Open Source Stream Deck Does It Without Touch Screens

July 9, 2020 by Kristina Panos 32 Comments

[Adam Welch] has built macro pads in the past out of pre-fab key matrices and handfuls of Cherry MX clones. But all the stickers and custom keycaps in the world wouldn’t make those macro pads as versatile as a stream deck — those visual shortcut panels with tiny touchscreens for each button that some streamers use to change A/V settings or switch between applications.

Let’s face it, stream decks are expensive. But 0.96″ OLED displays are not, and neither are SMD tactile buttons. Why not imitate a screen deck on the cheap by making it so the screens actuate buttons behind them? [Adam] based this baby on the clever design of [Kilian Gosewisch]’s FreeDeck, and they ended up working together to improve it with a dedicated PCB.

The brains of the operation is an Arduino Pro Micro, which addresses each screen individually via two 74HC4051 mux ICs. Thanks to an SD card module, there’s no need to flash the ‘duino every time you want to change a shortcut or its picture. Even if this deck doesn’t hold up forever, it won’t break the bank to build another one. Poke past the break for the build video, which has all the links you’d need to make your own, including a handy configurator.

There’s more than one way to do a visual macro pad. Here’s one that uses a single screen and splits it Brady Bunch style to match the matrix.

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Fail Of The Week: This SD Card Won’t Slot

June 29, 2020 by Jenny List 23 Comments

If you’ve got a few self-designed PCBs under your belt, you probably know the pain of missing some little detail and having to break out the bodge wires to fix it. So we feel for [Arsenio Dev], who placed an SD card slot next to an SoC, only to find that it was the wrong way round. Rather than tossing it in the bin, he decided to employ a particularly crafty set of bodge wires that curve over the board and connect to an SD card adapter on the other side.

Our attention was taken by the board itself, he’s posted little information about it and taken pains to conceal one of the pieces of text on it. Since it has an Octavo Systems BeagleBone-on-chip, a slot for a cellular modem, and a connector marked “CONNECT AERONET HERE” which we are guessing refers to the Aeronet sun photometry network, we’re guessing it might be a controller for remotely-sited nodes for that system. Either way it’s enough to have us intrigued, and we wish him every success with the next spin.

Meanwhile, this certainly isn’t the first PCB CAD fail we’ve brought you.

Inject Keystrokes Any Way You Like With This Bluetooth Keystroke Injector

December 3, 2019 by Gerrit Coetzee 10 Comments

[Amirreza Nasiri] sends in this cool USB keystroke injector.

The device consists of an Arduino, a Bluetooth module, and an SD card. When it’s plugged into the target computer the device loads the selected payload from the SD card, compromising the system. Then it does its unique trick which is to switch the injector over to Bluetooth mode. Now the attacker has much more control, albeit local, over the system.

While we would never even be tempted to plug this device into a real computer, we like some of the additional features, like how an added dip switch can be used to select from up to eight different payloads depending on the required attack. The addition of a photo diode is also interesting, and makes us dream of all sorts of impractical movie hacker scenarios. [Amirreza] says it’s to trigger when the person leaves the room and turns the lights off.

[Amirreza] has all the code and design files on the GitHub. There are also a few payload examples, which should be fun to hack on. After all, one of life’s pleasures is to find new ways to mess with your friends.

DIY Photo Backup In The Field

November 20, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 29 Comments

They say a file isn’t backed up if it isn’t backed up twice. This is easy enough to do if you have access to your computer and a network, but if you’re a photographer you might end up in a place without either of these things and need a way to back up the files you just created. For that you’ll need a specialized photo backup tool which you can easily build yourself.

While commercial offerings are available which back up files locally from a camera’s SD card to another medium, they suffer from a high price. [André]’s solution can be had for a fraction of that cost. Using a Raspberry Pi Zero, a tiny USB hub, and a high capacity jump drive, a photographer can simply plug in an SD card and the Pi will handle the backups with varying levels of automation. The software that [André] made use of is called Little Backup Box written by [Dmitri Popov] and can be used typically as an automatic backup for any other device as well.

This is a great solution to backing up files on the go, whether they’re from a camera or any device that uses an SD card. Removable storage is tiny and easily lost, so it’s good to have a few backups in case the inevitable happens. Raspberry Pis are an ideal solution to data backup, and can even be battery powered if you’re really roughing it for a few days.

ReMarkable Tablet Scores A MicroSD Slot

August 30, 2019 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

There’s been a marked trend towards modern tablets and phones having fewer expansion options. It’s becoming rarer to find a microSD slot available, which can be particularly frustrating. For [davisr], this simply wouldn’t do, and they set about hacking their ReMarkable tablet.

A rotary tool was used to make a tidy slot for the microSD card.

The ReMarkable already has a set of pads for an SDHC interface on the main board, ready to go. Despite this, both hardware and software modifications are required to get things up and running. [davisr] started by soldering some wires to the main board, feeding them to a microSD socket, which was mounted on the edge of the tablet in a convenient nook. The case was then delicately modified to make a slot for cards to be inserted and removed. With this done, the kernel was then recompiled to enable support for the SDHC interface, and everything was up and running.

With the modification in place, [davisr] now has over 150GB of storage available, which should last for quite some time. Similar hacks are possible on other platforms, too. Even the Pi Zero can mount a second SD card with the right mods!

Hackaday Podcast 014: Keeping Raspberry’s SD Card Alive, We Love MRRF, And How Hot Are Flip Chips?

April 12, 2019 by Mike Szczys No comments

Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys take a look at advances in photogrammetry (building 3D models out of many photographs from a regular camera), a delay pedal that’s both aesthetically and aurally pleasing, and the power of AI to identify garden slugs. Mike interviews Scotty Allen while walking the streets and stores of the Shenzhen Electronics markets. We delve into SD card problems with Raspberry Pi, putting industrial controls on your desk, building a Geiger counter for WiFi, and the sad truth about metal 3D printing.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (60 MB or so.)

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Give Your Raspberry Pi SD Card A Break: Log To RAM

April 8, 2019 by Dan Maloney 82 Comments

The fragility of SD cards is the weak link in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. Most of us seem to have at least one Pi tucked away somewhere, running a Magic Mirror, driving security cameras, or even taking care of a media library. But chances are, that Pi is writing lots and lots of log files. Logging is good — it helps when tracking down issues — but uncontrolled logging can lead to problems down the road with the Pi’s SD card.

[Erich Styger] has a neat way to avoid SD card logging issues on Raspberry Pi, he calls it a solution to reduce “thrashing” of the SD card. The problem is that flash memory segments wear out after a fairly low number of erase cycles, and the SD card’s wear-leveling algorithm will eventually cordon off enough of the card to cause file system issues. His “Log2Ram” is a simple Unix shell script that sets up a mount point for logging in RAM rather than on the SD card.

The idea is that any application or service sending log entries to /var/log will actually be writing them to virtual log files, which won’t rack up any activity on the SD card. Every hour, a cron job sweeps the virtual logs out to the SD card, greatly reducing its wear. There’s still a chance to lose logging data before it’s swept to disk, but if you have relatively stable system it’s a small price to pay for the long-term health of a Pi that’s out of sight and out of mind.

One thing we really like about [Erich]’s project is that it’s a great example of shell scripting and Linux admin concepts. If you need more information on such things, check out [Al Williams’] Linux-Fu series. It goes back quite a way, so settle in for some good binge reading.