Collaborate Disseminate
Visitors to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios are able to cast “spells” by waving special interactive wands in the air. Hackers like us understand that there must be some unknown machinations happening behind the scenes to detect how the wands are moving, but for the kids …read more
Continue reading Making A Birthday Party Magical With Smart Wands
Since the Pi Zero was released, there have been many attempts to add a power bank. Cell phone batteries are about the same size as a Pi Zero, after all, and adding a USB charging port and soldering a few wires to a Pi is easy. The PiSugar is perhaps …read more
Continue reading Portable Pi Power Pack Makes For Petite Projects
Thermal cameras are one of those tools that we all want, but just can’t justify actually buying. You don’t really know what you would do with one, and when even the cheap ones are a couple hundred dollars, it’s a bit out of the impulse buy territory. So you just …read more
Continue reading The Easiest Thermal Camera Build You’ll Ever See
Who says there’s no such thing as magic? Not anyone who knows what a Unix pipe is, that’s for sure. If you do some of your best incantations at a blinking cursor, this scratch-built Raspberry Pi Zero “Spellbook” laptop created by [Kamitech] might be just what the apothecary ordered. Lucky …read more
Continue reading A Raspberry Pi Grimoire For The Command Line Wizard
If you imagine somebody playing chess against the computer, you’ll likely be visualizing them staring at their monitor in deep thought, mouse in hand, ready to drag their digital pawn into play. That might be accurate for the folks who dabble in the occasional match during their break, but for the real chess aficionados nothing beats playing on a real board with real pieces. Of course, the tricky part is explaining the whole corporeal thing to a piece of software on your computer.
Enter the “Chess Challenger” by [slash/byte]. Modeled after a commercial gadget of the same name from 1978, …read more
Continue reading Raspberry Pi Powers This Retro Chess Computer
The Atari 2600 is a console from a very different time, when home appliances, furniture, and even automobiles were all covered in fake vinyl woodgrain veneer. Somehow it was the in thing for a decade, and then immediately became tacky overnight. Regardless, if you want to evoke the era, that’s what you do – and that’s exactly what [Christian] did with this handheld RetroPie build.
The technical side of things is fairly routine in these parts – a Pi Zero runs RetroPie so you can play emulated games from the mid-90s and earlier. It’s the visual presentation that we particularly …read more
Continue reading 2600-Inspired Handheld Brings the Faux Woodgrain
[GlytchTech] decided to implement his own Digital Data Link (DDL) for his drone experiments, and by using a Raspberry Pi Zero and some open-source software, he succeeded in creating a mostly self-contained system that delivers HD video and telemetry using an Android phone as a display.
The link uses standard WiFi hardware in a slightly unusual way to create a digital data link that acts more like an analog system, with a preference for delivering low latency video and a graceful drop-off when signal quality gets poor. A Raspberry Pi Zero, Alfa NEH WiFi card, external antenna, battery, and a …read more
Continue reading HD Video and Telemetry Link Uses Standard WiFi Hardware
We’re going to warn you right up front that this is not a hack. Or at least that’s how it turned out after [LiveOverflow] did some digital forensics on a mysterious device found lurking in a college library. The path he took to come to the conclusion that nothing untoward was going on was interesting and informative, though, as is the ultimate purpose of the unknown artifacts.
As [LiveOverflow] tells us in the video below, he came upon a Reddit thread – of which we can now find no trace – describing a bunch of odd-looking devices stashed behind garbage …read more
Continue reading Non-Nefarious Raspberry Pi Only Looks Like a Hack
It’s the eternal question hackers face: do you built it, or do you buy it? The low cost and high availability of electronic gadgets means we increasingly take the latter option. Especially since it often ends up that building your own version will cost more than just buying a commercial product; and that’s before you factor in the time you’ll spend working on it.
But such concerns clearly don’t phase [Andrea Cavalli]. Sure he could just buy a scientific calculator, but it wouldn’t really be his scientific calculator. Instead, he’s taking the scenic route and building his own scientific calculator …read more
Continue reading DIY Scientific Calculator Powered By Pi Zero
Like many people, [Mike] has a list of things he wants to do in life. One of them is “fire a gun with a switch,” and with a little help from some hacker friends, he knocked this item off last weekend.
For those wondering why the specificity of the item, the backstory will help explain. [Mike] has spinal muscular atrophy, a disease that was supposed to end his life shortly after it began. Thirty-seven years later, [Mike] is still ticking items off his list, but since he only has voluntary control of his right eyebrow, he faces challenges getting some …read more
Continue reading Shooting for the First Time with Help from a Raspberry Pi