New Raspberry Pi 400 Is A Computer In A Keyboard For $70

November 2, 2020 by Elliot Williams 248 Comments

The newest Raspberry Pi 400 almost-all-in-one computer is very, very slick. Fitting in the size of a small portable keyboard, it’s got a Pi 4 processor of the 20% speedier 1.8 GHz variety, 4 GB of RAM, wireless, Ethernet, dual HDMI outputs, and even a 40-pin Raspberry Standard IDE-cable style header on the back. For $70 retail, it’s basically a steal, if it’s the kind of thing you’re looking for because it has $55 dollars worth of Raspberry Pi 4 inside.

In some sense, it’s getting dangerously close to fulfilling the Raspberry Pi Dream. (And it’s got one more trick up it’s sleeve in the form of a huge chunk of aluminum heat-sinked to the CPU that makes us think “overclocking”.)

We remember the founding dream of the Raspberry Pi as if it were just about a decade ago: to build a computer cheap enough that it would be within everyone’s reach, so that every school kid could have one, bringing us into a world of global computer literacy. That’s a damn big goal, and while they succeeded on the first count early on, putting together a $35 single-board computer, the gigantic second part of that master plan is still a work in progress. As ubiquitous as the Raspberry Pi is in our circles, it’s still got a ways to go with the general population.

The Raspberry Pi Model B wasn’t, and isn’t, exactly something that you’d show to my father-in-law without him asking incredulously “That’s a computer?!”. It was a green PCB, and you had to rig up your own beefy 5 V power supply, figure out some kind of enclosure, scrounge up a keyboard and mouse, add in a monitor, and only then did you have a computer. We’ve asked the question a couple of times, can the newest Raspberry Pi 4B be used as a daily-driver desktop, and answered that in the affirmative, certainly in terms of it having adequate performance.

But powerful doesn’t necessarily mean accessible. If you want to build your own cyberdeck, put together an arcade box, screw a computer into the underside of your workbench, or stack together Pi Hats and mount the whole thing on your autonomous vehicle testbed, the Raspberry Pi is just the ticket. But that’s the computer for the Hackaday crowd, not the computer for everybody. It’s just a little bit too involved.

The Raspberry Pi 400, in contrast, is a sleek piece of design. Sure, you still need a power supply, monitor, and mouse, but it’s a lot more of a stand-alone computer than the Pi Model B. It’s made of high-quality plastic, with a decent keyboard. It’s small, it’s light, and frankly, it’s sexy. It’s the kind of thing that would pass the father-in-law test, and we’d suggest that might go a long way toward actually realizing the dream of cheaply available universal (open source) computing. In some sense, it’s the least Hackaday Raspberry Pi. But that’s not saying that you might not want one to slip into your toolbag.

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Ubuntu (Finally) Officially Lands On The Raspberry Pi. But Will Anyone Notice?

October 31, 2020 by Jenny List 51 Comments

The Raspberry Pi has been with us for over eight years now, and during that time it has seen a myriad operating system ports. It seems that almost anything can be run on the little computer, but generally the offerings have seen minority uptake in the face of the officially supported Raspbian, or as it’s now called, Raspberry Pi OS.

Maybe that could change, with the arrival of an Ubuntu release for the platform. For those of you pointing out that this is nothing new, what makes the new version 20.10 release special is that it’s the first official full Ubuntu release, rather than an unofficial port.

So Raspberry Pi 4 owners can now install the same full-fat Ubuntu they have on their PCs, and with the same official Ubuntu support. What does this really do for them that Raspberry Pi OS doesn’t? Underneath they share Debian underpinnings, and they both benefit from a huge quantity of online resources should the user find themselves in trouble. Their repositories both contain almost every reasonable piece of software that could be imagined, so the average Pi user might be forgiven for a little confusion.

We don’t expect this news to take the Pi desktop world by storm then. Ubuntu is a powerful distribution, but it’s fair to say that it is not the least bloated among distributions, and that some of its quirks such as Snap applications leave many users underwhelmed. By contrast Raspberry Pi OS is relatively lightweight, and crucially it’s optimised for the Pi. Its entire support base online is specific to the Pi hardware, so the seeker of solutions need not worry about encountering some quirk in an explanation that pertains only to PC platforms.

It’s fair to say though, that this release is almost certainly not targeted at the casual desktop user. We’d expect that instead it will be in the Ubuntu portfolio for commercial and enterprise users, and in particular for the new Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module in which it will no doubt form the underpinnings of many products without their owners ever realising it.

[via OMG Ubuntu]

Radio Remote Control Via HTML5

October 24, 2020 by Adam Zeloof 36 Comments

It’s a common scene: a dedicated radio amateur wakes up early in the morning, ambles over to their shack, and sits in the glow of vacuum tubes as they call CQ DX, trying to contact hams in time zones across the world. It’s also a common scene for the same ham to sit in the comfort of their living room, sipping hot chocolate and remote-controlling their rig from a laptop. As you can imagine, this essentially involves a server running on a computer hooked up to the radio, which is connected via the internet to a client running on the laptop. [Olivier/ F4HTB] saw a way to improve the process by eliminating the client software and controlling the rig from a web browser.

[Oliver]’s software, aptly named Universal HamRadio Remote, runs a web server that hosts an HTML5 dashboard for controlling the radio. It also pipes audio back and forth (radio control wouldn’t be very useful if you couldn’t talk!), and can be run on a Raspberry Pi. Not only does this make setup easier, as there is no need to configure the client machine, but it also makes the radio accessible from nearly any modern device.

We’ve seen a similar (albeit expensive and closed-source) solution, the MFJ-1234, before, but it’s always refreshing to see the open-source community tackle a problem and make it their own. We can’t wait to see where the project goes next!

