Hackaday Prize 2023: Ubo Project: Building For Builders

August 24, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 6 Comments

The Ubo Pod by [Mehrdad Majzoobi] is a very highly polished extension pack and enclosure for the Raspberry Pi 4, which shows you how far you can go to turn a bare PCB into something that rivals the hardware offerings from Google and others. Gadgets like the Sonos speakers and Amazon or Google’s covert listening devices (aka Echo, Alexa, or whatever they’re branded as) are fun to play with. Still, the difficulty of hacking custom applications into them and god-forbid adding one’s own extension hardware, makes them fairly closed ecosystems. Add in the concerns of privacy and data security; they look less and less attractive the closer you look. Luckily the Raspberry Pi and its friends have improved the accessibility to the point where it’s positively easy to create whatever you want with whatever hardware you need, and to that end we think [Mehrdad] has done a splendid job.

The custom top PCB sits below the wooden top surface, hosting a central LCD display with push buttons located around it. Also sitting atop are some IR transmitters and receivers as well as RGB LEDs for the ring lighting. This top PCB acts as a RPi hat, and plugs into an RPi4 below, which then attaches to a side board via some PCB-mounted connectors, matching up with the USB and audio connectors. This board seems to act purely as an interconnect and form-factor adaptor allowing interfaces to be presented more conveniently without needing wires. This makes for a very clean construction. Extensive use of resin printing is shown, with lots of nice details of how to solve problems such as LED diffusion and bleeding. Overall, a very slick and well-executed project, that is giving us a few ideas for our own projects.

This type of project is commonplace on these fair pages, like this DIY smart speaker for example. With the supply of pi being still a little difficult to deal with, could you roll your own or get an alternative? What about just using your old mobile phone?

Polaroid Develops Its Pictures Remotely

August 16, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 8 Comments

For those who didn’t experience it, it’s difficult to overstate the cultural impact of the Polaroid camera. In an era where instant gratification is ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when capturing a photograph meant waiting for film to be developed or relying on the meticulous art of darkroom processing. Before the era of digital photography, there was nothing as close to instant as the Polaroid. [Max] is attempting to re-capture that feeling with a modified Polaroid which instantly develops its pictures in a remote picture frame.

The build is based on a real, albeit non-functional, Polaroid Land Camera. Instead of restoring it, a Raspberry Pi with a camera module is placed inside the camera body and set up to capture pictures. The camera needs to connect to a Wi-Fi network before it can send its pictures out, though, and it does this automatically when taking a picture of a QR code. When a picture is snapped, it sends it out over the Internet to wherever the picture frame is located, which has another Raspberry Pi inside connected to an e-ink screen. Once a picture is taken on the camera it immediately shows up in the picture frame.

To help preserve the spirit of the original Polaroid, at no point is an image saved permanently. Once it is sent to the frame, it is deleted from the camera, and the next picture taken overwrites the last. And, for those who are only familiar with grayscale e-ink displays as the integral parts of e-readers, there have been limited options for color displays for a while now, as we saw in this similar build which was painstakingly built into a normal-looking picture frame as part of an attempted family prank.

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Get MOST Into Your Pi

August 3, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 15 Comments

When looking the modify a passenger vehicle, the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is a pretty easy target. In modern vehicles it has access to most of the on-board systems — everything from the climate control to the instrument cluster and often even the throttle, braking, and steering systems. With as versatile as the CAN bus is, though, it’s not the right tool for every job. There’s also the Media Oriented Systems Transport (MOST) bus which is increasingly found in automotive systems to handle multimedia such as streaming music to the stereo. To access that system you’ll need to approach it slightly differently as [Rhys] demonstrates.

[Rhys] has been working on replacing the dated head unit in his Jaguar, and began by investigating the CAN bus. He got almost everything working with replacement hardware except the stereo, which is where the MOST bus comes into play. It provides a much higher bandwidth than the CAN bus can accommodate but with almost no documentation it was difficult to interact with at first. With the help of a Raspberry Pi and a lot of testing he is able to get the stereo working again with a much more modern-looking touchscreen for control. It is also able to do things like change CDs in the car’s CD player, gather song information from the CD to display on the panel, and can perform other functions of the infotainment center.

For more detailed information on the MOST bus, [Rhys] also maintains a website where he puts his discoveries and other information he finds about this system. Unfortunately car stereo systems in modern vehicles can get pretty complicated these days, but adapting car stereos in older vehicles to modern technology carries some interesting challenges as well.

