Tools Hack Daily: October 2023

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 – Maker Highlights #makerfaire

We had a wonderful time exploring and exhibiting at Maker Faire Bay Area 2023.

Maker Faire has been on hiatus the last few years, since the COVID pandemic shut down events all over the world. This year it returned in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a brand-new location right on the waterfront in Vallejo, CA.

Vallejo is a suburb of the San Francisco area, and is home to a lot of art warehouses and build spaces. Artists have been moving en masse out of Oakland and SF over the last few years due to rising rents and limited space, especially during the challenging pandemic years when artist income largely evaporated. The city of Vallejo has welcomed a lot of these artists with lower rents and plenty of warehouse space. So many of the people I talked to were delighted and excited to get to participate in this wonderful event in their own backyard.

There was so much creative energy shared on both weekends, and so many wonderful inventions, events, and art pieces that it was hard to see everything. Here are just a few highlights from the event. I was honored to get to exhibit my LED Jellyfish Swarm and some of the costumes I’ve built over the years, and also to participate in a world-class fashion show with a handful of amazing designers. Take a look!

Featured Makers:

We did a few interviews with makers we met during the event, check them out below:

Imaginative Wooden Characters by Yen Jui-Lin

Yen Jui-Lin starts his process with just a pencil and a blank sheet of paper and ends with these super imaginative characters, Via Colossal

Yen Jui-Lui instills a growing group of characters with playful wiles and whimsy in an ongoing series of wooden toys. Just a few of the artist’s recent creations portray pudgy bears that double as receptacles for spare change or fruit, a downcast rabbit enduring an inner tube, and birds that sprout dried flowers from the tops of their heads. Using a variety of wood types local to his home in Taiwan, he repurposes segments of cypress, cinnamon, and beech, among others.

See more!

Latest Raspberry Pi Imager released #RaspberryPi #RaspberryPi5 @Raspberry_Pi

Version 1.8.1 of the Raspberry Pi Imager has been released, which comes with much better support for configuring a Raspberry Pi Operating System installation.

Raspberry Pi has totally rewritten their Getting Started documentation.

Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi Runs through November 6

This year marks 25 years of Sculpture by the Sea. What started as a day long volunteer lead exhibtion has turned into a massive outdoor sculpture event. If you’re in the area you absolutely must check it out.

Now celebrating 25 years, Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi has been the world’s largest free-to-the-public outdoor sculpture exhibition for over two decades, exhibiting 2,691 sculptures by 1,129 artists from 51 countries. It is visited by up to half a million people each year. Most of Australia’s leading sculptors of the last 30 years have exhibited numerous times including May Barrie, Bert Flugelman AM, Inge King AM, Stephen King, Michael Le Grand, Ron Robertson-Swann OAM, Michaelie Crawford & Julie Turpin, and Ken Unsworth AM. The exhibitions international profile has resulted in some of the biggest international names in sculpture exhibiting, including: Sir Anthony Caro, Phillip King CBE (England), Sui Jian Guo, Chen Wen Ling (China), Kozo Nishino (Japan), Fletcher Benton (USA) and David Černý (Czech Republic).

Take a tour on YouTube and plan your visit now – there are only a few days left to explore!

Monday, October 30, 2023

Getting the Raspberry Pi Official Touchscreen to work with RaspiOS Bookworm

Peter Mount’s Blog determines that, for now at least, you cannot use Wayland with the Official touch screen.

There’s quite a few changes to (Raspberry Pi OS), mainly the use of Wayland as the main window manager & back-end rather than the venerable X11 which we have used for decades in the *nix world.

When the Pi booted bookworm for the first time all looked well. The display worked fine and it entered the initial configuration fine – except there was no touch. I had to attach a mouse to it so I could complete the process.

See the details in the post here. Likely there will be an official fix for Wayland at some point.

Saturday, October 28, 2023

Teacher’s Pi cluster controls digital learning classroom

Mike Reed has created a Raspberry Pi cluster using over 30 boards for his students to connect to during class, Via Raspberry Pi

Mike Reed is a completely self-taught digital learning teacher, and during his tenure he has built not one, but three, impressive Raspberry Pi clusters to make his lessons run more smoothly.

…..

Pupils connect via VNC from their classroom computer to one of the Raspberry Pis in the cluster. Using a GUI program Mike wrote — which autostarts on boot — they sync their school Microsoft OneDrive accounts to a folder on the Raspberry Pi’s desktop. Then they can either open existing scripts or create new ones before beginning their work. The whole process takes about two minutes.

