Author Archives: Rich Hawkes

Vintage Portable TV Turned Retro Gaming System

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When [FinnAndersen] found an old TV set by the side of the road, he did what any self-respecting DIY/gaming enthusiast would do: He took it apart and installed a Raspberry Pi 3 running RetroPie in it in order to play retro games on a retro TV!

[Finn] took the CRT out of the TV before realizing that it actually worked. It was already too late, so [Finn] ordered a 12″ LCD screen to put in its place. He liked the idea of the curved screen the CRT had, though, so he molded a piece of acrylic around the CRT and, …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Electro-Magnetic Enabled Bagpipes

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Bagpipes are an instrument at least a millennia old, the most popular of which, in modern times, is the Great Highland bagpipe. There are other types of bagpipes, some of which have a bellows rather than requiring the player to manually inflate the bag by breathing into it. The advantage of the bellows is that it delivers dry air to the bag and reed (instead of the moist air from the player’s breath) and this dryness means that the instrument stays in tune better and the reed lasts longer.

[TegwynTwmffat] has built his own Irish uilleann pipes, (one of the …read more

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Using Modern C++ Techniques with Arduino

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C++ has been quickly modernizing itself over the last few years. Starting with the introduction of C++11, the language has made a huge step forward and things have changed under the hood. To the average Arduino user, some of this is irrelevant, maybe most of it, but the language still gives us some nice features that we can take advantage of as we program our microcontrollers.

Modern C++ allows us to write cleaner, more concise code, and make the code we write more reusable. The following are some techniques using new features of C++ that don’t add memory overhead, reduce …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: DIY ARM Scientific Calculator

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What does a hacker do when he or she wants something but can’t afford it? They hack one together, of course. Or, in the case of [Ramón Calvo], they thoughtfully plan and prototype. [Ramón Calvo] wanted a scientific calculator, but couldn’t afford one, so he designed and built one himself.

[Ramón] started off with Arduino but upgraded initially to Freescale’s Freedom KL25Z development board upgraded to an ARM Cortex-M0+ programmed using mbed. The display is an Electronic Assembly DOGL-128 128×64 pixel LCD. [Ramón] did a couple of iterations on the PCB, going from a large DIY one in order for …read more

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Detect Cars Running Stop Signs (and Squirrels Running Across the Roof)

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There’s a stop sign outside [Devin Gaffney]’s house that, apparently, no one actually stops at. In order to avoid the traffic and delays on a major thoroughfare, cars take the road behind [Devin Gaffney]’s house, but he noticed a lot of cars didn’t bother to stop at the stop sign. He had a Raspberry Pi and a camera, so he set them up to detect the violating cars.

His setup is pretty standard – Raspberry Pi and camera pointed outside at the intersection. He’s running OpenCV and using machine learning to detect the cars and determine if they have run …read more

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Gaming Beyond Retropie

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Looking for something a bit more from your Raspberry Pi? Tired of the usual console and arcade games? Eltech’s Exagear Desktop is a virtual machine that runs on your Raspberry Pi and allows you to run x86 games. [Dmitry]’s done a write-up about running more modern games on your Raspberry Pi.

Up until now, the Pi has been a great platform for retro gaming. By running MAME or EmulationStation, you can play classic arcade games as well as the great console games you played as a kid. Exagear Desktop goes one further, allowing you to use Wine to play more …read more

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Before There were Nixie Tubes, There Were Edge-Lit Displays?

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We’ve seen a bunch of replacements for nixie tubes using LEDs and edge-lit acrylic for the numbers. But one of the earliest digital voltmeters used edge-lit Lucite plates for the numbers and a lot of incandescent lamps to light them up.

[stevenjohnson] has a Non-Linear Systems Model 481 digital voltmeter and he’s done a teardown of it so we can get a glimpse of the insides. Again, anyone who’s seen the modern versions of edge-lit numeric displays knows what they are: A series of clear plastic plates with numbers (or characters) etched into them, each with a light source beneath …read more

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Count Your Zombies! A Left4Dead 2 Stat Tracker

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Sure, you’re getting further and further into the game and finishing missions, but the true progress for a zombie shooter is how many zombies you’ve killed, right? [Evan Juras] agreed, so he set off to build a hardware stat tracker for Left4Dead 2!

Left4Dead 2 tracks a bunch of stats and at the end of each level, those stats are updated on your Steam page. [Evan] used a Python script running on a Raspberry Pi to connect to the internet and grab four different stats from your Steam profile. Those stats are displayed on an RGB 16×2 display. To house …read more

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Wake Up! The Cat Came Back!

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In order to get the most out of the batteries connected to your microcontroller, you’ll probably need to put it to sleep, the deeper the better. [Rgrokett] was curious about the nighttime habits of his cat, and came up with a nice little hack to get more battery life out of the ESP8266 that he was using.

[rgrokett]’s cat enters and leaves through a cat-door. He figured a PIR sensor would let him know when there was movement around the door. He could then tell if the cat was around. Leaving the PIR sensor and the ESP8266 microcontroller (an Adafruit …read more

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Wake Up! The Cat Came Back!

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In order to get the most out of the batteries connected to your microcontroller, you’ll probably need to put it to sleep, the deeper the better. [Rgrokett] was curious about the nighttime habits of his cat, and came up with a nice little hack to get more battery life out of the ESP8266 that he was using.

[rgrokett]’s cat enters and leaves through a cat-door. He figured a PIR sensor would let him know when there was movement around the door. He could then tell if the cat was around. Leaving the PIR sensor and the ESP8266 microcontroller (an Adafruit …read more

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