Kumo Connect: From Automated Desktop And Backyard Gardens To Automated Everything

July 16, 2014 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

photo hut I ran into a guy at Maker Faire Kansas City who I used to scoop ice cream with twenty years ago. We were slinging frozen dairy at a Baskin Robbins in a dying suburban strip mall that had a one-hour photo booth in the parking lot. It was just far enough away from our doorstep that dotting its backside with the hard-frozen ice cream balls that had been scooped and then not always accidentally dropped into the depths of the freezer was challenging. This guy, [Blake], kept a hockey stick hidden in the back room especially for this purpose. I never could get them to fly that far, but he was pretty good at it.

I hadn’t seen him since those days, and there he was manning a booth at Maker Faire. He looked quite professional, showing no hint of the mischief from those days of ice cream hockey. His booth’s main attraction was Niwa, a connected indoor garden. Having spent four years living and working in Japan after college, [Blake] did not choose this name arbitrarily: ‘niwa’ is Japanese for ‘garden’. He loves Hackaday and was more than happy to share his story.

Niwa and gnome

Connecting with Nature

[Blake] is an avid gardener, but his wife does not share this passion. A few years ago, he took a new job that required travel on an almost weekly basis, which meant big trouble for his plants. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find what he wanted to ensure they were taken care of. You know what comes next: he decided he would design his own system. However, he had no experience with electronics.

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Raspberry Pi Turns A Novelty Radio Into A Real Computer

July 15, 2014 by Adam Fabio 32 Comments

picomp

[Strider19] remembers the 90’s, and a great little novelty radio he had back then. Shaped like a computer, the radio was a typical AM/FM affair, with the monitor serving as a speaker. His original radio was long gone, but [Strider19] was able to find a replacement on everyone’s favorite auction site. With the replacement radio in hand, he set his plan in motion: Turning it into an epic Raspberry Pi Case.

The Raspberry Pi fit great, but [Strider19’s] 3.5″ composite monitor didn’t quite make it. Following in [Ben Heck’s] footsteps, [Strider19] cut the LCD’s control PCB down to fit the case. A piece of clear polycarbonate protects the fragile LCD from poking fingers. The monitor’s button board, two USB ports, and an external composite input mounted nicely inside the former battery compartment at the rear of the CRT. There’s even enough room back there to hide a USB WiFi adapter.

The Raspi itself fit perfectly into the base of the radio, along with a DC to DC converter, USB hub, real-time clock module, and a whole bunch of wires used to extend the connectors.

The final result is awesome! Thanks to a request on [Strider19’s] Reddit thread, we have pictures of Doom running on a (former) radio. Even Windows 3.1 runs under DosBox, though it took a bit of tweaking to get the display settings just right. Now [Strider19] just needs to figure out how to turn that tiny keyboard into a working model. We think some old school cell phone keyboard hacking may be in order!

The Raspberry Pi Model B+ Is Here (Again!)

July 14, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 105 Comments

Depending on who you believe, yesterday someone either broke an NDA or was the lucky recipient of an Element 14 shipping error. Nevertheless, we were lucky enough to get a glimpse at the new Raspberry Pi Model B+. Today, everything is live, and Adafruit has a great teardown of what’s new, what’s changed, and what’s completely different in this new board.

The biggest question about this new Pi was the CPU: the Broadcom SoC in the models A and B are looking a little long in the tooth right now, and an upgraded CPU would be a very, very welcome addition. There is no change. This is the same 700 MHz Broadcom chip with 512MB of RAM. There will not be a ‘magical, because you’re awesome’ RAM upgrade the original Model B saw early in production, either – there simply aren’t enough address pins in the SoC.

Despite not having an upgraded CPU, there are some neat features that addressed the complaints of the original Pi: The standard sized SD card socket is replaced with a microSD card socket that won’t stick out over the edge of the board. The ports are rearranged, with the analog video out on a TRRS plug with the audio. There are now four USB ports and an Ethernet port thanks to this chip, and mounting holes galore: they’re M2.5 holes in a square 58mm wide and 49mm high. Also included in the B+ is a completely redesigned power supply – the jumbo linear regulator is gone, replaced with an all-around better power supply.

The biggest change for anyone looking making a project with the Pi is the expanded GPIO header. This is a 40 pin header, with the ‘top’ pins identical to the original 26 pin header. Yes, all your existing Pi plates/shields/whatevers will still work. The new pins on this header include nine more GPIO pins, the I2S pins for the Wolfson audio card, and a pair of pins for an ID EEPROM. Connections to an ID EEPROM have been a feature of the BeagleBone for a while now, and this will allow the Pi to configure the appropriate I/Os and kernel modules at boot, depending on what Pi Plates are attached.

