Friday, May 17, 2024

A Nature Documentary on Your Cat, Made with Raspberry Pi @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

Those of us with cats can lose hours to watching our furry friends antics. At times we can feel as if we’re zoologists, observing some strange new animal for the first time. We can even imagine David Attenborough narrating the curious behavior of our cat. Now we don’t have to. Here’s more from Yoko Li via Hackaday:

Detecting a cat with a raspberry pi and camera is one thing, but [Yoko Li]’s AI Raspberry Pi Cat Detection brings things entirely to another level by narrating your feline’s activities, nature documentary style…. “This feline exemplifies both the beauty and the peaceful nature of its kind. No email will be sent as the cat is not on the kitchen counter.”

Hard to believe that just a few years ago this cat detector tool was the bee’s knees in cat detection technology. Things have certainly come a long way. Interested? The GitHub repository has everything needed to roll your own and we highly recommend watching it in action in the video, embedded below.

See more!

 

5 fun Summer projects for Raspberry Pi #Raspberrypi

Summer is coming and Kevin McAleer shared this video highlighting some fun Raspbery pi projects to tackle now that the school year is over!

Here are 5 fun Summer projects for Raspberry Pi that you have to try.

See more!


3055 06Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

The official Raspberry Pi 5 M.2 HAT+ out, plus design is published

The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ is now out and enables connection of M.2 M-key peripherals, such as NVMe drives and AI accelerators, to a Raspberry Pi 5. It provides fast (up to 500 MB/s) data transfer to and from these peripherals, and is available to buy today, from Raspberry Pi’s network of Approved Resellers, priced at just $12.

A nice side-effect of launching of the M.2 HAT+ a bit later has been a profusion of third-party products, like the NVMe Base from our friends at Pimoroni. We want to make it easier to build high-quality PCIe accessories for Raspberry Pi 5, and so we’re publishing our schematics as a reference design. You can also browse our documentation for the M.2 HAT+.

Read all the details in the announcement post here.

Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Farewell, Chuck E. Cheese Animatronic Band

Screenshot 2024 05 15 at 12 28 44 PM

The band that has inspired nightmarish games, tv shows and movies (and infinite actual nightmares) is finally hanging up the wires. Rumblings of Munch’s Make Believe Band‘s last set have been dragging on for a while now but plans are settled. Chuck E. Cheese will phase out the animatronic band

It isn’t shocking but it still feels like a loss. Chuck E. Cheese will focus more on digital media and screens at their locations moving forward. It’s too bad Boston Dynamics didn’t step in to help them update their bots to be a little more modern, and a little less creepy.

More from the New York Times:

For now, Munch’s Make Believe Band still performs every day at the Hicksville location, which sometimes hosts as many as 20 birthday parties on a weekend day, starting as early at 8 a.m. But by the end of the summer, the band will have played its last show there.

Then the band will be removed and replaced by a Jumbotron-size TV, more seating and a digital dance floor. (Chuck E. Cheese declined to say what will happen to the animatronic figures after they are removed from hundreds of locations across the country.)

Read more and more from Gizmodo

‘Portals,’ Connects New Yorkers and Dubliners #ArtTuesday

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For a brief moment Dublin and NYC were linked via the ‘Portals‘ project. The project is a really cool idea linking the two cities in real time with large circular screens .

Unfortunately, as of today, some folks made poor choices and the portal has been temporarily shut down. Hopefully they find a way to re-open shortly.

While open the Portal was quickly gaining buzz and crowds. More from the Smithsonian:

The newly installed “public technology sculptures”—collectively named “The Portal”—form an “unprecedented visual bridge between these two iconic cities,” according to a statement from the Flatiron NoMad Partnership, which presented the installation in collaboration with the Simons Foundation and New York City Department of Transportation Art Program.

Dublin and new york portal official opening 2 jpg

See more!

Screenshot 4 2 14 11 48 AMEvery Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Speculative Fiction Reads from Charles Yu and Ken Liu #AsianPacificAmericanHeritageMonth #APAHM #AAPIHM

Today we celebrate the science fiction of Charles Yu and Ken Liu.  Here’s more from the Hoboken Library:

The story focuses on a time machine repairmen and his relationship with his parents, one of whom disappeared and the other of whom has chosen to live in a time loop.  Charles Yu parents were immigrants from Taiwan and some autobiographical details from Yu’s own life are used in the story.