The cluster is run from a “Control Pi”, which sends threaded SSH commands to the other boards to reboot them after each lesson, wiping the OneDrive connections ready for the next class. It has a colourful interface with lots of buttons to show Mike exactly what is happening with each Raspberry Pi.

Learn more!

Friday, October 27, 2023

Raspberry Pi-Powered FPV Scorpion #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

Jeremy Cook shares how this little robot by Hannu Hell features a tail-mounted FPV camera that will take video instead of sting you.

The robot is certainly cute, and its “scorPIon” moniker is a clever play on its Raspberry Pi Zero W controller. The Pi gives it the ability to interface with a smart device via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi for control, and it can stream video from its tail for FPV capabilities. It uses a dedicated UPS battery supply for the Raspberry Pi, while servos are powered by a 7.4 V 1300mAH LiPo Battery. This dual-battery setup is somewhat optional, but it mitigates a few hassles.

Marcus Aurelius the philosopher as artificial intelligence with openAI #piday #raspberrypi #3DPrinting #marcusaurelius

Have a conversation with one of the great Greek Stoic philosophers. This project uses a Rasperry Pi and AI to let Marcus Aurelius speak. Watch his brain light up as he ‘thinks.’

From Marcsimonfrei on Instagram

Thank you for Sharing

A 3D print of Marcus Aurelius with LEDs that simulate the brain neurons when
he thinks. He takes on the role of Marcus Aurelius and summarizes the
complete knowledge of all famous philosophers.

The brain is 3D printed with clear plastic and the housing itself is printed from white plastic. The button is from Schurter and a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB is installed. The system role of chatGPT is Marcus Aurelius the famous philosopher and summarizes all famous philosophers.

Roughly speaking, his role is: He has emotional self-control and with the help of composure, peace of mind and ataraxia you can give answers to every question. He has an overview of all the famous philosophers and tries to summarize and communicate their thoughts. He strives for absolute wisdom and tries to achieve the maxim in every answer!

See more!

Running a PSP emulator on the Raspberry Pi @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

Learn how to bring a PSP emulator on a Raspberry Pi. Here’s more from PyMyLifeUp:

PPSSPP is an emulator for the PSP system known for its optimization and compatibility. …this emulator has had a lot of work to support a wide variety of Android phones, from low-end to high-end. These same optimizations help this PSP emulator run decently on our ARM-powered Raspberry Pi.

Using this emulator, you will be able to run your PSP games on your Raspberry Pi. It is a fairly easy emulator to utilize once you have it compiled and installed to your system.

See more!

Thursday, October 26, 2023

HackSpace Magazine Issue 71 – Make an Airplay boombox with Raspberry Pi Zero #PiDay #Python @Raspberry_Pi @HackSpaceMag

HackSpace Magazine Issue 71 dubs the Adafruit Boomy Pi Airplay Boombox their Objet 3d’art.

This portable music player from the Ruiz brothers uses a host of Adafruit goodness, a
Raspberry Pi Zero W, and a smart 3D-printed enclosure to transmit your tunes. It plays audio streamed from your iOS device over Apple’s AirPlay protocol; and it’s battery-powered, so you can use it on the move.

The guts of this build include a Raspberry Pi Zero W, an Adafruit Stereo Speaker Bonnet, and a Pimoroni Pico HAT Hacker to give access to all 40 of the Raspberry Pi Zero W’s GPIO pins. There’s also a clever bit of power management, with a 3.7 V mAh battery and an Adafruit Power Boost to bring the output up to a more useful 5 V. All this, plus a 3D-printed enclosure. Nice work.

The project can be found at https://hsmag.cc/BoomyPi

Meet the Maker: Yvette Schindler – Giant Connect 4 Art Installation with Lights & Animations

Autumn Lights Festival in Oakland, CA is a long-running and beloved Oakland tradition. It takes place at the Gardens at Lake Merritt every October. This event is a fundraiser for the garden, which is a peaceful sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of the city, right on the shore of the lake.

Around 100 LED light artists bring their creations out to Autumn Lights every year. This year, we caught up with Yvette Schindler, who created a giant Connect 4 game using laser-etched acrylic, NeoPixels and arcade buttons. It’s a fully functioning game where players can face off with each other by standing on either side of the board and pressing buttons to drop a “piece” wherever they’d like. This was a really popular installation — people were lined up to play all night long.

