Alas, Poor Yorick! I Tweeted Him

October 19, 2013 by Adam Fabio 9 Comments

yoreck the talking skull

You know Halloween is coming around when the tweet reading skulls start popping up. [Marc] wanted to bring the Halloween spirit into his workplace, so he built “Yorick”. In case you’re worried, no humans were harmed (or farmed for parts) in the creation of this hack. Yorick started life as an anatomical skull model, the type one might find in a school biology lab. Yorick’s skull provided a perfect enclosure for not one but two brains.

A Raspberry Pi handles his higher brain function. The Pi uses the Twitter API to scan for tweets to @wedurick. Once a tweet is found, it is sent to Google’s translate server. A somewhat well-known method of performing text to speech with Google translate is the next step. The procedure is simple: sending “http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=hackaday” will return an MP3 file of the audio. To get a British accent, simply change to google.co.uk.

The Pi pipes the audio to a speaker, and to the analog input pin of an Arduino, which handles Yorick’s lower brain functions. The Arduino polls the audio in a tight loop. An average of the last 3 samples is computed and mapped to a servo position. This results in an amazingly realistic and automatic mouth movement. We think this is the best part of the hack.

It wouldn’t’ be fair for [Marc] to keep the fruits of his labors to himself, so Yorick now has his own Livestream channel. Click past the break to hear Yorick’s opinion on the Hack A Day comments section! Have we mentioned that we love pandering?

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SSTV Beacon Based On A Raspberry Pi

October 6, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 17 Comments

The Budapest hackerspace did some joint work with a local ham radio club and created an SSTV beacon housed inside a CCTV case that takes an image of its environment and transmits it using slow-scan television over ham bands.

As the title says, the build uses a Raspberry Pi to process the image taken from its camera and then transmits it over the air using a Ricofunk UHF transceiver with a main frequency of 433.425MHz. On the software side, PySSTV is used to convert images to frequency/time tuples, UNIXSSTV then creates the actual audio file and finally sox plays it. To avoid screwing up the Raspberry SD card, every part of the filsystem is either mounted in read-only mode (things like /home and /usr) or uses a ramdisk (things like /tmp and logs).

The plans, schematics and source code are available, so they hope that other hackerspaces will join the ranks!

Raspberry Pi Media Center On An Apple TV

October 3, 2013 by Phillip Ryals 8 Comments

You may tend to think of the AppleTV as a sort of walled garden, and you would mostly be right. Apple keeps tight control over what runs on their devices. That said, [David] decided to look closer at how the various ‘applications’ work. It turns out, the applications are nothing more than glorified web plugins. Using XML and Javascript, the apps simply define library function calls, giving them a consistent interface. So using fairly simply methods, the options really open up. Unfortunately, the method for adding new sites isn’t enabled by default.

Using a jailbroken AppleTV, [David] was able to do a fair bit of detective work and found a way to enable the ‘Add Site’ option, which allowed him to use his Raspberry Pi as a media server. The good news: you don’t need to jailbreak if you’re running 5.2 or 5.3… you should be able to recreate his success fairly easily. The bad news: things seem to have changed in 6.0. [David] isn’t sure if this was Apple intentionally closing a hole, or just not dotting all of their i’s.

[David] put all of his research up on Github, including the rough code. If you haven’t updated your AppleTV yet, and you have a Raspberry Pi to use as a media server, give it a try and let us know how it goes in the comments.

A Retro, Not Steampunk, Media Center

October 2, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

[toddfx] wanted to put his Raspberry Pi to work and set about creating one of the best stereos we’ve ever seen: It’s called the Audio Infuser 4700, and turns a conglomeration of old disused stereo equipment into a functional piece of art.

[toddfx] used a Raspberry Pi to stream music over WiFi, but also wanted to play some classic vinyl. He took apart an old Yamaha YP-D4 turntable. stripped it to the bone, and created a fantastic oak enclosure around it. To this, he added a seven-band graphic EQ, aux jacks (both in and out), and a tiny 5″ CRT from an old portable TV.

