raspberry pi

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Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 Seen In The Wild

November 19, 2024 by 23 Comments

Last Thursday we were at Electronica, which is billed as the world’s largest electronics trade show, and it probably is! It fills up twenty airplane-hangar-sized halls in Munich, and only takes place every two years.

And what did we see on the wall in the Raspberry Pi department? One of the relatively new AI-enabled cameras running a real-time pose estimation demo, powered by nothing less than a brand-new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5. And it seemed happy to be running without a heatsink, but we don’t know how much load it was put under – most of the AI processing is done in the camera module.

We haven’t heard anything about the CM5 yet from the Raspberry folks, but we can’t imagine there’s all that much to say except that they’re getting ready to start production soon. If you look really carefully, this CM5 seems to have mouse bites on it that haven’t been ground off, so we’re speculating that this is still a pre-production unit, but feel free to generate wild rumors in the comment section.

The test board looks very similar to the RP4 CM demo board, so we imagine that the footprint hasn’t changed. (Edit: Oh wait, check out the M2 slot on the right-hand side!)

The CM4 was a real change for the compute module series, coming with a brand-new pinout that enabled them to break out more PCIe lanes. Despite the special connectors, it wasn’t all that hard to work with if you’re dedicated. So if you need more computing power in that smaller form factor, we’re guessing that you won’t have to wait all that much longer!

Thanks [kuro] for the tip, and for walking around Electronica with me.

FLOSS Weekly Episode 809: Pi4J – Stable And Boring On The Raspberry Pi

November 13, 2024 by No comments

This week, Jonathan Bennett and David Ruggles chat with Frank Delporte about Pi4J, the friendly Java libraries for the Raspberry Pi, that expose GPIO, SPI, I2C and other IO interfaces. Why would anyone want to use Java for the Pi? And what’s changed since the project started? Listen to find out!

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Fail Of The Week: Subscription EV Charger Becomes Standalone, Briefly

November 1, 2024 by 48 Comments

At this point in the tech dystopia cycle, it’s no surprise that the initial purchase price of a piece of technology is likely not the last payment you’ll make. Almost everything these days needs an ongoing subscription to do whatever you paid for it to do in the first place. It’s ridiculous, especially when all you want to do is charge your electric motorcycle with electricity you already pay for; why in the world would you need a subscription for that?

That was [Maarten]’s question when he picked up a used EVBox wall mount charger, which refused to charge his bike without signing up for a subscription. True, the subscription gave access to all kinds of gee-whiz features, none of which were necessary for the job of topping off the bike’s battery. A teardown revealed a well-built device with separate modules for mains supply and battery charging, plus a communications module with a cellular modem, obviously the bit that’s phoning home and keeping the charger from working without the subscription.

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Pi Pico Lays Down The Groove

October 30, 2024 by 8 Comments

From the 60s to perhaps the mid-00s, the path to musical stardom was essentially straight with very few forks. As a teenager you’d round up a drummer and a few guitar players and start jamming out of a garage, hoping to build to bigger and bigger venues. Few people made it for plenty of reasons, not least of which was because putting together a band like this is expensive. It wasn’t until capable electronic devices became mainstream and accepted in popular culture in the last decade or two that a few different paths for success finally opened up, and this groovebox shows just how much music can be created this way with a few straightforward electronic tools.

The groovebox is based on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and includes enough storage for 16 tracks with a sequencer for each track, along with a set of 16 scenes. Audio plays through PCM5102A DAC module, with a 160×128 TFT display and a touch-sensitive pad for user inputs. It’s not just a device for looping stored audio, though. There’s also a drum machine built in which can record and loop beats with varying sounds and pitches, as well as a sample slicer and a pattern generator and also as the ability to copy and paste clips.

There are a few limitations to using a device this small though. Because of memory size it outputs a 22 kHz mono signal, and its on-board storage is not particularly large either, but it does have an SD card slot for expansion. But it’s hard to beat the bang-for-the-buck qualities of a device like this, regardless, not to mention the portability. Especially when compared with the cost of multiple guitars, a drum set and a bunch of other analog equipment, it’s easy to see how musicians wielding these instruments have risen in popularity recently. This 12-button MIDI instrument could expand one’s digital musical capabilities even further.

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Compact Dedicated News Reader Always Brings You CBC

October 29, 2024 by 4 Comments

Your phone or laptop will give you access to the vast majority of news in the world, in languages you can read and a few hundred you can’t. Maybe you only like one news source, though, and that news source happens to be Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). If that’s the case, you might like to give this project a look from [Ron Grimes].

[Ron] built a device that does one thing and one thing only: it displays news stories from CBC. It’s built around a Raspberry Pi 2, and the project began when he wanted to interface a keypad just to see if he could. With that done, the next challenge was to integrate a 16×2 character LCD display of the HD44780 persuasion. With those two tasks completed, the question was simple — what to display? He figured tuning into the CBC news feed would be useful, and the Chocolate Box News Reader was born.

The device displays 29 news feeds in total, including the main top stories, world news, and Canadian regional news. It stores 15 news items per feed and will hang on to those stories even if the Internet drops. The reader will display the whole stash of stored news in around 90 minutes or so, and each stored item comes with more information if something strike’s [Ron’s] curiosity or interest. Files are on GitHub for the curious.

It’s a neat build, and we can imagine it being a smart item to have kicking around the house. It was also a great way for [Ron] to build on his familiarity with the Raspberry Pi, too. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own nifty Pi-based projects—or others!—don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

The Woodworker’s Cyberdeck

October 28, 2024 by 9 Comments

Computers were supposed to be personal, customizable, and cool. At times, in this cold modern world, we forget that. However, the cyberdeck scene is chock full of people building creative, original computers that suit their own tastes, aesthetics, and needs. [DIY Tinkerer] is one such individual, and he made the most of his woodworking skills when it came time to build his own cyberdeck!

The technological basics are along the lines of what we’re used to in this field. The build is based around a Raspberry Pi 4, with [DIY Tinkerer] selecting an 8 GB model for his needs. It’s paired with a 9000 mAh onboard battery, and there’s a power jack on the front to let the thing run on anything from 5 to 20 volts DC. For ease of use, there’s a multi-memory card reader and several USB 3 ports available.

The rest of the video focuses on the woodworking side of things. [DIY Tinkerer] shows us how he managed to build a new housing out of a rugged plastic case that would also be practical to use. The final product is both functional and attractive, and comes with an oscilloscope built in to boot! It came a long way from his earlier build, too.

We’ve seen a great load of cyberdeck builds over the years.

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Word Of The Day Calendar Is Great Use Of E-Paper

October 28, 2024 by 12 Comments

If you’re trying to learn a new language, there are always a lot of words to learn. A word-of-the-day calendar can help, and they’re often readily available off the shelf. Or, you can grab some hardware and build your own, as [daedal-tech] did!

The project was built as a gift to help [daedal-tech]’s partner with their efforts to pick up French. Thus, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W was employed and paired with a small Waveshare e-Paper display. These were stuffed inside a fancy light switch plate from Hobby Lobby and a small stand, the pair of which act as a pretty nice little frame for the build. The Pi runs a small Python script which employs the BeautifulSoup4 library and the Python Image library. Basically, the script grabs French words and spits them out on the display with a small description such that one might understand their meaning.

It’s a simple build, but one that has some real utility and is fun to boot. We might see more word clocks than calendars around these parts, but we love both all the same!