Learn more!

Charles Yu

Ken Liu

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

200,000 CDs Transformed Into Art #ArtTuesday

Dead media litter the planet. VHS tapes, floppy discs, E.T. game cartridges, cassette tapes, and more can be found all over the world, transforming what was once a slice of the future into a smelly pile of the past. Some enterprising artists use these dead media to make something beautiful. Artist Tara Donovan has done just that with CDs. Here’s more from Colossal:

Because of their mirrored surfaces, the monumental sculptures catch and reflect light depending on the time of day and confront the viewer with the stunning weight of information. Donovan described the material in a recent interview:

“The silver CDs are commercial discs with music, movies, audiobooks, porn, Jesus, Celine Dion. Everything. The green are CDRs, so they’re recordable. They contain whatever people valued enough to put on them, whether it’s a Grateful Dead concert or a mix. The CD is the last quantifiable object of data that exists in the world. We moved from filing cabinets to clouds. These are relics of a very recent past. I remember when the CD became a thing, it was marketed as the future. They made “forever discs” which were gold. When you think about the amount of information that is in this room is staggering.”

See and learn more!


Screenshot 4 2 14 11 48 AMEvery Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Carl Bugeja Built a Mini Las Vegas Sphere

Carl Bugeja set a goal to make a baseball sized sphere jam-packed with as many LEDs as possible and by golly, what a success! Follow along on YouTube

BreadboardOS for Raspberry Pi Pico

BreadboardOS (BBOS) by Cavin McKinley is a firmware platform aimed at quick prototyping on Raspberry Pi Pico. BBOS was built around the following principles:

  1. Every project should start with a CLI. A command line interface makes prototyping, debugging, and testing about 1000% easier, especially over the lifespan of multiple projects with reused pieces.
  2. Write it once. Don’t waste time writing and re-writing the basic infrastructure for your projects. Modularize, duplicate, and profit!
  3. Get running QUICKLY. The faster you can bring up a project, the faster you can find out that you need to re-tool the whole dang thing. But at least you don’t have to write a CLI again!

Functional Description

BreadboardOS is built on top of FreeRTOS, enabling fast integration of new functional blocks and allowing for task concurrency without breaking the base system. Existing knowledge of RTOS is not necessarily required.

See the video below and more on GitHub.

A Raspberry Pi Pico W-based business card design

Clovis Fritzen is entering the Hackaday business card contest with a novel design built using a Raspberry Pi Pico W.

The above image is of my project, which I already sent to PCB manufacturing. It features a Raspberry Pi Pico W (with Wi-Fi) to the right and a touch button in parallel with a mechanica switch for “wake up” functions. To the right there is a 6×6 charlieplexed LED display (using only 7 pins of Pi Pico) and a 0.96″ OLED yellow/blue display.

My plan is for the card to be in a “dormant” state where it will show time (hour and minutes) and temperature in binary on the LEDs, fetching such data from a web API. The OLED display will be displaying contact information.

When you press the touch button or the mechanical switch, the charlieplexed 6×6 LED display will probably show your e-mail (letter by letter). The OLED display will probably show more contact information in a “rolling” style.

See the design here, PCB files on GitHub and the hackaday.io page.

Monday, May 13, 2024

NEW GUIDE: Adafruit PiCowbell Camera Breakout #AdafruitLearningSystem #Adafruit @adafruit

Ding dong! Hear that? It’s the PiCowbell ringing, letting you know that the new Adafruit PiCowbell OV5640 Camera Breakout is in stock. This is a quality OV5640 camera with a 5 Megapixel sensor element plus all the support circuitry you need to start taking pictures with your Pico or Pico W. You can grab raw RGB images for image analysis, or use the built-in JPEG encoding to save images to a microSD card.

The Adafruit PiCowbell Camera Breakout guide has everything you need to get started with this PiCowbell. There’s pages for overview, pinouts, CircuitPython, and resources for download.

Read more at Adafruit PiCowbell Camera Breakout

Fortune Telling Robot built with a Raspberry Pi!

