Plan 9 On The Raspberry Pi

December 1, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Yet another operating system has been ported to the Raspberry Pi. No, it’s not Haiku, sadly, but it is something just as weird and interesting. This time it’s Plan 9 from Bell Labs, an 80’s era OS from the same company that brought you C and Unix.

As a research operating system, Plan 9 has a bunch of really weird, but useful features. For one, everything about a computer running Plan 9 is distributed; the memory can be running on one machine, the processor on another, and the display can run on yet another machine. This modularity gives Plan 9 the honorable title of, ‘more Unix than Unix’.

Another great feature, although somewhat of a historical note, is that Plan 9’s graphics capabilities are written into the kernel, unlike Linux and X where the display manager is floating around in user space.

It’s an interesting system, and if you’ve got enough Raspis to build your own supercomputer you might want to install Plan 9 on a few of your nodes, just to see what the future computer of ages past looked like.

Raspberry Pi Quadcopter

December 1, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjXvzMdf8Nk&w=470]

It was bound to happen sooner or later, but that doesn’t diminish the awesomeness of [Matthew]’s Raspberry Pi-powered quadcopter.

[Matthew]’s quadcopter is similar to all the other flying drones we’ve seen before with one important difference – all the processing, from reading the gyroscopes to computing exactly how much power to give each motor – is handled by a Raspberry Pi. This task is usually the domain of a microcontroller, as these calculations need to happen in real-time. The Linux distro [Matt] is running on his Pi has a lot more overhead than a simple AVR or ARM microcontroller, so doing everything that needs to be done in real-time isn’t guaranteed. With a bit of clever programming, [Matthew] managed to make sure all the necessary tasks were taken care of in time. It’s still not a real-time operating system, but for this project at least, it’s good enough.

Since the Raspberry Pi in [Matthew]’s quadcopter is much more powerful than a microcontroller, there’s plenty of head room to SSH into the ‘copter while it’s flying. There may even be enough processing power to stream video to a web server; we honestly can’t wait to see what [Matthew] does with his flying Linux computer in the future.

You can check out [Matthew]’s code over on the git or watch a few flight test videos over on his youtube.

Minecraft Coming To Raspberry Pi

November 26, 2012 by Eric Evenchick 18 Comments

The folks over at the Raspberry Pi Foundation often gets asked “does it run Minecraft?” Mojang, the team behind the block building game, has announced that they will be releasing Minecraft: Pi Edition. This port will be based off the Pocket Edition of the game, but with a revised set of features.

So what does this have to do with hacking? Mojang has announced that the Pi Edition will have “support for multiple programming languages.” There aren’t too many details about what this support will entail, but it looks to be aimed at teaching programming by using the world of Minecraft.

Hopefully, it will be possible to interface with the RPi’s expansion header to allow external devices to get data and create objects in the Minecraft world. There’s a lot of potential for hacking and learning programming skills.

The best part? It will be a completely free download. We’re looking forward to the launch.

Tiny MAME Cabinet Built From Raspberry Pi

November 26, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

It’s been a while since we’ve seen [Sprite_tm] pull a project from thin air, and we haven’t seen him do anything with a Raspberry Pi yet. All things must pass, and finally [Sprite] has unleashed his tiny, pocket-sized MAME machine to the world.

The build uses a Raspi for all the Linux-ey and MAME goodness, but [Sprite_tm] didn’t want to fiddle around with the HDMI or analog video output. Instead, he chose to use an SPI-controlled TFT display that is only 2.4 inches across. This isn’t a new hack for [Sprite] – he figured out how to connect this display over GPIO pins with a Carambola earlier this year.

To make his cabinet portable, [Sprite] opted for using old cell phone batteries with a cleverly designed charging circuit. When the power supply is connected to +5V, the batteries charge. When this power is removed, an ATtiny85 provides 5V of power to the Raspi and display.

No arcade cabinet is complete without a marquee of some sort, so [Sprite] used an extremely tiny 128×32 white OLED to display the logo of the game currently being played. Everything in the Raspi is set up to be completely seamless when switching between games, automatically configuring the controls and marquee for the currently selected game.

You can check out [Sprite]’s mini MAME booting straight into Bubble Bobble after the break along with some gameplay footage and finally switching it over to Nemesis. A very awesome build from an exceedingly awesome maker.

Continue reading “Tiny MAME Cabinet Built From Raspberry Pi” →

Raspberry Pi Camera Board Coming Early Next Year

November 24, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 52 Comments

We’ve seen hundreds of builds tinker around with the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. They’re great for bridging the gap between physical sensors and a virtual world, but there are a few more unused and ignored pins on the Raspberry Pi. The folks at the Raspberry Pi foundation are finally giving these unused pins a life of their own with the new camera module for our favorite single board computer.

The specs for the camera are fairly impressive – it can record H.264 video at 1080p and 30 frames per second. Best of all, it costs only $25.

There are a few more hurdles to pass before the Raspi foundation can send this board out to manufacturers. They still need to make sure the ribbon cable doesn’t emit any interference, but if all goes right the camera module should be available early next year.

You can see the camera in action in the video after the break. If you listen closely you can hear [Rob Bishop] of the Raspi foundation say they’re also working on a display add on for the other unused pins on the Pi, something we can’t wait to see.

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Camera Board Coming Early Next Year” →

EVE Radio Breakout Board For The Raspberry Pi

November 17, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

The Raspberry Pi is an excellent tool to build the ‘Internet of things’ we’ve been hearing about, but there’s still the issue of connecting the Raspi to other devices. The EVE Alpha – a breakout board for several wireless radio modules for the Raspberry Pi – hopes to change that with their Kickstarter campaign.

The idea behind the EVE is to provide a link between low-power radio modules found in a few of the microcontroller projects we’ve seen and the Raspberry Pi. It does this by simply serving as a breakout board, taking the GPIO pins on the Raspi and connecting them to solder pads for a few of the many radio modules currently available.

Already the EVE supports the RFM12B wireless tranciever, a Z-Wave module, 868-915Mhz SRF modules, and has a breakout for an XBee module, allowing the EVE to communicate using one of the many different XBee boards. There’s also a battery-backed real-time clock and temperature sensor thrown in for good measure making this board the perfect building block for an outdoor weather station or solar array.

It’s an awesome idea, and if you already have a few radio modules, incredibly cheap; just the PCB is only £6, and a board with all the SMD components is only £20.

Raspberry Pi Gets RISC OS, Can Now Play Elite

November 8, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

The processor in the Raspberry Pi – an ARM11 built by Broadcom – actually has a long and storied history. Much as how the Intel i7 in a top-of-the-line desktop can still run code written for the original IBM PC, the ARM chip in the Raspberry Pi is also based on decades-old technology.

The first ARM-based computer was the Acorn Archimedes, a mid-80s computer with 512kB of RAM and no hard drive. The Archimedes ran RISC OS, a very nice graphical operating system written explicitly for the ARM architecture. RISC OS is now available for the Raspberry Pi, finally bridging the gap between educational computers from 1987 and 2012.

Of course, a very much updated version of 25-year-old operating system running on a Raspberry Pi doesn’t mean much without a ‘killer app,’ does it? For the original Acorn Archimedes the killer app – and one of the best video games of the 80s – was Elite, a space trading and combat game that featured vector-style ships. [Pete Taylor] downloaded the Raspi RISC OS image and got Elite running using an Archimedes emulator and, of course, the Archimedes port of Elite.

It’s a pretty neat development if you’re in to alternative OSes and one of the best space-based games ever made. Well worth a download, at the very least.