Tools Hack Daily

Monday, December 4, 2023

Tutorial: Build an Edge-Lit Acrylic Tavern Sign with IR Control and WLED

Check out the latest guide from Erin St Blaine: Build an edge-lit acrylic tavern sign for your space.

Full tutorial: https://learn.adafruit.com/edge-lit-tavern-sign-with-wled-control-with-wifi-or-ir-remote/overview

Addressable NeoPixel LEDs light the sign with hundreds of open-source animations you can choose from. Adafruit’s Feather ESP32 V2 works seamlessly with the free and open-source WLED software. Control the lights from your phone or from an IR remote.

From the guide:

Adventurers, friends, and companions will feel welcome in your space when they see this custom glowing tavern sign, lit from inside with a fiery glow. Program different animation modes to suit your mood with just a few taps on your phone, or control the colors and animations with an infrared remote. This project will transform your home bar or game room into a delightful warm refuge for weary travelers. Tankards not included.

Difficulty

This is an intermediate level project. Skills needed:

Soldering +2

Coding +0

Woodworking +3

Guilloché patterns: spirograph with a laser

A guilloché pattern is a decorative technique that involves mechanically engraving a repetitive pattern into a material. The space can then be used to add decorations or ornaments. To a certain generation they appear like drawings from a spirograph.

Ed Nisley has been cutting Guilloché patterns in materials and has looked to do it on compact disks.

So the overall workflow involves generating an SVG image, importing it into LightBurn with those layers set up with the appropriate cut parameters, using the Three-Point Circle Center Finder tool to align the pattern with the CD, then Fire The Laser. Alignment stops on the laser platform eliminate the need to realign every pattern, so it boils down to running the generator script enough times, importing a batch of patterns, then snapping each one into place and cutting it.

They’re kinda pretty, in the usual techie way.

Read more in the post here. The GCMC source code and Bash driver script as a GitHub Gist.

Raspberry Pi hints at new products in 2024 #RaspberryPi @hacksterio

On the heels of the Raspberry 5 announcement several weeks ago, Eben Upton hints at an RP2040 successor and promises a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 in 2024. Upton is quoted as saying:

“We know what people don’t like about [RP]2040,” Upton admitted at the event, “the [Arm Cortex-]M0+ [architecture], could have more RAM, could have more GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output], and we know what people do like — the PIO [Programmable Input/Output blocks]… and we have a chip team.”

While Upton stopped short of announcing an actual successor product, it’s clear the company is at least thinking about what comes after the RP2040. No release date for a new chip nor a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 to showcase it were discussed, but Upton did go on to confirm that the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 system-on-module is design-complete and scheduled for launch in 2024 — bringing with it “a high degree of commonality” with the Compute Module 4 and “USB 3.0 where some of the MIPI lane[s] used to be.”

Sunday, December 3, 2023

I Made a Night Vision Camera Using a Raspberry Pi

John’s Reviews and More shared this video on Youtube!

This is a Night Vision Camera I Made, If you want to make it yourself I have the links to the stuff you will need

Friday, December 1, 2023

Make Your Own Raspberry Pi 4 Photobooth!

element14 presents shared this video on Youtube

Although we mostly rely on smartphones to take photos, portable Photo Booths are a convenient alternative at events like parties and weddings. Building one from scratch in 2019 is easier than ever, particularly using a Raspberry Pi board and camera, along with a Touchscreen Display. In this video, we go over the steps on how to assemble the hardware and setup the software to run a Pi-powered Photo Booth for taking selfies with your besties at the next gathering! http://bit.ly/2S2hRZH

Each 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!

Tomy Ominbot 2000 Restored with Raspberry Pi #piday #raspberrypi

Bring your favorite 80s bots back to life with the help of Raspberry Pi. Matt Vella points shared this project on hackster.io:

From Star Wars to Short Circuit, Go-bots to Transformers – the 1980s was a time in pop culture where people thought a lot about how robots might exist alongside us in the future.

Let’s bring the Omnibot 2000 closer to the home robot vision that many had (and still have) by bringing in new technology and rename it the Omnibot MAIV (Modernized with AI and Viam).

See the guide and more details from Jeremy Cook on Hackster.io

Bringing Back a Wii U with a Raspberry Pi @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

Word on the street is that some Nintendo Wii U systems are having mysterious failures. When error codes are found in the wild, community members often come up with solutions. Here’s a hack to help resurrect your otherwise bricked Wii U from [Voultar] via hackaday:

[Voultar] wasn’t able to source a Wii U with the much-discussed NAND failure mode, but he was able to source a number of supposedly bricked Wii U systems displaying the error codes 160-0101 and 160-0103. The hack is achieved with an exploit in the Wii U’s USB Host Stack descriptor parsing module, developed by [GaryOderNichts]. It allows the injection of a payload that lets one run unsigned code on the Wii U, achieved via a Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pico is ultimately used to boot off an SD card running a recovery program for the Wii U. By resetting the Wii U’s “coldboot title ID”, it solves the error and gets the console booting properly, as per normal.

See more!