Kevin McAleer shared this video on Youtube! He Built a Fortune Telling Robot Based on Voltar from the movie Big

Join me as we learn how to build a fun interactive exhibit for Open Sauce 2024 in San Fransisco. This exhibit is powered by a Raspberry Pi 4, has an arcade button on the front and a Thermal printer to print out your fortunes.

Check out his Youtube channel here!

Friday, May 10, 2024

Running Forejo on the Raspberry Pi #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

via PiMyLifeUp

Forgejo is a self-hosted, lightweight Git service that offers many of the services and features you expect from cloud services like GitHub.

This particular software package is actually a fork off of the popular Gitea project. This fork was created after key changes in how Gitea was managed.

Being lightweight makes Forgejo an excellent solution for self-hosting your code repositories on your Raspberry Pi. It can easily run on the Pi’s limited hardware without consuming all the resources.

Read more.


3055 06Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

Raspberry Pi Connect #piday #raspberrypi

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Raspberry Pi released a beta version of their very own official remote access client for Raspberry Pi. Called Raspberry Pi Connect.

It’s often extremely useful to be able to access your Raspberry Pi’s desktop remotely. There are a number of technologies which can be used to do this, including VNC, and of course the X protocol itself. But they can be hard to configure, particularly when you are attempting to access a machine on a different local network; and of course with the transition to Wayland in Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm, classic X remote desktop support is no longer available.

We wanted to be able to provide you with this functionality with our usual “it just works” approach. Enter Raspberry Pi Connect.

Learn more!


3055 06Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

Self-Hosting AI Chatbot with Open Web UI on a Raspberry Pi @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

Of course you can bring AI and Raspberry Pi together! Here’s more from PiMyLifeUp:

Open Web UI (Formerly Ollama Web UI) is an open-source and self-hosted web interface for interacting with large language models… The idea of this project is to create an easy-to-use and friendly web interface that you can use to interact with the growing number of free and open LLMs such as Llama 3 and Phi3.

If you have ever used ChatGPT through your web browser, you will be very familiar with how Open WebUI works. Its interface is very similar and sports many of the features you would expect.

See project!


3055 06Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

Compute Module 4 brings Sega Game Gear back to life #Raspberrypi

Jeff Geerling shared the video on Youtube and the Raspberry pi blog has a great write up!

Compute Module 4 is running RetroPie inside a salvaged Game Gear handset, giving the user access to as many classic games as the innards of their machine will allow. Jeff explains in his build video that he could have used a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W or a 3A+, which would draw less power but wouldn’t be quite as fast.

Jeff found a used, broken Game Gear handset online, and turned to John Maddison’s Zega Mame Boy, a Game Gear modding kit designed for use with Raspberry Pi, to help with the transformation. A smaller, more powerful audio board stepped in to improve the Game Gear’s sound. He also got a new screen and some fresh buttons from Hand Held Legend to disguise the battle scars from hours and hours of use in the handset’s previous life. I know from personal experience that your screen will get scratched if you throw your Game Boy at the wall every time you fail to complete the Bowser’s Castle level in Super Mario Bros.

Wednesday, May 8, 2024

Trying RISC OS on an old Raspberry Pi

Call For Art ALL-NATURAL #ArtTuesday

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Art conetest from the sharing project which focuses on technology and Science. Bruce Sterling on Tumblr shares:

The artworks nominated for the prize must follow the theme:

‘ALL-NATURAL’

curated by Share Festival artistic director Bruce Sterling and curator Jasmina Tešanović

The platform invites artists from all over the world to submit their works.

Call for entries open from 12 April 2024 to 9 June 2024

The six prize nominees will be announced in July 2024. The announcement will be published on our website: www.toshareproject.it

The winner will be announced during the Share Festival Opening,in Turin from 28 October to 3 November 2024 during the Turin Contemporary Art Week.

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See more!


Screenshot 4 2 14 11 48 AMEvery Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Tuesday, May 7, 2024

GIF Art: free fallin’ from Virarts #ArtTuesday

Gravity defying GIF art from Virartz:!


