Collaborate Disseminate
Working towards automating a few things in a home often seems simple on the surface, but it’s easy for these projects to snowball into dozens of sensors and various servos, …read more Continue reading A Lightweight Smart Home Server
The Raspberry Pi is famous for its low cost, versatile and open Linux environment, and plentiful I/O, making it a perfect device not only for its originally-intended educational purposes but …read more Continue reading A Dedicated GPU For Your Favorite SBC
While it might be nice to use a $4,000 oscilloscope in a lab at a university or well-funded corporate environment, a good portion of us won’t have access to that kind of equipment in our own home shops. There are a few ways of getting a working oscilloscope without breaking …read more
Continue reading You Don’t Need That Bulky CRT Oscilloscope Anymore
Have you ever found yourself wishing you had a clone of the Game Boy, except it was actually twice as wide, and instead of holding it in your hands you pop a tiny separate controller out of the middle and play it that way? No? Well, neither have we. But that didn’t stop [Christian Reinbacher] from designing and building exactly that, and by the looks of the finished product, we have to say he might be onto something.
To be fair, the charmingly-named FatPiBoy is not really meant to be played like the GameBoy of yesteryear. It’s more like a …read more
Continue reading FatPiBoy: Respin Game Boy with a Pop-Out Controller
If you were a gamer in 1991, you were presented with what seemed like an easy enough choice: you could get a Nintendo Game Boy, the gray brick with a slightly nauseating green-tinted screen that was already a couple of years old, or you could get yourself a glorious new Sega Game Gear. With full color display and games that were ported straight from Sega’s home consoles, it seemed like the Game Gear was the true future of portable gaming. But of course, that’s not how things actually went. In reality, technical issues like abysmal battery life held the Game …read more
Do you know how to harvest data from your bench tools, like plotting bandwidth from your oscilloscope with a computer? It’s actually pretty easy. Many bench tools make this easy using a standard protocol with USB to make the connection.
In the previous installment of this article we talked about the National Instruments VISA (Virtual Instrument Software Archetecture) standard for communicating with your instruments from a computer, and introduced its Python wrapper with a simple demonstration using a Raspberry Pi. We’ll now build on that modest start by describing a more useful application for a Raspberry Pi and a digital …read more
Continue reading Controlling Your Instruments From A Computer: Doing Something Useful
