raspberry pi

1647 Articles

Hackaday Prize 2023: The NEOKlacker Pocket Computer

May 13, 2023 by 12 Comments

Science fiction always promised us pocket computers. These days, we’re spoiled for choice. [Spider Jerusalem] eschewed a simple smartphone or tablet, though, instead building a custom pocket computer of their own design. 

Like so many other DIY cyberdecks and handheld computers, this one relies on a Raspberry Pi. In this case, it’s built using a Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM, which offers a snappy experience that wasn’t available on the earliest boards. [Spider] paired it with a nifty 720×720 LCD screen and a full QWERTY button pad, wrapped up in a tidy 3D-printed case. Like any good pocket computer, it’s well-connected, thanks to a 4G LTE cellular data connection.

It might seem to be a build without a purpose in this era, but that’s not necessarily the case. When it comes to running barebones Linux utilities at a real command line, a Raspberry Pi offers some utility that the average smartphone doesn’t have out of the box. It’s a useful tool if you need to interface with a server on the go or do some low-level network diagnostics without carrying a whole laptop around. Video after the break.

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Tiny Bitcoin Miner Plays The Lottery

May 13, 2023 by 113 Comments

Usually when we think of Bitcoin miners, we imagine huge facilities of server racks doing nothing but essentially wasting energy, all for the chance that one of those computers amongst the rows will stumble upon the correct set of numbers to get rewarded with imaginary money. The idea being that the more computers, the more chances to win. But just buying one lottery ticket is the only thing technically required to win, at least in theory. And [Data Slayer] is putting this theory to the test with this Bitcoin miner built around a single Raspberry Pi.

This tiny Raspberry Pi Zero does get a little bit of support from an Ant Miner, a USB peripheral which is optimized to run the SHA256 hashing algorithm and solve the complex mathematical operations needed to “win” the round of Bitcoin mining. Typically a large number of these would be arrayed together to provide more chances at winning (or “earning”, to use the term generously) Bitcoin but there’s no reason other than extreme statistical improbability that a single one can’t work on its own. The only other thing needed to get this setup working is to give the Pi all of the configuration information it needs such as wallet information and pool information.

This type of miner isn’t novel by any means, and in fact it’s a style of mining cryptocurrency called “lottery mining” where contributing to a pool is omitted in favor of attempting to solve the entire block by pure random chance alone in the hopes that if it’s solved, the entire reward will be claimed by that device alone. In the case of this device, the current hash rate calculated when it was contributing to a pool means that when lottery mining, it has about a one-in-two-billion chance of winning. That’s essentially zero, which is basically the same chance of winning a lottery that pays out actual usable currency.

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Machine Vision Automates Trainspotting With Unique Full-Length Portraits

May 2, 2023 by 10 Comments

As hobbies go, trainspotting is just as valid a choice as any — we don’t judge. But it does present certain logistical challenges, such as having to be in visual range of a train to be able to spot it. There’s also the fact that trains are very large objects, and they tend to move very fast. What’s a railfan to do?

If you’re also technically minded, you might try building an automatic trainspotting bot like [jo-m] has. It looks like the hardware end of “Trainbot” is pretty simple since it has been tested on both x86 and Raspberry Pi, and supports both video4linux and Pi cam. The magic is in the software, which is able to detect a train entering the frame, record images, and then stitch them together into one long image. The whole thing is coded in Go and has some interesting bits, like a custom image patch mapping package.

Trainbot gives an unusual view of a train, one that most of us accustomed to watching a train pass at a crossing have never seen. By stitching small chunks of the train as it passes, Trainbot is able to show the entire train in a single image, which would be impossible to do except for being very, very far away from the track. [jo-m] also built a web interface for Trainbot where you can check out the comings and goings yourself. Each passing train’s image is accompanied by data like its velocity and acceleration, length of the train, and time of passage. There’s also a GIF of the original source video, which is pretty cool.

Here in the States, we don’t have a lot of passenger trains to spot, but we do have some really long freight trains. It’d be interesting to see how this works with a train that’s over a mile long; that would be quite an image. Looks like someone at least has the hardware in place to give it a try.

A small speaker with an LCD showing chatbot responses

AI-Powered Speaker Is A Chatbot You Can Actually Chat With

April 22, 2023 by 20 Comments

AI-powered chatbots are pretty cool, but most still require you to type your question on a keyboard and read an answer from a screen. It doesn’t have to be like that, of course: with a few standard tools, you can turn a chatbot into a machine that literally chats, as [Hoani Bryson] did. He decided to make a standalone voice-operated ChatGPT client that you can actually sit next to and have a conversation with.