The best part about this is the price – it’s the same as the OG Model B. Using the same case as you old Model A or B is out of the question, but that’s totally what Kickstarter is for, right? You might want to grab one of those, because this is probably going to be the form factor for the upgraded Raspberry Pi 2.0 that will probably be released in a year or two.

ADC For Raspi Without Using An ADC

July 13, 2014 by Will Sweatman 22 Comments

Schematic of ACD for a raspi

With all the amazing and wonderful things a Raspberry Pi can do, it is sorely lacking a dedicated ADC chip. Sure, you can wire up an ADC via SPI or even I2C with a little work, but still. It would be nice to have access to an Analog to Digital converter without having to go through the trouble. Fortunately, [Hussam] has figured out a way to do just this.

Using a comparator, two resistors, a single capacitor and a few lines of code, [Hussam] managed to get an active ADC working on his Raspberry Pi. He’s using the PWM1 and a passive RC filter to make a DAC. He then uses the comparator along with a ‘ successive approximation algorithm’ to complete the ADC.

[Hussam] mentions that the hack is not new, and this technique has been used before for microcrotrollers that lack a built-in ADC. But we are still impressed with his attention to detail in describing how to do this on a Raspi. Be sure to check out the link for full details, code, and an awesome description on how his algorithm works.

Introducing The Raspberry Pi B+

July 13, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 208 Comments

It looks like Element 14 screwed up a single shipment, because some lucky soul just received an unreleased model of Raspberry Pi. If you can believe the silkscreen, it’s called the Raspberry Pi Model B+, and while we have no idea what the chipset is, the layout and peripherals look pretty cool.

From the looks of it, this new board features four USB ports, a new, 40-pin GPIO header, and more screw holes that will allow you to secure this to anything. The analog video out is gone, and the SD card connector – a weak point of the original design – might be replaced with a microSD connector. Oh, every Raspi case that has ever been made? They won’t work.

Without booting this Raspi B+ there’s no way of knowing what the chipset is on this new board. The smart money is on the entire SOC being the same: basically, what you’re looking at is the same as a Raspberry Pi Model B, only with a few more ports.

There is no clue when these improved Raspis will be available, but the word “soon™” will probably appear on the Raspberry Pi blog shortly.

Thanks [John] for the tip.

EDIT: [feuerrot] is smarter than me and mirrored all the images in an imgur album.

Pi Musicbox 0.5 Released

July 13, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 4 Comments

Have an extra Raspberry Pi kicking around? Pi MusicBox provides a way to quickly turn it into a standalone streaming device that can fetch music from tons of sources. The latest release of Pi MusicBox adds a bunch of new features.

We took a look at this software over a year ago, and noted that it made streaming Spotify easy, and had support for controlling tracks using Music Player Daemon (MPD). The newest release supports AirPlay, DNLA, Google Music, SoundCloud, and several other music sources.

Since the analog audio output on the Pi isn’t great, Pi MusicBox includes support for a variety of USB sound cards. It’s also possible to use the HDMI port for digital audio output, which can be connected into your home theatre system.

If you want to build a standalone music device, this looks like a great place to start. The user community has built a variety of projects that run this software, which are featured on the Pi MusicBox homepage.

The Raspi GameBoy For The Rest Of Us

July 6, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

We’ve seen quite a few casemods that stuff a Raspberry Pi into a Game Boy with all the required to turn it into a very cool portable Pi and retro gaming device. Most of these builds use a modified 20-year-old Game Boy for the enclosure, and if you have an attachment to your old green screened friend, you might not want to cut it up for a Pi project. [Noe] over at Adafruit has a solution – a 3D printed Game Boy enclosure that turns a Pi and TFT screen into a barely pocketable Raspberry Pi, with all the buttons and batteries required for taking an installation of RetroPi on the road.

The PiGRRL, as this build is called, uses the Adafruit touchscreen TFT kit for the Pi, effectively turning the Pi into a very tiny tablet. This allows for normal desktop interaction with the Pi, and it’s also small enough to fit in the smallest of enclosures.

The 3D printed enclosure is the star of the show here, allowing complete access to most of the Pi’s ports, while allowing enough space in the rest of the enclosure for a largish battery, charging circuit, and buttons taken from an SNES controller.

The end result is a very usable portable Pi that just happens to be in the perfect form factor for loading up a few ROMs and playing some classic video games. Video below.

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