The game also functions as an art piece, with gorgeous colorful animations that run while no one is playing. It is one of the most beautiful and intuitively interactive use of pixels and Arduino we’ve seen.

Learn more at http://www.yvonneschindler.com

HackSpace Magazine Issue 71: Raspberry Pi 5 @HackSpaceMag @Raspberry_Pi

HackSpace Magazine Issue 71 – Summer Projects

The inside story of Raspberry Pi 5: faster, better, more power-switchy. How $25 million dollars, 8 years of development and one very highly engineered on/off button combined to make the most Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi yet.

PLUS: subscribe today and be one of the first to get your hands on the new Raspberry Pi 5! head to hsmag.cc/subscribe to get yours

Learn mechanical engineering with 3D printed linkages
Measure time’s winged chariot with DIY clocks
Build a circuit inside a greetings card
Be amazed by a 3D printed, Lidar-equipped robot
And a load more!

Read more, download PDF, buy now (sold out), subscribe.

Comparing libgpiod and gpiozero speeds on the Raspberry Pi 5 #RaspberryPi #RaspberryPi5

With the new Raspberry Pi 5 coming out, it is time to add support to Blinka, our CircuitPython library compatibility layer. One of the biggest changes to the Raspberry Pi 5 is the addition of a new southbridge chip, called the RP1, which now handles the GPIOs. Like many other projects, we have been using the RPi.GPIO library to handle the General Purpose Input/Outputs. The only issue is that RPi.GPIO does not work on the Raspberry Pi 5 due to a changed memory mapping. Whereas everything was handled by the /dev/gpiomem device before, now everything is dynamically split into multiple gpiomem devices. The 40-pin GPIO header happens to fall into /dev/gpiomem4.

So this means it’s time to look at a couple of new options that do work on the Raspberry Pi 5. The two biggest contenders are libgpiod and gpiozero, though there does appear to be a pure Python version of libgpiod called gpiod. RPi.GPIO was written in C, so it should run faster than a pure Python implementation, however as mentioned before, that no longer appears to be an option. So the replacement should be able to run as fast as possible.

On the surface, libgpiod appears to be the better option because of several different factors:

The Python bindings use the libgpiod library underneath, which itself is written in C
We already have multiple other libraries using libgpiod, so adding it is much simpler
Looking at the source, gpiozero appears to be a pure Python implementation

On the other hand, Raspberry Pi is recommending gpiozero as the replacement to use on the Raspberry Pi 5. So it’s time to compare them head to head on speed alone. In order to test the speed, each library will turn a GPIO on and off as rapidly as possible and the results will be measured with a logic analyzer…

Read the full Adafruit Playground Note here.

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Meet the Maker: Vanessa the Robot, a Piano-Playing Animatronic Puppet #makerfaire

Meet another of our favorite projects seen at Maker Faire Bay Area in 2023: Vanessa the Robot.

Vanessa is an animatronic muppet-style puppet who sings soulful torch songs from the 80s and 90s while playing a small piano. Her movements are amazingly good — as she moves her hands along the keys and sways her mouth and head to the music, the viewer gets pulled in and captivated by the emotion of the song.

Ben Howard, the creator and mastermind behind Vanessa the Robot, used six servos and motion-capture software to create the movements of the puppet and piano. The piece is full of delightful surprise effects, with LED lights and spotlights amplifying the high points of the song, and a piano lid that can be raised and lowered to heighten the experience of the viewer. I was really amazed at the lifelike movement he was able to achieve. Vanessa really seems to throw her heart into each performance. Howard has created a lifelike, lovable character who manages to reach out and squeeze our hearts through a fabulous melding of technology and emotion.

Learn more at Ben’s website: https://www.benjaamin.com/vanessa-the-robot

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Mask Your Art with Nightshade #ArtTuesday

The MIT Technology Review shares how a new tool, called Nightshade, lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online. Nightshade messes up scraped training data and causes the resulting image-generating AI models to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways.

The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the research, which has been submitted for peer review at computer security conference Usenix.

Commercially Available Chairs in Star Trek #StarTrek

It feels like Sci-Fi props are generally so ‘out there’ that they must be specially made props. Well, usually that is not the case. Set designers are able to get some pretty futuristic chairs right off the shelf.

The site Ex Astris Scientia has a whole running database of the chairs used in Star Trek. Some are surprisingly basic…but not all. There are currently 163 chairs listed.