The base of the project is a USB speaker, to which [Hoani] added a Raspberry Pi, a Teensy, a two-line LCD and a big red button. When you press the button, the Pi listens to your speech and converts it to text using the OpenAI voice transcription feature. It then sends the resulting text to ChatGPT through its API and waits for its response, which it turns into sound again through the eSpeak speech synthesizer. The LCD, driven by the Teensy, shows the current status of the machine and also provides live subtitles while the machine is talking.

To spice up the AI box’s appearance, [Hoani] also added an LED ring which shows a spectrogram of the audio being generated. This small addition really makes the thing come alive, turning it into what looks like a classic Sci-Fi movie prop. Except that this one’s real, of course – we are actually living in the future, with human-like AI all around us.

All code, mostly written in Go, is freely available on [Hoani]’s GitHub page. It also includes a separate audio processing library called toot that [Hoani] wrote to help him interface with the micophone and do spectral analysis. Anyone with basic electronic skills can now build their own AI companion and talk to it – something that ham radio operators have been doing for a while.

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A New Commodore C128 Cartridge

April 17, 2023 by 18 Comments

A new Commodore C128 cartridge in 2023?  That’s what [idun-projects] set out to do and, as you can see in the video below, did. I did the original C128 hardware design and worked with the amazing team that turned this home computer out in 1985. Honestly, I am amazed that any of them are still working 38 years later, let alone that someone is making new cartridges for it.

I also never thought I would hear about someone’s in-depth experience designing for the ‘128. The post takes us through [idun-project’s] decision to use the ‘128 and how modern expectations apply to all computers, even the old ones. Hot on the list was connectivity and reasonable storage (looking at you, floppy disks).

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Pi Microcontroller Still Runs A Webserver

April 7, 2023 by 14 Comments

At first glance, the Raspberry Pi Pico might seem like a bit of a black sheep when compared to the other offerings from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. While most of the rest of their lineup can run Linux environments with full desktops, the Pico is largely limited to microcontroller duties in exchange for much smaller price tags and footprints. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be coerced into doing some of the things we might want a mainline Pi to do, like run a web server.

The project can run a static web page simply by providing the Pico with the project code available on the GitHub page and the HTML that you’d like the Pico to serve. It can be more than a static web page though, as it is also capable of running Python commands through the web interface as well. The server can pass commands from the web server and back as well, allowing for control of various projects though a browser interface. In theory this could be much simpler than building a physical user interface for a project instead by offloading all of this control onto the web server instead.

The project not only supports the RP2040-based Raspberry Pi Pico but can also be implemented on other WiFi-enabled microcontroller boards like the ESP8266 and ESP32. Having something like this on hand could greatly streamline smaller projects without having to reach for a more powerful (and more expensive) single-board computer like a Pi 3 or 4. We’ve seen some other builds on these boards capable of not only running HTML and CSS renderers, but supporting some image formats as well.

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A white, house-shaped clock with the words "TEMPUS NECTIT" written in faux Roman script in black on a strip of silver at the base of the "roof." a white power cord extends from the left of the enclosure, and the center of the clock is a 22 pin knitting machine wheel with one pin covered in silver metalic. A white plastic peg extends from the bottom right of the enclosure to hold the feedstock yarn.

Tempus Nectit, A DIY Knitting Clock With Instructions

April 5, 2023 by 1 Comment

We’re no strangers to unusual clocks here at Hackaday, and some of our favorites make time a little more tangible like [Kyle Rankin]’s knitting clock.

Inspired by our coverage of [Siren Elise Wilhelmsen]’s knitting clock, [Rankin] decided to build one of his own. Since details on the build from the original artist were sparse, he had to reverse engineer how the device worked. He identified that a knitting clock is essentially a knitting machine with a stepper motor replacing the hand crank.

Using a Raspberry Pi with an Adafruit motor hat connected to a stepper motor and a 3D printed motor adapter, [Rankin] was able to drive the knitting machine to do a complete round of knitting every twelve hours. By marking one of the knitting pegs as an hour hand, the clock works as a traditional clock in addition to its year-long knitting task. [Rankin] says he still has some fine tuning to work on, but that he’s happy to have had the chance to combine so many of his interests into a single project.

If you’re looking for more knitting hacks, check out this knitted keyboard instrument or a knitted circuit board.

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