Screenshot 4 2 14 11 48 AMEvery Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Saturday, May 4, 2024

Raspberry Pi Motion Alarm

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A Pi Pico and a PIR sensor module make up this simple burglar alarm. Shared by ROBO HUB on Instructables:

I have included all the step by step instruction on how to build this and also there is a working video and tutorial on this project given at the end of this post, Have a great build and suggestions for improvements are always welcome.

See the guide!


There are a ton of other fun Alarm projects on the Adafruit Learn System:

Trinket Bluetooth Alarm System –

Trinket IMG 2397

Gemma M0 Vibration Sensor Motion Alarm –
Sensors P3110526 2000

Friday, May 3, 2024

T3rminal Raspberry Pi-based pocket PC #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

A Pi-powered PC for your pocket? Perfect!

via Tom’s Hardware

For most people in the world, the pocket PC concept became obsolete the moment smartphones became viable. And no, I don’t consider a smartphone to be a pocket PC in anything but the vaguest sense. But while it may not have widespread appeal anymore, the pocket PC form factor does still tickle the fancy of certain geeks. Because the consumer market doesn’t exist anymore, we geeks have to make our own pocket PCs. And it is hard to imagine a DIY design more tempting than Caleb Holloway’s T3rminal Raspberry Pi-based pocket PC.

Read more.


3055 06Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

Meet André Costa: the brains behind @rpilocator #piday #raspberrypi

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Raspberry Pi supply shortages have abated (for now). But, over the past few years, if you were looking for a Pi André Costa was there to help. The maker behind @rpilocator talks with MagPi:

The service we now know as rpilocator started off as cm4locator, with AndrĂ© coding it during a couple of days off. Initially it was private, and within a couple of days it had helped him locate – and buy – a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Surprised at how easy it was, he decided to make a public version.

“I registered the domain on January 26 and spent a couple of hours a day after work adding more listings to be tracked,” AndrĂ© says. “On January 29 I pushed the website to a cloud service. Rpilocator was officially live but no one knew about it. I waited a day to make sure everything was working and I sent an email to Lee from leepspvideo and Jeff Geerling.”

Read more!


3055 06Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

Get young people making interactive websites with JavaScript and Raspberry pi’s ‘More web’ path

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There are six new projects available in the ‘More web’ project where young people (I’m still young right?) can explore what JavaScript makes possible in web development. Via Raspberry pi

Modern web design has turned websites from static and boring walls of information into ways of providing fun and engaging experiences to the user. Our new ‘More web’ project path shows young creators how to add interaction and animation to a webpage through JavaScript code.

Why learn JavaScript?

As of 2024, JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world. And it’s easy to see why when you look at its versatility and how it can be used to create dynamic and interactive content on websites. JavaScript lets you handle events and manipulate HTML and CSS so that you can build everything from simple animations, to forms that can be checked for missing or nonsensical answers. If you’ve ever seen a webpage continuously load more content when you reach the end, that’s JavaScript.

Where is the ISS, Raspberry Pi version #PiDay #Python #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi

The folks at WhiskeyTangoHotel were just curious how Orbital Files and Kepler Elements are used to define the current and predicted locations of a satellite.  One thing leads to another and the result was an International Space Station tracker.

For example, we wrote the Python 3 program on our own and then decided we would see how ChatGPT would handle the problem.   Turns out we were a lot faster at the task than the ChatGPT AI.  ChatGPT would finally get there, but it seemed error prone.  Still, impressively ChatGPT finally got to a solution after a TON of help from us.

But… we did like some of the things ChatGPT did better.  For example, the ChatGPT routine to translate compass degrees to a cardinal direction was better than ours.  So, in addition to learning about Orbital Files and Kelper Elements we learned a little about what ChatGPT is good and “less good” at.

The project updates the location on the ISS for your location every ten seconds.  If the ISS is above the horizon a LED flashes to let you know.  The whole enchilada is contained in a 3D Printed box.

See the video below and more on WhiskeyTangoHotel.