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2023 Cyberdeck Challenge: Crosberry Pi Loves Lo-Fi Hip Hop

July 22, 2023 by Kristina Panos 1 Comment

As far as we can tell, the only real selling point that any portable record player offered was, well, its portability. To be clear, the sound is never that great. But perhaps a selling point for this crowd is that they usually come in hinged cases with handles, and you know what that means — cyberdeck that thing!

[Mx. Jack Nelson] started gutting this Crosley CR40 record player to make a Raspberry Pi housing, but it quickly turned into a cyberdeck project with the addition of a 10.1″ portable monitor, a Planck ortholinear keyboard, and a gutted trackball mouse.

We love that [Mx. Jack Nelson] made use of the Crosley’s original speakers — this was the wife’s idea! — as well as the volume and tone knobs. But our favorite part has to be the clear acrylic top that both protects the electronics and provides a platform for the keyboard and mouse buttons. Be sure to check out the demo video after the break.

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DIY All-Flash NAS Vs. Commercial Hardware

July 20, 2023 by Lewin Day 37 Comments

[Jeff Geerling] has tried building his own network-attached storage before, but found that the Raspberry Pi just wasn’t able to keep pace with his demands. He’s back with a new all-flash NAS build, and put his new design to the test against proper store-bought gear.

His build is based around the ROCK 5 Model B, which is able to truck data around far faster than most other single-board computers. Internally, it can top 1 GB/sec without too much hassle. He decided to build a NAS rig using the board, putting it up against the turn-key ASUSTOR AS-T10G3.

Using OpenMediaVault to run the ROCK 5 as a NAS, [Jeff] was able to get decent performance out of the setup. With a 3-drive RAID 5 configuration, he recorded write and read speeds of 100 MB/sec and 200 MB/sec respectively, over a 2.5 Gbps network connection. There were also some spikes and curious performance wobbles. While speed was better than [Jeff]’s previous Raspberry Pi experiments, it wasn’t capable of double or triple the performance like he’d hoped. In comparison, the ASUSTOR solution was capable of much greater speeds. It topped out at 600 MB/sec write speeds, and 1.2 GB/sec on reads.

If you’re looking to build a high-performance DIY NAS, the ROCK 5 may be a better solution than most Raspberry Pi boards. However, if you want speed over all else, existing commercial NAS solutions really have the edge. Video after the break.

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Adapter Board Expands The Pi Zero

July 17, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 23 Comments

The standard Raspberry Pi computers have been in short supply for a while now, so much so that people are going to great lengths to find replacements. Whether it’s migrating to alternative single-board computers or finding clones of the Pi that are “close enough”, there are solutions out there. This method of building a full-size Raspberry Pi with all of the bells and whistles using the much-less-in-demand Pi Zero also stands out as a clever solution.

[SpookyGhost] didn’t build this one himself, but he did stumble across it and write a pretty extensive how-to and performance evaluation for the board, which can be found here. The adapter connects to the Zero’s HDMI and USB ports, and provides all the connectors you’d expect from a larger Pi such as the 3B. It’s not a perfect drop-in replacement though — you don’t get the 3.5 mm audio jack, and the micro SD card location doesn’t match up with where it should be on a “real” Pi.

All things considered, this is one of those solutions that seems obvious in retrospect but we still appreciate its elegance. It might disappear as soon as chip shortages stop being an issue, but for now we’ll take any solutions we can. If you don’t already have a Pi Zero on hand, we’ve seen some other successes replacing them with thin clients or even old smartphones.

Listening To Bats As They Search For Food

July 14, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

The range of human hearing goes up to about 20 kilohertz, which is fine for our purposes, but is pretty poor compared to plenty of other animal species. Dogs famously can hear up to about 60 kHz, and dolphins are known to distinguish sounds up to 100 kHz. But for extremely high frequencies we’ll want to take a step into the world of bats. Some use echolocation to locate each other and their food sources, and bats like the pipistrelle can listen in to sounds up to 350 kHz. To listen to them you’ll need a device like the π*pistrelle. (Ed Note: a better explanation is available at the project’s website.)

The original implementation of the bat detector was based on a Raspberry Pi Pico, from which it gets its name. But there have been several improvements on it in the years since it was first developed. The latest can detect bats when it hears their 350 kHz sonar calls thanks to an ultrasonic microphone and op amp. The device then records the bat sounds and then either heterodynes the sound down or time-expands it to human-audible range so the calls can actually be heard. There’s an LED display on the board as well as three input buttons, but an iOS companion app is available to interact with the device as well.

If you want to know for sure which species is flying around at night, you can use machine learning to help figure that out.