raspberry pi

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RasPiCommPlus, An Expansion Board For Expansion Boards

November 17, 2014 by 34 Comments

The easiest way to connect a GSM module to a Raspberry Pi would be to buy a breakout module, install some software, and connect to a mobile network with a Pi. Need GPS, too? That’s a whole other module, with different software. The guys behind RasPiCommPlus are working on a better solution – a breakout board for breakout boards that takes care of plugging a ton of modules into a Pi and sorts out the kernel drivers to make interfacing with these modules easy.

Right now, the team has a GPS and GSM module, digital in and out modules, an analog input module, and RS-232 and -485 modules. They’re working on some cool additions to the lineup, including a breakout for Sharp memory displays, a 9-axis IMU, a stepper motor driver, and a 1-wire breakout module.

Some of the RasPiCommPlus team showed up to the Hackaday Munich party and were kind enough to sit down for a demo video. You can check that out below.

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Hackaday Links: November 16, 2014

November 16, 2014 by 35 Comments

There have been a few people asking us to do our full teardown of a crowdfunding campaign, this time for Bleen. We’ll get to that, but here’s the TL;DR version: 208 people just threw money away, and right now Indiegogo is ~$3000 richer for doing nothing.

Insipired by a Hacklet, [Chris] documented his retro console build. He started out like most people do with a Raspberry Pi, but found emulating newer consoles like the N64 consumed too much processor time. He moved his build over to custom-assembled hardware with an AMD Micro-ATX board, a drive, and a USB gamepad. It’s beautiful, and much, much more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.

SD card in your Pi died? Of course it did. The problem is you’re not shutting down your Pi correctly. [satya] whipped up a quick project to fix that. One button, a bit of Python, and a shell script is all you need for a one-button shutdown for your Raspberry Pi.

A while ago, [Jan] built an ARM-based modeling MIDI synth that sounds a lot like the old Junos of the 80s. It’s build around the one 8-pin DIP ARM that’s being manufactured, placed between a MIDI jack and a 1/4″ jack. That’s pretty much all the components. [Gritty] plugged it into a Teensy that’s connected to a sequencer. It sounds awesome.

Everyone loves the Spark Core – there are a few floating around the office here. Now there’s a new Spark. It’s called the Photon, and they’re packaging it as a module. There’s an STM32F2 microcontroller and a BCM43362 Wi-Fi transceiver packaged in a nice, FCC certified module. Very cool.

Bricked Raspberry Pi Displays History

November 16, 2014 by 7 Comments

[eN0Rm’s] Raspberry Pis are much more than just another brick in the wall. He’s used the popular embedded Linux platform to build several small rear projection screens in a brick wall (Imgur link). Brick shaped metal enclosures were mortared into the wall of the building. Each rear projection screen is illuminated by a DLP projector which sits inside the metal enclosure. The Raspberry Pis sit on a shelf below all this.  The bricks are in a building in the Aker Brygge section of Oslo, Norway, and show historical facts and short videos about the local area.

[eN0Rm] could have used a PC for this task, the price for a low-end PC with a few graphics cards probably wouldn’t have been much more expensive than several Raspberry Pi’s with cases. However, this system has to just work, and a PC would represent a single point of failure. Even if one Raspberry Pi goes down, the others will continue running.

The current installation is rather messy, but it’s just a test setup.  [eN0Rm] has already been taken to task for the lack of cable management in his Reddit thread.  As [eNoRm] says – first get it working, then make it pretty.

Raspis in Near Space

Throwing Pis Into The Stratosphere

November 14, 2014 by 26 Comments

It’s always exciting to see the photos from High Altitude Ballooning (HAB) outings. While it’s no surprise that the Raspi is a popular choice—low cost, convenient USB jacks, etc.—this is the first build we’ve seen that uses an OLED during the trip to show real-time data on-screen to be picked up by the on-board webcam. (Though you may have to squint to see it at the bottom middle of the above image).

[Fabrice’s] payload made it to 26,000m, and the screen he chose, an ILSOFT OLED, performed admirably despite the extreme conditions suffered (temperatures can reach -50C). The last time we saw a near-space Raspi payload was a couple of years ago, when [Dave Akerman] was closing in on UK balloon altitude records. [Dave] hasn’t stopped launching balloons, either, testing new trackers and radio modules, as well as his most recent build that sent a Superman action figure to the skies—all recorded in glorious HD.

