Raspberry Pi 3 Gets USB, Ethernet Boot

August 4, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 64 Comments

The Raspberry Pi is a great computer, even if it doesn’t have SATA. For those of us who have lost a few SD cards to the inevitable corruption that comes from not shutting a Pi down properly, here’s something for you: USB Mass Storage Booting for the Raspberry Pi 3.

For the Raspberry Pi 1, 2, Compute Module, and Zero, there are two boot modes – SD boot, and USB Device boot, with USB Device boot only found on the Compute Module. [Gordon] over at the Raspberry Pi foundation spent a lot of time working on the Broadcom 2837 used in the Raspberry Pi 3, and found enough space in 32 kB to include SD boot, eMMC boot, SPI boot, NAND flash, FAT filesystem, GUID and MBR partitions, USB device, USB host, Ethernet device, and mass storage device support. You can now boot the Raspberry Pi 3 from just about anything.

The documentation for these new boot modes goes over the process of how to put an image on a USB thumb drive. It’s not too terribly different from the process of putting an image on an SD card, and the process will be streamlined somewhat in the next release of rpi-update. Some USB thumb drives do not work, but as long as you stick with a Sandisk or Samsung, you should be okay.

More interesting than USB booting is the ability for the Pi 3 to boot over the network. Booting over a network is nothing new – the Apple II could do it uphill both ways in the snow, but the most common use for the Pi is a dumb media player that connects to all your movies on network storage. With network booting, you can easily throw a Pi on a second TV and play all that media in a second room. Check out the network booting tutorial here.

Single Board Revolution: Preventing Flash Memory Corruption

August 3, 2016 by Moritz Walter 97 Comments

An SD card is surely not an enterprise grade storage solution, but single board computers also aren’t just toys anymore. You find them in applications far beyond the educational purpose they have emerged from, and the line between non-critical and critical applications keeps getting blurred.

Laundry notification hacks and arcade machines fail without causing harm. But how about electronic access control, or an automatic pet feeder? Would you rely on the data integrity of a plain micro SD card stuffed into a single board computer to keep your pet fed when you’re on vacation and you back in afterward? After all, SD card corruption is a well-discussed topic in the Raspberry Pi community. What can we do to keep our favorite single board computers from failing at random, and is there a better solution to the problem of storage than a stack of SD cards?

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Smart USB Hub And IoT Power Meter

August 2, 2016 by Moritz Walter 1 Comment

[Aleksejs Mirnijs] needed a tool to accurately measure the power consumption of his Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects, which is an important parameter for dimensioning adequate power supplies and battery packs. Since most SBC projects require a USB hub anyway, he designed a smart, WiFi-enabled 4-port USB hub that is also a power meter – his entry for this year’s Hackaday Prize.

[Aleksejs’s] design is based on the FE1.1s 4-port USB 2.0 hub controller, with two additional ports for charging. Each port features an LT6106 current sensor and a power MOSFET to individually switch devices on and off as required. An Atmega32L monitors the bus voltage and current draw, switches the ports and talks to an ESP8266 module for WiFi connectivity. The supercharged hub also features a display, which lets you read the measured current and power consumption at a glance.

Unlike most cheap hubs out there, [Aleksejs’s] hub has a properly designed power path. If an external power supply is present, an onboard buck converter actively regulates the bus voltage while a power path controller safely disconnects the host’s power line. Although the first prototype is are already up and running, this project is still under heavy development. We’re curious to see the announced updates, which include a 2.2″ touchscreen and a 3D-printable enclosure.

Sniffing Bluetooth Devices With A Raspberry Pi

August 1, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

Hackaday was at HOPE last weekend, and that means we got the goods from what is possibly the best security conference on the east coast. Some of us, however, were trapped in the vendor area being accosted by people wearing an improbable amount of Mr. Robot merch asking, ‘so what is Hackaday?’. We’ve all seen The Merchants Of Cool, but that doesn’t mean everyone was a vapid expression of modern marketing. Some people even brought some of their projects to show off. [Jeff] of reelyActive stopped by the booth and showed off what his team has been working on. It’s a software platform that turns all your wireless mice, Fitbits, and phones into a smart sensor platform using off the shelf hardware and a connection to the Internet.

[Jeff]’s demo unit (shown above) is simply a Raspberry Pi 3 with WiFi and Bluetooth, and an SD card loaded up with reelyActive’s software. Connect the Pi to the Internet, and you have a smart space that listens for local Bluetooth devices and relays the identity and MAC address of all Bluetooth devices in range up to the Internet.

The ability to set up a hub and detect Bluetooth devices solves the problem Bluetooth beacons solves — identifying when people enter a space, leave a space, and with a little bit of logic where people are located in a space — simply by using what they’re already wearing. Judging from what [Jeff] showed with his portable reelyActive hub (a Pi and a battery pack) a lot of people at HOPE are wearing Fitbits, wireless headphones, and leaving the Bluetooth on the phone on all the time. That’s a great way to tell where people are, providing a bridge between the physical world and the digital.

This NES Emulator Build Lets You Use Cartridges To Play Games

July 29, 2016 by Cameron Coward 25 Comments

You may not remember this, but Nintendo hardware used to be a pretty big deal. The original Game Boy and NES both had remarkable industrial design that, like the Apple II and IBM Thinkpad, weren’t quite appreciated until many years after production ended. But, like many of you, [daftmike] had nostalgia-fueled memories of the NES experience still safely locked away.

Memories like lifting the cartridge door, blowing on the cartridge, and the feel of the cartridge clicking into place. So, understandably, reliving those experiences was a key part of [daftmike’s] Raspberry Pi-based NES build, though at 40% of the original size. He didn’t just want to experience the games of his youth, he wanted to experience the whole NES just as he had as a child.

Now, like any respectable hacker, [daftmike] didn’t let gaps in his knowledge stop him. This project was a learning experience. He had to teach himself a lot about 3D design and modeling, using Linux, and programming. But, the end result was surely worth the work; the attention to detail shows in features like the USB placement, the power and reset buttons, and of course the game cartridges which work with the magic of NFC and still include the insert and toggle action of the original cartridge carriage.

If you have a 3D printer and Raspberry Pi available, you could build a similar NES emulator yourself. But if you don’t have a 3D printer, but do have an original NES lying around, you could pull of the Raspberry Pi in a NES case hack. Whichever you do, the NES’s beauty deserves to be displayed in your home.

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Squirrel Café To Predict The Weather From Customer Data

July 28, 2016 by Moritz Walter 13 Comments

Physicist and squirrel gastronomer [Carsten Dannat] is trying to correlate two critical social economical factors: how many summer days do we have left, and when will we run out of nuts. His research project, the Squirrel Café, invites squirrels to grab some free nuts and collects interesting bits of customer data in return.

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DIY Smart Home Device Means No More Fumbling In The Dark

July 27, 2016 by James Hobson 24 Comments

Smart home tech is on the rise, but cost or lack of specific functionality may give pause to prospective buyers. [Whiskey Tango Hotel] opted to design their own system using a Raspberry Pi and Bluetooth device connectivity. Combining two ubiquitous technologies provides a reliable proximity activation of handy functions upon one’s arrival home.

The primary function is to turn on a strip of LEDs when [Whiskey Tango Hotel] gets home to avoid fumbling for the lights in the dark, and to turn them off after a set time. The Raspberry Pi and Bluetooth dongle detect when a specified discoverable Bluetooth device comes within range — in this case, an iPad — after some time away. This toggles the Pi’s GP10 outputs and connected switching relay while also logging the actions to the terminal and Google Drive via IFTTT.

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