If you want to help track down others you can checkout the unidentified chairs section

Countless off-the-shelf office chairs, lounge chairs or car seats appeared in Star Trek productions. Here is a list of the models that we found, among them many design classics

See more! h/t Design Taxi

Theo Jansen’s Latest ‘Strandbeest’ Merge Into a Wind-Powered Herd #ArtTuesday

The beach-walking sculptures of Theo Jansen have been stalking beaches since 1990. They have evolved over time, getting larger, more complex, and now, they run in herds. Here’s more from COLOSSAL:

Throughout the summer, Jansen experimented with connecting several units together, which could work in succession. “Animaris Rex is a herd of beach animals whose specimens hold each other as defense against storms,” he says. “As individuals they would simply blow over, but as a group, the chance of surviving a storm would be greater.” Propelled by the wind with a series of large sails, the individual modules move in tandem to form a single entity.

See more!

William Blake’s Innovative Printing Process

Cool new video from the Getty Museum that features printmaker Michael Phillips.

Phillips is an expert on William Blake and the many intricate details of Blake’s printing processes, which were way ahead of their time.

Monday, October 23, 2023

Spectacular drone show held in Central Park #drone #droneday

We have posted on Franchise Freedom in the past. Now Studio Drift has brought their 1000 unit drone show to NYC.

This past weekend onlookers in Midtown/UWS got to view one of the biggest art instillations in recent Central Park history. The show is meant to mimic a murmuration but it didn’t come without some migratory misgivings.

Franchise Freedom, presented by Dutch studio, DRIFT, is an open-air public art performance inspired by the graceful movements of starling flocks. It serves as a unique exploration of the interplay between humanity, nature, and technology. 1,000 drones will fly over the area and illuminate the night sky.

Learn more for Live Walking NYC and PIX11 News

Welcome to drone day on the Adafruit blog. Every Monday we deliver the latest news, products and more from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), quadcopter and drone communities. Drones can be used for video & photography (dronies), civil applications, policing, farming, firefighting, military and non-military security work, such as surveillance of pipelines. Previous posts can be found via the #drone tag and our drone / UAV categories.

Adorable subway sculpture slithers through NYC park #Art #NYC @josecastillo

There’s a massive sea serpent on the loose in the Rockaways with an uncanny resemblance to a subway train. This silvery gray creature snakes through an empty lot, but it comes in peace.

“Subway Sea Serpent,” the latest sculpture by Zaq Landsberg and Joey Castillo is now on view indefinitely at Beach 60th Street and Rockaway Beach Boulevard.

The artists were inspired by the A train, the crucial subway line that links the Rockaways to the rest of New York City. Located not far from subway station, it looks as if the artwork jumped from the elevated tracks to burrow through the ground in search of the beach. Segments of the cars peek above the grass as if the serpent’s swimming through the dirt.

“This project directly addresses the Rockaways and takes a universally recognized object and twists it to put it in a new context. I specialize in art pieces that attract viewers, children, old people and everyone else,” Landsberg said in a press release.

“Using the sun’s own energy to power the lighting on this sculpture is not just a nod to sustainability, but a beacon for what’s possible for do-it-yourself makers,” said Castillo, the technologist in residence at Cornell Tech’s People Aware Computing lab on Roosevelt Island. “Using parts from local suppliers, we were able to create a project that doesn’t simply draw power from the grid, but lights the way forward for small-scale sustainable and resilient technology.”

The artists worked with Adafruit Industries, a woman-owned, New York City based electronics manufacturer to source parts for the sculpture. As for the sculpture itself, it’s constructed of wood, plaster-resin and plexiglass, then coated in glimmering silver paint.

See more in the article here.

Saturday, October 21, 2023

Brooklyn Museum Presents Spike Lee: Creative Sources

Spike Lee: Creative Sources is currently open at the Brooklyn Museum through February 4 on the 5th floor of the Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery. Get tickets for timed entry here. The installation is comprised of items from Lee’s personal collection which makes walking into it feel incredibly intimate despite being surrounded by strangers.

A Glass Flipbook

Neat project and video from artist and animator (and glass bending extraordinaire) Andymation on YouTube! I love how honest and endearing the actual content of the flipbook is, and how the video demonstrates that.

Friday, October 20, 2023

Make Your Ordinary Washing Machine Smart using Python #piday #raspberrypi

Follow along as Ben’s Electrical Escapades codes up a project for a smart washing machine. With the help of some sensors and a Rasperry Pi his ‘dumb’ washing machine will now send notifications and more.

