was pretty straightforward, with the Raspberry Pi, a sound card, WiFi dongle, USB hub, and microphone all fitting nicely inside the case of the intercom. The software side of things is a little more tricky, but with a device like this it runs well with Amazon’s Alexa SDK. Of course, if you want to add more hardware features, that’s possible too.

Continue reading “Retrofitting A Vintage Intercom To Run Amazon Alexa” →

Capacitive Imaging With A Raspberry Pi Touch Screen

August 18, 2016 by 15 Comments

We use touch screens all the time these days, and though we all know they support multiple touch events it is easy for us to take them for granted and forget that they are a rather accomplished sensor array in their own right.

[Optismon] has long held an interest in capacitive touch screen sensors, and has recently turned his attention to the official Raspberry Pi 7-inch touchscreen display. He set out to read its raw capacitance values, and ended up with a fully functional 2D capacitive imaging device able to sense hidden nails and woodwork in his drywall.

Reading the capacitance values is not a job for the faint-hearted though. There is an I2C bus which is handled by the Pi GPU rather than the processor, and to read it in software would require a change to the Pi’s infamous Broadcom binary blob. His solution which he agrees is non-optimal was to take another of the Pi’s I2C lines that he could talk to and connect it in parallel with the display line. As a result he can catch the readings from the screen’s sensors and with a bit of scripting make a 2D display on the screen. The outlines of hands and objects on his desk can clearly be seen when he places them on the screen, and when he runs the device over his wall it shows the position of the studding and nails behind the drywall.

He’s posted his code in a GitHub repository, and put up the YouTube video of his capacitive imaging in action which you can watch below the break.

Continue reading “Capacitive Imaging With A Raspberry Pi Touch Screen” →

Solar-powered Weather Station Has The Complete Suite Of Sensors

August 17, 2016 by 15 Comments

There was a time when getting weather conditions was only as timely or as local as the six o’clock news from the nearest big-city TV station. Monitoring the weather now is much more granular thanks to the proliferation of personal weather stations. For the ultimate in personalized weather, though, you might want to build your own solar powered weather station.

It looks like [Brian Masney] went all out in designing his weather station. It supports a full stack of sensors – wind speed and direction, rain, temperature, pressure, and dew point. About the only other parameters not supported (yet) are solar radiation, UV, and soil moisture and temperature. The design looks friendly enough that adding those sensors should be a snap – if fact, the 3D models in his GitHub repo suggest that he’s already working on soil sensors. The wind and rain sensor boom is an off-the-shelf unit from Sparkfun, and the temperature and pressure sensors are housed in a very professional 3D printed screen enclosure. All the sensors talk to a Raspberry Pi living in a (hopefully) waterproof enclosure topped with a solar panel for charging the stations batteries. All in all it’s a comprehensive build; you can check out the conditions at [Brian]’s place on Weather Underground.

Weather stations are popular around these parts, as witnessed by this reverse-engineered sensor suite or even this squirrel-logic based station.