Category Archives: Raspberry Pi Zero

Hackaday Links: November 6, 2016

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Here’s a life protip for you: get really, really good at one video game. Not all of them; you only want to be good – top 10% at least – at one video game. For me, that’s Galaga. It’s a great arcade game, and now it’s IoT. [justin] has been working on publishing high scores from a Galaga board to the Internet. The electronics are actually pretty simple – just a latch on a memory address, and an ESP8266 for comms.

On with the mergers and acquisitions! Lattice has been sold to Canyon Bridge, a Chinese private equity firm, for $1.3 …read more

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Pi Zero Powered Skateboard

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There’s something to be said for whizzing around town on your own automatic personal transport. It’s even better when you’ve built it yourself. That’s just what [The Raspberry Pi Guy] did – built a Wiimote controlled, Raspberry Pi Zero powered skateboard and whizzed around Cambridge to show it off.

It’s a fairly simple build – skateboard, battery, motor and mount, controller, Wiimote and Pi Zero. The Raspberry Pi controls the motor controller which in turn controls the motor speed. The Python code that [The Raspberry Pi Guy] wrote comes in at around a hundred lines and manages the motor controller …read more

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Pi Zero Powered Skateboard

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There’s something to be said for whizzing around town on your own automatic personal transport. It’s even better when you’ve built it yourself. That’s just what [The Raspberry Pi Guy] did – built a Wiimote controlled, Raspberry Pi Zero powered skateboard and whizzed around Cambridge to show it off.

It’s a fairly simple build – skateboard, battery, motor and mount, controller, Wiimote and Pi Zero. The Raspberry Pi controls the motor controller which in turn controls the motor speed. The Python code that [The Raspberry Pi Guy] wrote comes in at around a hundred lines and manages the motor controller …read more

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Give Your RPi a Cool FPGA Hat

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Need additional, custom IO for your Raspberry Pi? Adding an FPGA is a logical way to expand your IO, and allow for high speed digital interfaces. [Eric Brombaugh]’s Icehat adds a Lattice iCE5LP4K-SG48 FPGA in a package that fits neatly on top of the Raspberry Pi Zero. It also provides a few LEDs and Digilent compatible PMOD connectors for adding peripherals. The FPGA costs about six bucks, so this is one cheap FPGA board.

The FPGA has one time programmable memory, but can also be programmed over SPI. This allows the host Pi to flash the FGPA with the latest …read more

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Emulating a GameBoy Advance Inside of a Gameboy Advance

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[Ryzee119]’s GBA might not look so different at first glance. The screen is way better than you remember, but that may just be your memory playing tricks on you. The sound comes out of the speakers. It feels the right weight. It runs off AA batteries. Heck, even the buttons feel right.

It’s not until you notice that it really shouldn’t be playing any games without a cartridge inserted that you know something is not right in the Mushroom Kingdom. When you look inside you see the edge of a Raspberry Pi Zero instead of the card edge connector you …read more

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Raspberry Pi Zero as a USB Stick

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The Raspberry Pi Zero is small enough that it could almost be mistaken for a USB gadget, rather than a standalone computer. Maybe that was the inspiration that drove [Novaspirit] to completely “donglify” his Zero.

This is a great convenience hack if you’ve got a Zero just kicking around. With minimal soldering, he converted the Zero’s onboard female USB jacks into a male USB plug. From there on out, it’s all software, and the video (embedded below) takes you through all the steps on Windows.

First, he attaches the Raspberry Pi Zero running Pixel OS to his main computer as …read more

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The Animated Gif Camera, Brought To You By A Raspberry Pi

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No one watches video anymore. Cable cutters are digging into Verizon’s profits, and YouTube is a shadow of its 2005 self. What are people consuming now? Animated gifs. This is the bread and butter of the meme economy. Personally, all my investments are sunk deep into Gandolf / Balrog gifs, with each character replaced with Trump and Hillary. I expect a tidy profit on November 9th.

With animated gifs being the de facto method of sharing moving pictures, the world will belong to those who can create them. Phones are fine, but strangely video cameras, DSLRs, and other high-end photography …read more

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Dumb Terminals And Raspberry Pis

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Back in the old days, the cool kids didn’t have an Apple II or a Trash-80. The cool kids had jobs, and those jobs had Vaxxen all over the place. The usual way of working with a Vax would have been a terminal, a VT220 at least, or in the case of [Sudos]’ experiments with a Raspberry Pi, A DEC VT510, a single session, text only serial terminal.

Usually, when we see a ‘new hardware stuffed into old tech’ project like this, the idea is simply to find a use for the old hardware. That makes sense; a dumb terminal …read more

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Hackaday Links: September 25, 2016

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So you like watching stupid stuff? Here you go, a scene from Bones that tops the infamous ‘IP backtrace with Visual Basic’ or ‘four-handed keyboard’ scenes from other TV shows. Someone hacked the bones by embedding malware in a calcium fractal pattern. Also, when she uses the fire extinguisher, she doesn’t spray the base of the fire.

Raspberry Pi! You have no idea how good the term Raspberry Pi is for SEO. Even better is Raspberry Pi clusters, preferably made with Raspberry Pi Zeros. Here’s a Raspberry Pi hat for four Raspberry Pi Zeros, turning five Raspberry Pis into a …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Text To Speech The Hard Way

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Studies have shown reading to children leads to improved academic performance later in life, a trait that will make them more competitive in the workforce, and ultimately happier human beings. It follows, then, that having a robot read to children will also lead to happier and more productive adults, while normalizing the cyborg uprising takeover of the AI apocalypse of 2037.

It’s a good thing the above paragraph is a complete non-sequitur and has nothing to do with this Hackaday Prize entry. The TextEye, [Markus]’ entry for the Assistive Technology portion of the Hackaday Prize, is a handheld device that …read more

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