Every time we yell out, “OK Google… navigate to Velvet Melvin’s” we feel like a Star Trek character. After all, you’ve never seen Captain Kirk (or Picard) using a keyboard. If you get that same feeling, and you have a Raspberry Pi project in mind, you might enjoy the Raspberry Pi LCARS interface.
You can see the results in the video below. The interface uses PyGame, and you can customize it with different skins if you don’t want a Star Trek look.
The spec bullet list for the latest Raspberry Pi begins as you’ve already heard: WiFi and Bluetooth, now standard. While this is impressive itself, it doesn’t tell the whole story. The Pi 3, with an ARM Cortex A53, is up to 50% faster than the Pi 2 from last year. That’s an astonishing improvement in just 12 short months.
In playing with the Pi 3 for a few hours, it’s apparent the Pi 3 is fast. It passes a threshold of usability. The Raspberry Pi isn’t a computer that just sits on a shelf and runs a few cron jobs and blinks LEDs anymore – this is a computer that’s usable as a computer. But how fast is it? By stroke of luck, the official website for the Cortex A53 gives us a direct comparison between this chip and the CPU in the Raspberry Pi 2:
In real devices, the performance improvement from the Pi 2 to the Pi 3 is somewhere between 40 and 60 percent. At least that’s what ARM and the Raspberry Pi foundation are claiming. Is this true? There are tests we can run, and the marketing speak, for once, isn’t too terribly off the mark.
Continue reading “Pi 3 Benchmarks: The Marketing Hype Is True”
The Raspberry Pi Zero Contest presented by Adafruit and Hackaday has been going incredibly well! We currently have 132 projects entered, and there is still time for YOU to get in on the fun! The only problem entrants have had is getting their hands on these amazing $5 computers. We’ve made that easy by giving away ten Raspberry Pi Zero boards. The following projects were well documented, well thought out projects were selected by the judges. We’ve already informed the winners through Hackaday.io, and will be shipping out the Pi Zero boards to them right away.
Please join the judges and the entire Hackaday staff in congratulating the winners of the Pi Zero boards!
If you didn’t win, all is not lost! There is still time to enter the contest. The deadline is 11:59 pm PST on March 13, 2016. You’ll be in the running for one of three $100 gift certificates to The Hackaday Store!
TL;DR: The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is out now. This latest model includes 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and a quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 running at 1.2 GHz. It’s a usable desktop computer. Available now at the usual Pi retailers for $35.
News of the latest Raspberry Pi swept around the Internet like wildfire this last weekend, thanks to a published FCC docs showing a Pi with on-board WiFi and Bluetooth. While we thank the dozens of Hackaday readers that wrote in to tell us about the leaked FCC documents, our lips have been sealed until now. We’ve been doing a few hands-on tests with the Pi 3 for about two weeks now, and the reality of the Pi 3 is much cooler than a few leaked FCC docs will tell you.
The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B features a quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 clocked at 1.2 GHz. This puts the Pi 3 roughly 50% faster than the Pi 2. Compared to the Pi 2, the RAM remains the same – 1GB of LPDDR2-900 SDRAM, and the graphics capabilities, provided by the VideoCore IV GPU, are the same as they ever were. As the leaked FCC docs will tell you, the Pi 3 now includes on-board 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0. WiFi, wireless keyboards, and wireless mice now work out of the box.
[Nathan] wanted a smart mirror that cost less than the last one he built, which was about $500. He decided that you don’t see more smart mirrors because of the high cost. His latest build came in at only $79 (you’ll have to visit the blog’s home page to find the entire series).
The most expensive piece of the build is a 7-inch monitor ($45). Any Raspberry Pi will work, although [Nathan] uses a Pi B+. Although he managed to score a free one-way mirror from a local glass shop, you can buy one for about $13.
This is the kind of project that isn’t a big technical challenge. After all, it is a one-way mirror with an LCD screen behind it. However, getting the screen blacked out and set to provide the best possible effect is the trick and [Nathan’s] techniques will give you a head start.
You can see the mirror in the video below. We’ve seen smart mirrors that sense your presence as well as wireless mirrors before.
The Raspberry Pi is a very capable device whose hardware has been pushed to the limit in all sorts of interesting ways. But even the most ingenious of experimenters have to agree on one point; it doesn’t possess an analog-to-digital converter. If you want analog inputs you will have to buy or build them.
[Mincepi] has done just that, but not as you might expect by adding an integrated circuit on one of the Pi’s interfaces. Instead the circuit [Mincepi] is using consists only of passive components, measuring the time taken to discharge the parasitic capacitance of one of the Pi’s inputs from logic 1 voltage to logic 0 voltage through a resistor into the voltage to be measured. This is a long-established approach to A to D conversion, one that was achieved back in the day with purpose-designed timers as microprocessor ancillaries.
The problem is that the Pi does not have a timer peripheral, so [Mincepi] has used the shift registers that form part of the Pi’s SPI and PCM inputs to perform this task on two channels. A sample rate of 100kHz and 6-bit resolution is claimed, with enough voltage range for a 1V peak-to-peak audio signal to be sampled.
Of course, simplicity does not guarantee a good ADC, and this circuit does not perform very well. It is noisy, non-linear, and as [Mincepi] puts it, probably sensitive to temperature. And though [Mincepi] talks in detail about the software to drive it, none is forthcoming. To quote: “It doesn’t include code since I’m in the process of writing a proper sound device module. My previous code was a simple character device, but it worked just fine, and served to prove the concept.”
We really want this to work, even if it’s not the best ADC ever. So we eagerly await the sound device module, and look forward to more news from the project.
This may be the simplest of simple ADCs we’ve yet featured here on Hackaday, but it’s not the first we’ve seen. There is this one using a comparator for example, or this one using a flip-flop. It is the essence of creative electronics to eke a function from a component that was never meant to be, please keep them coming!
If you’re looking for a hot collectible item and a great restoration project, cathedral-style radios from the 1930s are a solid choice. But they’re getting harder to find as the years roll by, so if your heart’s content is to listen to modern broadcasts through a radio with a classic look, you may need to roll your own cathedral case for an internet radio.
The cathedral-style case was a hugely successful form-factor for radios back in the day, with variations on the arch-top theme ranging from Gothic to Art Deco. For this build, [nick.r.brewer] decided on a more parabolic arch. His build log has SVG files for the individual ribs that were cut from plywood with an X-Carve. A Raspberry Pi and TFT display were mounted inside the finished case, along with a Bluetooth module and a 20W amplifier and speaker. A big 3-pole rotary switch with custom knob selects the audio source and evokes that 1930s feel. It ended up looking pretty good, and the video after the break shows that it sounds nice, too.
We featured a fair number of internet-radio-in-a-classic-case builds before, but we’re surprised to see no cathedral-style radios have been modded. Maybe it’s time to hit the flea market and estate sales and see what turns up.
Continue reading “An Internet Radio In A Classic Cathedral Case”