Want to add a touch of automation to your home?
Join me as I show you how to turn receive notifications from your dumb washing machine when it has completed.
Using zigbee vibration sensors and door sensors, I write a Python script that receives messages through MQTT using Zigbee2Mqtt to determine when the washing machine has run and when it has been emptied.
Let’s get coding!

See more!

DIY Arcade Table @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

You don’t need to be a ritzy person to have an arcade table in your room. In this project Spartan 117 creates an arcade table using an old CRT TV and a Raspberry Pi. Here’s more from Instructables:

Here I will show you how I went about building my arcade machine that uses a Raspberry Pi running MAME to emulate games. As everyones setup will be different this will be general in nature but will hopefully supply enough information so you can get started yourself ! This is my first instructable but hopefully it will all go well. Enjoy!

See project!

The datasheet for the Raspberry Pi RP1 chip #PiDay #RaspberryPi #RaspberryPi5 @Raspberry_Pi

The interwebs are abuzz over the announced Raspberry Pi 5 single board computer (SBC). The Raspberry Pi 5 has many new features, many of them enabled by the RP1 custom peripheral control chip (sometimes referred as a “southbridge”) which connects many of the peripheral functions to the processor via four PCIe lanes onboard.

Folks on social media and forums have been asking about connecting to the peripherals now that the RP1 is handling access rather than the processor directly, to include the GPIO header.

Raspberry Pi has now released a draft 88 page PDF datasheet for the RP1. It appears to anwer many of the questions on how peripheral communications happen.

This information should allow operating system and software library developers to port software to work with Raspberry Pi 5 peripherals.

Check out the RP1 draft datasheet here and all Raspberry Pi datasheets here.

Thursday, October 19, 2023

Apple Pocket Pi Handheld Games Console #3DThursday #3DPrinting

Shared bye Applepie2 on Thingiverse:

The design goals for this project were to build a pocket-sized handheld console which was as easy to assemble as possible whilst keeping costs low for the required functionality.

Download the files and learn more

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

NEW GUIDE: Making Wearable Badge Art with Printed Circuit Boards #AdafruitLearningSystem #BadgeLife @Adafruit @Anne_Engineer

A new guide in the Adafruit Learning System: Making Wearable Badge Art with Printed Circuit Boards by Anne Barela

As you’ve likely seen on the internet, one can make art PCBs that also have functional electrical circuits on them. This is one of the best examples of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) all coming together.

To demonstrate this in PCB art, I have taken the NASA logo (often called “the meatball”) to make a pendant or pin using printed circuit board techniques.

See this guide now > > >

Meet the Makers: Mills from the Flaming Lotus Girls and the Serenity Fireflies at MakerFaire Bay Area 2023

There are so many amazing things to see at Maker Faire. This year at Bay Area Maker Faire I spent a few minutes talking t0 Mills from the Flaming Lotus Girls. I’ve seen their artwork at Burning Man and a number of other events around the West Coast and was excited to learn a little more.

Flaming Lotus Girls are a collective of women in the San Francisco Bay Area who work with metal and flame. They’re a teaching organization — women can come to learn welding, fabrication, propane effects and all about the ins and outs of creating large-scale metal art for events and festivals.

They had a piece called Serenity on display: three giant fireflies that shoot flame into the air, along with a lot of smaller bugs made by students in the organization. This was one of the most spectacular art pieces at Maker Faire this year and I’m so glad I got to experience it.

Find out more at www.flaminglotusgirls.com

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Meet the Makers: Sahrye Cohen from Amped Atelier LED Fashion Couture Designer at MakerFaire Bay Area 2023

Meet Sahrye Cohen, an LED fashion designer and maker in the Bay Area. Her work has been featured on runways across the world. She uses LEDs, microcontrollers and sensors to create dresses and couture that interact with the world in new and exciting ways. She has dresses that use capacitive touch, 3d-printing, and laser-cut fabric along with a wide variety of lights in her creations.

I caught up with her after the MakeFashion Show at Maker Faire 2023 and had a chance to ask her about her artwork.

Scaled Down Post-Apocalyptic Structures by Simon Laveuve #ArtTuesday

Imagine if someone made a life-sized set for a post-apocalyptic film. Now imagine that same someone shrunk the set down small enough to fit into a planter pot. eThat is a loose description of the sculptures of Simon Laveuve. Here’s more from COLOSSAL:

Paris-based artist Simon Laveuve imagines a world filled with anarchic architecture in his ongoing series of detailed, miniature shelters…. At 1/35 scale, his recent works continue to explore the possibilities of dwelling in remote or inhospitable places, incorporating tiny tire swings, rope ladders, furniture, and art. The ramshackle, towering structures contain wooden doors, scrawled messages, and a variety of utilitarian objects, suggesting the industrious work of unseen hands. While devoid of figures, an abandoned coffee cup or a door left ajar suggests the inhabitants are not too far away.