Check out both [Dave] and [Fabrice’s] blogs for loads of pictures documenting the latest in High Altitude Ballooning, and stay with us after the jump for a quick video of [Fabrice’s] OLED in action.

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$2 FM Transmitter For Raspberry Pi

November 12, 2014 by 37 Comments

We love re-purposed consumer gear. This project uses a cheap, discontinued cellphone gadget to create a Raspberry Pi controlled FM radio transmitter.

The Sony-Ericsson MMR-70 radio transmitter apparently used to connect to a cell phone and broadcast music. But the Walkman cellphones in question are a little bit old in the tooth, so one can buy the transmitter units for cheap on the resale market. What makes the transmitters even more interesting is that you can activate and deactivate the radio, change frequency or output power, and even send RDS station and song information.

It turns out (link in German) that the radios have an AVR ATMega32 microcontroller and a NS73 radio transmitter module, which can be entirely controlled over I2C. (Schematic here as PDF.) The units also have handy test points strewn all around. Once the test points were mapped out, one could completely ignore the on-board AVR microcontroller and control the FM transmitter module directly using the Raspberry Pi’s I2C outputs.

And that’s where [Manawyrm] stepped in. She wrote an I2C daemon for the Raspberry Pi that lets you control the FM transmitter via simple commands. All you have to do is solder up a bunch of test points, install [Manawyrm]’s software, write a batch script, and you’re on the air. For instance, this makes building a FM radio retransmitter for online streamed audio a one-day project. You can see his working example on youtube. Of course, you’ll want a web-based remote control interface to go with that.

If you’re interested in hacking along, and don’t have a Raspberry Pi application in mind, Sparkfun used to sell the NS73 radio transmitter so you can find lots of good information about the chip. We’d love to see a stand-alone broadcasting gizmo that actually utilizes the onboard AVR chip, but our hats are off to [Manawyrm] for making the Raspberry Pi version so accessible.

"Stomach Shot" lets you see through your zombie corpse.

“Stomach Shot” Halloween Costume

November 11, 2014 by 12 Comments

Halloween may have come and gone, but [Luis] sent us this build that you’ll want to check out. An avid Walking Dead fan, he put in some serious effort to an otherwise simple bloody t-shirt and created this see-through “stomach shot” gunshot wound.

The project uses a Raspi running the Pi Camera script to feed video from a webcam on the back of his costume to a 7″ screen on the front. [Luis] attached the screen to a GoPro chest harness—they look a bit like suspenders—to keep it centered, then built up a layer of latex around the display to hide the hard edges and make it more wound-like. Power comes from a 7.4V hobby Lipo battery plugged into a 5V voltage converter.

After ripping a small hole in the back of his t-shirt for the webcam and a large hole in the front for the screen, [Luis] applied the necessary liberal amount of fake blood to finish this clever shotgun blast effect.

The Raspberry Pi Model A+

November 9, 2014 by 57 Comments

A few months ago we were lucky to get the scoop on a new Raspberry Pi a few days before it was officially announced. This model ended up being the Raspberry Pi Model B+, with improvements that included more USB ports, not-dumb mounting holes, more GPIOs, and a decent microSD card connector. Today, we’re proud to leak another revision to the Raspberry Pi ecosystem – the Raspberry Pi Model A+

There really aren’t many details for this new revision of the Raspi, but we can make some educated guesses. The new model features the same not-dumb mounting holes as the B+, 58mm wide by 49mm wide. All the ports are moved to two sides of the board, and the analog audio and video are combined into one 3.5mm jack. Like the normal Model A, this one doesn’t have Ethernet and only one USB port, but the improvements seen from the B to the B+ are still there: a good microSD card socket is on the back, and the 40-pin GPIO header replaces the old 26-pin header. There’s no word if the A+ will feature a RAM upgrade – when the Model B was ramping up production The Foundation decided to bump the RAM up to 512MB. This could happen with the A+, but we’re not holding our breath.

There’s no word when the A+ will be announced, or when it will start shipping. The educated guess would say tomorrow morning, with an analysis of how much power this thing consumes a week after it starts shipping.