Thursday, May 2, 2024

Xbox Pad Control for Raspberry Pi Projects @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

Tightly controlling your Hunter during your 23rd attempt at taking out the Capra Demon, wearing as little as possible to get the best rolls, wielding a sword forged from material forged from [spoiler] endless arrows shot at [spoiler] under the [spoiler], is the best time to have a perfectly operating game controller. Also handy when you’re working with your Raspberry Pi. Here’s more on hackster.io from Team SaraKIT: Artur Majtczak, Maciek Matuszewski:

Welcome to a practical and fun way to control your Raspberry Pi projects using an Xbox One controller (or other bluetooth pad)! This project emerged from the desire to offer an intuitive and interactive method for steering devices like the “RC Car – Lego Powered by Raspberry PI with SaraKIT” and the “Self-Balancing Lego Robot, ” as well as managing complex camera systems like “Pan-Tilt” or “Turret Base.”

The idea began when I noticed that while many enjoy the technical aspects of Raspberry Pi projects, the interface for interacting with these devices often lacks the direct and tactile response that a game controller offers. Recognizing the potential to enhance user experience, I set out to create a straightforward integration that allows anyone with an Xbox One controller to jump straight into controlling their projects.

See more!


3055 06Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

4-way NVMe RAID comes to Raspberry Pi 5

With the Raspberry Pi 5‘s exposed PCI Express connector comes many new possibilities. Jeff Geerling tests the Geekwork X1011, which puts four NVMe SSDs under a Raspberry Pi 5.

Unlike the Penta SATA HAT I tested last month, this carrier uses thinner and faster NVMe storage, making it a highly-compact storage expansion option, which has the added benefit of freeing up the top of the Pi 5 for other HAT expansion options.

But how does the board get power from the Pi 5? Raspberry Pi maintains you shouldn’t draw more than 5W through the PCIe FFC, so where does the board get up to 5A 5V power? It’s through pogo pins.

Because the Pi 5 only exposes one lane (x1) of PCI Express Gen 2, you need a PCI Express switch chip (much like a network switch) to split that single lane into four connections.

Check out the whole review in the post here.

 

Wednesday, May 1, 2024

NEW LEARN GUIDE: Arcade Stick Conversion #Hacks #AdafruitLearningSystem @Adafruit

Play games with a proper old-school arcade joystick and buttons on your modern systems! Back at the dawn of MAME arcade game emulation there were lots of heavy-duty joysticks made for Windows PCs. Their joysticks and buttons are great, but their brains were meant to output over PS/2 keyboard cables or sound card joystick interfaces.

Now you can keep all the good parts and swap out the old-fashioned driver board for a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller that works as a gamepad over USB. With the Pico H and Terminal PiCowbell you can avoid soldering altogether for a plug-and-play solution.

Read more at John Park’s Arcade Stick Conversion

Navigating the Moon with Art #ArtTuesday

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NASA always has always had room for artists. From helping to visualize data to dreaming of the future; space exploration isn’t strictly for the scientist. Or would it be more apt to say Artist are Scientists too?

Fun image from NASA‘s early days:

An artist uses an airbrush to recreate the lunar surface on one of the four models comprising the LOLA, or Lunar Orbit and Landing Approach, simulator in this November 12, 1964, photo. Project LOLA was a simulator built at Langley to study problems related to landing on the lunar surface.

See more!


Screenshot 4 2 14 11 48 AMEvery Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Upcycling a 1960s clock with Raspberry Pi

Alan Boris has re-imagined an old analog clock radio from the 1960s using a Raspberry Pi 4B.

I saw this tired, dirty, unattractive 1960s radio in a thrift store and I just had to buy it to see if it could be modernized into something interesting.

I like to retrofit old electronics with modern components and this clock radio presented a real challenge! Basically nothing on the inside was salvageable.

An Adafruit 3.5 inch LCD HAT attached to a Raspberry Pi 4 fit nicely in place of the old clock. To easily add FM radio functionality, an RDA5807 module was added. It’s an entire FM radio with RDS on a tiny chip that can be controlled via I2C which is connected to the Pi. A MAX4544 analog switch module allows the audio to be switched between the Pi’s audio out and the FM module audio out. A Pi GPIO controls the switch, and its output feeds a TPA2016 audio amplifier.

I wanted to show a lot of active content on the screen but I did not want to code an entire user interface, so I decided to just display the output of a web browser. My Python code establishes a WebSocket connection to an onboard web server, allowing the button presses detected by the GPIO pins to manipulate JavaScript code in the browser.

See the video below and check out all the details in the post on hackster.io.