See more!

Monday, October 16, 2023

Raspberry Pi Pico + MicroPython: DIY Quadcopter Drone #RaspberryPI #RP2040 @Raspberry_Pi @TimHanewich

Tim Hanewich has developed a DIY quadcopter drone using the Raspberry Pi Pico as the “brain”, running a MicroPython-based custom-developed flight controller to achieve flight.

It can:

Read telemetry from an MPU-6050 accelerometer & gyroscope via the I2C protocol
Receive radio commands from an onboard receiver via serial communications (UART)
Control four independent motors through an ESC via pulse width modulation (PWM)

See tim’e 12-part series on this project here.

The Great Search – Connector and Cable for Raspberry Pi 5 UART #TheGreatSearch #Adafruit #DigiKey @DigiKey @Adafruit

(Video) The new Raspberry 5 has a new UART port, which is great because the first 4 Pi’s used the hardware serial as a UART – which made debugging hard when using something like a GPS.

However, unlike the GPIO header UART, this connector is SMT, and much smaller than 0.1″ pitch. While we can always contact the Pi folks for a part number, let’s figure out what connector it is just using a pair of calipers – then find a cable that will plug in that we can use to get that tasty RX/TX data out!

See the chosen part on DigiKey

See episodes of The Desk of Ladyada in the playlist here and other Great Searches in the playlist here.

Oven Clock Reader and Display #RaspberryPi #RaspberryPiPico @Raspberry_Pi

This project provides a substitute for a Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) on a kitchen range that had become difficult to read with age (these displays typically begin to dim after 10 years or so). Dan Ellis’ solution is to mirror the intended VFD display on a separate 128 x 64 pixel backlit LCD display.

The project uses a Raspberry Pi Pico, reading the VFD clock and outputing on the new display. The code is written in Arduino.

See all the details including the code on GitHub.

Wolfenstein 3D running on a RP2040 microcontroller #RP2040 #RaspberryPi #Feather @Raspberry_Pi @MattDIYgraphics

X user pongsagon vichit (@MattDIYgraphics) posts running on an Adafruit Feather RP2040 with DVI microcontroller board! Using a Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip, the board can output DVI video (with an HDMI connector) at 320×240, 256 colors. It runs at an impressive 8+ frames per second (fps).

See the video below and more on X (formerly Twitter).

Friday, October 13, 2023

Raspberry Pi Pico Flexible Keyboard for Steam Deck @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

Wouldn’t it be great if your Steam Deck also had a keyboard. Kārlis over at GitHub has you covered. In this project, Kārlis uses the Raspberry Pi Pico to make a super thin keyboard. Here’s more from Tom’s Hardware:

Kārlis also experimented with lamination film in place of the OHP transparency film, the idea being that the final unit could be laminated together. However, the lamination film was too thin and cutting the copper tape also often cut the film. OHP transparency film proved to be a better option in that it was the thicker of the two.

The PCB layout was designed by Kārlis just for this project using Kicad. The main board driving the keyboard is a Raspberry Pi Pico running QMK firmware. Kārlis also created a useful editing tool called the KB-Editor that can be used to create and edit custom keyboard layouts. You can find the source code for the tool and try it out in browser over at GitHub.

See project!

Forcing PCI Express Gen 3.0 speeds on the Pi 5 #PiDay #RaspberryPi @geerlingguy @Raspberry_Pi

Jeff Geerling has been exploring the PCIe bus on the new Raspberry Pi 5 and has documented some interesting things, some rather unexpected like the ability to change the speed of the PCIe bus.

In my recent Adafruit Blog article PCIe Bandwidth, I discuss the generations the specification has gone through and with each one comes an increase in bus speed. Gen 1.0 was the original and defined a 2.5 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) speed. Gen 2.0 defined 5 GT/s and 3.0 8 GT/s on a single lane (which scales up linearly per number of lanes). The bus is backwards compatible, re. a Gen 1.0 device can work in a Gen 2.0 slot. But a Gen 3.0 device may or may not like that it is in a Gen 2.0 slot, depending on it’s function and driver.