Where this build really gets great is the fabrication. The front panels have all their graphics and lettering engraved via a toner-transfer like method using copper sulphate and salt. [todd] got the idea from this thread and we have to say the results are unbelievable.

Even though this awesome device only used for music, [toddfx] used the tiny color CRT to its fullest. Flick one switch, and it’s an oscilloscope-like display. Flick another switch, and it’s the output of the Raspberry Pi loaded up with a few MAME games including Pacman, Asteroids, and Space Invaders.

[toddfx] put up a build page for his Audio Infuser and an awesome video for his project, available below.

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Hackaday Links: September 22, 2013

September 22, 2013 by Mike Szczys 42 Comments

First we start with some protection… for your USB charged devices. Here’s a USB Condom which acts as a pass-through for the power rails but not the data lines. This prevents untrusted charger security exploits. [Thanks Markus]

[OutKastz] seems to think he’s uncovered a price matching conspiracy at Best Buy. His post references an HDTV video wall he has built. But he also discovered that there are two different version of the same television sold as the same SKU. His theory is that this prevents the big box from matching prices on half of their inventory.

When you’re in need of some breadboarding action with your Raspberry Pi and want to make it as painless as possible you need to build your own Pi Cobbler. This is the diy version of an Adafruit product, built using a couple of pin headers, stripboard, and an IDE cable.

Speaking of Adafruit, did you see Ladyada’s teardown of an ICEdot crash sensor?

[Phineas] is showing off a really really small hexacopter. Check out the maiden flight, as well as first indoor and first outdoor tests.

Perhaps this coded entry system will inspire a future project for you. It uses piezo elements to enter a code which unlocks the back door to the company. The glass door already had a series of large dots painted on it. This turns out to be a nice interface for a four button code system.

Many projects use a Raspberry Pi as a web server. But there is more than just one flavor available. [Jeremy Morgan] performed a variety of Pi server benchmarks using Nginx, Monkey, Lighttpd, and Apache. [Thanks Walter]

Can an old TV antenna reflector be used to boost the range of a WiFi dongle? We’re a bit skeptical. Let us know what you think in the comments.

And finally, we do wish there was more information on this upright piano used to play Doom [Thanks Itay].

Stealth Peephole Camera Watches Your Front Door

September 17, 2013 by James Hobson 33 Comments

In this week’s links post we mentioned an over-powered DSLR peephole that purportedly cost $4000. So when we saw this tip regarding a relatively inexpensive digital peephole, we thought some of you might be a bit more interested.

The hardware is quite simple; a decent webcam, a Raspberry Pi, and a powered USB hub. The camera gets stripped down to its PCB and hidden inside the door itself. Even if you see this from the inside it’s just a suspicious-looking wire which wouldn’t make most people think a camera was in use.

On the software side of things, [Alex] set up his Raspberry Pi as a 24/7 webcam server to stream the video online. Unlike using a cheap wireless CCTV camera, his video signals are secure. He then runs Motion, a free software motion detector to allow the camera to trigger events when someone comes sneaking by. It can be setup to send you a text, call you, play an alarm, take a picture, record a video… the list goes on. His blog has a full DIY guide if you want to replicate this system. We just hope you have a stronger door!

We covered a similar project back in 2011, but it had made use of real server instead of an inexpensive Raspberry Pi.

[Thanks Alex!]

Giant Video Walls Powered By A Raspberry Pi

September 16, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

There’s no denying that giant video walls are awesome, but creating one usually means a fairly complex setup with either multiple computers or very expensive video cards. Now, with Pi Wall, you can make a video wall as large as your wallet will allow with only one Raspi per monitor, and a single master pi to control the whole shebang.

As long as you have a few displays with an HDMI input, it’s easy to turn them into a giant monitor. Just plug one Pi per monitor into a network switch, have a Pi (or other Linux box) transmit a video to all the video tiles, and sit back and enjoy the show.

Right now there is an installation guide for creating a Pi Wall, but there are a few limitations; this software only works with the video player provided with the Raspberry Pi, omxplayer. If you’re looking to create an enormous display for a flight simulator or what have you, you might need to do a bit of tinkering under the hood.