Let The Solar Free

October 24, 2020 by Matthew Carlson 15 Comments

Anyone tackling solar power for the first time will quickly find there’s a truly dizzying amount of information to understand and digest. You might think you just need to buy some solar panels, wire them together, and just sort of plug them in. But there are a hundred and one different questions about how they’ll be connected, the voltage of the panels, and the hardware for driving a load. [Michel], [case06], and [Martin Jäger] have set out to create a simpler and easier to understand charge controller named LibreSolar.

A charge controller is fundamentally a simple idea. The goal is to charge a battery with solar panels, which means it’s essentially just a heavy-duty DC/DC buck converter. What makes this project different is that it is an open platform built for extensibility.

There are UEXT connectors included for adding extra peripherals, and with some tweaks to the STM32 firmware, it would be easy to handle small wind turbines (with some rectification to convert to DC, of course). LibreSolar seems to be designed with an eye towards creating a nano-scale localized networked grid. For example, they’ve developed a Raspberry Pi Zero module that uses WiFi to create a CAN bus allowing the boxes to communicate their maximum voltage to each other. This makes the system as plug-and-play as possible, as the bus doesn’t require a master controller to communicate.

With features such as MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking), 20 amp peak charging, a USB interface for updating, and several built-in protection mechanisms, it’s clearly a well thought through project. We look forward to seeing it deployed in the real world!

Tracking Boats And Ships In Real Time At The Same Time

October 22, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 15 Comments

Software-defined radio came on the hacker scene in a big way less than a decade ago thanks to the discovery that a small USB-based TV tuner dongle could be used for receiving all kinds of radio transmissions. Two popular projects from that era are tracking nearby airplanes and boats in real time. Of course, these projects rely on different frequencies and protocols, but if you live in a major port city like [Ian] then his project that combines both into a single user interface might be of interest.

This project uses an RTL-SDR dongle for the marine traffic portion of the project, but steps up to a FlightAware Pro dongle for receiving telemetry from airplanes. Two separate antennas are needed for this, and all of the information is gathered and handled by a pair of Raspberry Pis. The Pis communicate with various marine and air traffic databases as well as handles the custom user interface that knits both sets of information together. This interface was custom-built from a previous project of his and was repurposed slightly to fit the needs of this one.

This is a great project that goes into a lot of interesting detail about how the web traffic moves and how the UI works, so even if you’re not into software-defined radio it might be worth a look. However, it’s also worth noting that it hasn’t been easier to set up a system like this thanks to the abundance and low price of RTL-SDR dongles and the software tools that make setting them up a breeze.

Raspberry Pi And Raspberry Pi Spy: This Is How Trademark SNAFUs Should Be Handled

October 20, 2020 by Jenny List 29 Comments

In the eight years or so since the Raspberry Pi first landed as tangible hardware, we’ve all dealt with the Pi folks whether as customers or through their many online support and outreach activities. They’ve provided our community with the seed that led to an explosion of inexpensive Linux-capable single board computers, while their own offerings have powered so many of the projects we have featured here. Their heart lies in their educational remit, but they have also become an indispensable part of our community.

The statement from the Pi Foundation's Philip Colligan. — The statement from the Pi Foundation’s Philip Colligan.

Thus it was a surprise when [Raspberry Pi Spy], a long-time commentator on all things Pi, received a legal notice from the Raspberry Pi Foundation that their use of the Raspberry Pi name contravened the acceptable use guidelines and demanding that all content be removed and the domains be handed over. Some consternation ensued, before Pi foundation boss [Philip Colligan] released a statement retracting the original letter and explaining that the incident was the result of an over-zealous legal adviser and that the Foundation has no wish to undermine the Pi community.

All’s well that ends well, but what just happened? In the first instance, it’s natural for any organisation to wish to protect their brand, and there would be plenty of unscrupulous entities ready to sell fake Pi products were the Foundation not active in asserting their rights. In this case it seems that it was the use of the full Raspberry Pi trademark in a domain name that triggered the letter and not the fair-use blogging about the Pi products. We can see that however much we might wish otherwise it was not without legal merit. There have been numerous cybersquatting cases heard since the creation of the Web, and even though some of them have been on more dubious ground than others it remains a well-trodden path.

Where this story differs from so many others though is that the Pi Foundation acted with common sense in withdrawing the notice issued against a member of its community. It is inevitable that sometimes even the best of us can take regrettable paths by whatever means, and respect is earned by how such situations are resolved. We applaud the Pi folks for their swift action in this matter, we’d suggest to anyone that they take care when registering domain names, and we suspect that somewhere a legal adviser will be in the doghouse. But that all such incidents in our community could be resolved with such ease.

Thinking About Creating A Raspberry Pi Replacement?

October 20, 2020 by Al Williams 66 Comments

If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at creating a Raspberry Pi-like board for yourself, you should check out [Jay Carlson’s] review of 10 different Linux-capable SoCs. Back in the 1960s, a computer was multiple refrigerator-sized boxes with thousands of interconnections and building one from scratch was only a dream for most people. Then ICs came and put all the most important parts in a little relatively inexpensive IC package and homebrew computing became much more accessible. Systems on Chip (SoC) has carried that even further, making it easier than ever to create entire systems, like the Pi and its many competitors.

Only a few years ago, making an SoC was still a big project because the vendors often didn’t want to release documentation to the public. In addition, most of the parts use ball grid array (BGA) packaging. BGA parts can be hard to work with, and require a multilayer PC board. Sure, you can’t plug these into a typical solderless breadboard. But working with these relatively large BGAs isn’t that hard and multilayer boards are now comparatively cheap. [Jay] reports that he got cheap PCBs and used a hot plate to build each board, and has some sage advice on how to do it.

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