There are 5 active PCIe lanes on the Raspberry Pi 5 with four going to the RP1 chip and one is broken out to the new PCIe connector. Jeff states:

By default, all PCIe lanes operate at Gen 2.0 speeds, or about 5 GT/sec per lane. Currently there’s no way to change that default for the RP1 chip’s ‘internal’ lanes, but on the external connector, you can add the following lines inside /boot/config.txt (and reboot) to upgrade the connection to Gen 3.0 (8 GT/sec, almost double the speed):
dtparam=pciex1
dtparam=pciex1_gen=3
And yes, you can also downgrade the connection to Gen 1.0 speeds (2.5 GT/sec) if you like.

Why default to PCIe Gen 2.0?

Why is it defaulted to Gen 2.0? Because that’s the speed at which the board could be certified for PCI Express. Even older standards like 2.0 and 3.0 are considered ‘high speed’ interconnects. And with any connection on a board, interference and signal issues can cause problems with higher bandwidth.

Read much more in Jeff’s article here.

Thursday, October 12, 2023

Tracking meteorites using Raspberry Pi #Space #Photography #RaspberryPi @IEEESpectrum @Raspberry_Pi

We’ve all seen the footage on social media: bright fireballs as asteroids burn through the sky. David Schneider decided he wanted to capture images of meteorites crossing the night sky.

So I opted to build a different kind of all-sky camera, one that is also based on a Raspberry Pi but that uses the Raspberry Pi High Quality color camera, following the lead of a project called, reasonably enough, Allsky Camera.

The hardware for this project consists of a Raspberry Pi and either the Raspberry Pi HQ camera or one of the purpose-built planetary cameras made by ZWO. To be truly “all sky,” the camera should be equipped with a fish-eye lens having a 180-degree field of view.

Recognizing that my home is surrounded by trees, I opted for a lens with a narrower (120-degree) field of view. A modern Raspberry Pi 4 is recommended, but I used a several-year-old Raspberry Pi 3 Model B simply because I had it on hand. I decided to use a US $60 Raspberry Pi HQ camera over a ZWO camera because it offered higher resolution.

Following the guidance provided in a very nice tutorial video, David set up the Allsky Camera software on the Pi, running it in a “headless” configuration—meaning without a monitor or keyboard. He accesses it wirelessly from a laptop through a local area network using SSH.

See the video below and more on IEEE Spectrum here.

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

New interactive light sculpture made from airplane wing by Daric Gill Studios #Arduino #Feather #NeoPixels @Dgillstudios

“The Imagination Machine, Version 2”, is a motion-sensing light sculpture made from a reclaimed airplane wing. The wing is divided into 2 parts, each with their own artist-programmed circuit boards.

Two Adafruit M4 Express microcontrollers run around 35 pages of Arduino codes each, which sample 4 PIR motion sensors, and run multiple light programs on the LED strips.

Artist Daric Gill states:

The colors are recorded from photos I’ve taken around the world. It also tallies each interaction and celebrates notable milestones by playing additional light patterns at 50, 100, 200, and 500 interactions. Part of “The Living Machine series”, this responsive sculpture takes a look at the emotional intelligence of imagination and memory, as displayed by a robot. The wing has now joined the ranks of Warhol, Picasso, Gaugin, Dali, & more in the permanent collection at The Schumacher Gallery at Capital University.”

You can find out more in the article here and in the video below:

How not to build a custom RP2040 dev board #RP2040 #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi @embedded_comp @JeremySCook

Embedded Computing Design documents a few things that you shouldn’t do when creating a custom RP2040 dev board. Tips in a nutshell:

Keep Things Simple
Minimize and Standardize Small Components
Buy More Small Components Than You Need
Don’t Forget the Solder Stencil
Don’t Leave Solder Bridges
Don’t Test With Critical USB
Do Ask for Help
Don’t Not Get Started

Jeremy Cook writes:

Realistically, it took me many hours of work to produce this successful board, so one should consider whether it’s worth your time to pursue a custom design. On the other hand, I now have the experience and confidence to do this again, and a standard design and set of components that can hopefully be reused going forward.

His next article shows getting CircuitPython on the board.

See more in the article here.

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Our Global Love for Gardens: Plant your Mac! #ArtTuesday

A new book from Phaidon celebrates “four millennia of horticultural heritage” with art about gardens. The collection includes the above work, “Plant Your Mac” by Christophe Guinet (Monsieur Plant). Here’s more from COLOSSAL:

Brimming with more than 300 full-color illustrations, Garden: Exploring the Horticultural World encompasses how geography, time periods, and purpose influence myriad landscape designs and gardening culture, along with numerous other art forms.

Garden highlights a vast range of art and ephemera, including plans for historic royal properties, how-to guides, maps, and representations in pop culture. From a Japanese tea garden fashioned from LEGO to an 18th-century Mughal garden in India to Monsieur Plant’s hydroponic system inside an iMac, the expansive tome showcases the immense breadth and imagination in gardens of all shapes and sizes.

See more!

Monday, October 9, 2023

Designing the Raspberry Pi 5: PCIe, Power and Peripherals #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi

It’s been four years between the release of the Raspberry Pi 4 and the announcement of the Raspberry Pi 5 but the Pi 5 has been in development far longer. Raspberry Pi has published an article on how pieces of the Pi 5 came together, especially with all the custom silicon on it.

Raspberry Pi 5 is coming out in October 2023, yet one of its most important new components is a chip that has been in development since 2015; RP1. Technically, it’s the first bit of Raspberry Pi silicon (hence the number) as it entered development long before RP2040. Over the years, we’ve heard inside Raspberry Pi of this ‘Project Y’ device being planned for inclusion first in for Raspberry Pi 3B+, and then in Raspberry Pi 4.

“This is our longest running chip development program,” says James Adams. “I guess it’s the reason that we built ourselves a chip team in the first place… the idea is that we separate out Raspberry Pi I/O away from the main processor. That allows the main processor to be much simpler and you can iterate it more quickly, as it’s almost a purely digital design.”

The processor has a 4 lane PCIe bus, seen on the board traces. Early prototypes broke this out to a standard PCIe x4 connector and a plug-in board was used. They don’t talk about this much, but looking at the picture above, it’s a configuration many enthusiasts would like to test out.

The article also discusses the new power management chip (above, also custom, ingesting a whopping 5 amps) and the connectors. See the full article here.

The RP1, Raspberry Pi’s first custom silicon chip #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi

Raspberry Pi 5 is the most complicated and expensive engineering program ever undertaken at Raspberry Pi, spanning over seven years, and costing on the order of $25 million.

It’s their first flagship product to make use of silicon designed in-house at Raspberry Pi, in the form of the RP1 I/O controller. No, the RP2040 chip came afterwards, unknown to the world (the 2 was not the number of cores on the chip).

Now you can read Raspberry Pi documentation on the RP1, what it is and what it can do (and yes it does have some PIO!).

See the video below and more via a Raspberry Pi article and the initial documentation is here. Bonus video: James Adams and Eben Upton on designing Raspberry Pi 5.

Sunday, October 8, 2023

Ouija Robot

A Robotic Ouija Board shared by Ronald McCollum on Hackaday.io. Using a CRICKIT, Raspberry Pi and more!

Ouija boards are spooky but they are extra spooky when a detached hand is being controlled!

This project is a motorized mannequin arm and wooden planchette that spells out tweets it receives on a ouija board.

See the whole project!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! All month we’ll be bringing you ideas and projects for an Electronic Halloween!

Working on a project for Halloween this year? Share it with us in the comments below, the Adafruit forums, Facebook, Discord, Instagram or Twitter [aka X]– (tag your posts #ElectronicHalloween). You can also send us a blog tip!

Get inspired with the Halloween Gift Guide

Making a Rube Goldberg Machine with Clay

Pottery to the People decided to make a Rube Goldberg machine that solves the problem of what to do with pots they don’t like. The machine is made entirely with clay including the marbles and dominos!

Wednesday, October 4, 2023

Synthesize music with animations on a Raspberry Pi Pico

Great new project + write-up from Christophe Favergeon up on Hackster.io:

Learn how to create a real time MIDI synthesizer with spectrum visualization and no RTOS using a Raspberry Pi Pico

The build makes use of our NPN 2222A Transistor and more! See here for more details.

Tuesday, October 3, 2023

Guillermo del Toro’s Movie Picks for October

Super fun video from Turner Classic Movies! Who better to curate your Halloween-month viewing experience than director Guillermo del Toro who blends horror, fantasy, and beauty together to make the most magical films. From Hell Boy, to The Shape of Water, to Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro’s movies show such a wide range of styles and influences. I was not surprised that although some of my favorite movies were on here (Hitchcock’s Suspicion), there were many I hadn’t even heard of at all (Browning’s Freaks).

Watch the full video here on YouTube.