With the addition of wireless LAN and Bluetooth, the Raspberry Pi Zero W is ideal for making embedded Internet of Things (IoT) projects. The Pi Zero W has been designed to be as flexible and compact as possible with mini connectors and an unpopulated 40-pin GPIO, allowing you to use only what your project requires. Make amazing Raspberry Pi Zero W projects with our latest issue Inside MagPi 61 In issue 61, we’re focusing on the small but mighty wonder that is the Raspberry Pi Zero W, and on some of the very best projects we’ve found for you to build with it.
We’re not sure about the name of that Scott M. Baker built. He calls it a “filadometer”, perhaps a portmanteau of “filament” and “odometer”, in which case it makes sense. It may not flow trippingly from the tongue and we can’t come up with anything better, but whatever moniker you use it’s actually a pretty cool build.The filadometer started life as something completely different and utterly typical for Nixie tube projects – a temperature and humidity gauge. Scott decided to recycle the eight-tube display to keep track of his Prusa, and in doing so he reveals a pretty remarkable degree of forethought in his design process. The original Nixie display has all the usual trappings – the driver chips, the shift registers, and the high voltage power supply. What stands out is the modularity of his design: the tube sockets and drivers live on a backplane PCB, with a Raspberry Pi and a separate HV supply board plugging into it.
The original display had a Model B Pi, so there was plenty of room for a new Zero W. A new printed case and a little programming to capture the filament use from Octoprint is all it took to put this nifty little build back in action.
The video below shows the details.We’re always excited to see new videos from Scott because we learn so much from looking over his virtual shoulder. If you haven’t checked out his stuff, take a look at or.Posted in Tagged,. In the time before smartphones for on-the-go visual entertainment, there were portable TVs. You might think of a portable TV as a luggable device, but the really cool ones were pocket-sized.
Perhaps if you are familiar with pocket TVs you’ll be thinking of a Citizen or a Casio with a matchbox-sized LCD, but before those devices reached the market there was an earlier generation that featured tiny CRTs. These were simply the coolest electronics that an ’80s kid could lust after, and Nick Reynolds is lucky enough to have one. It’s a Sony Watchman from some time in the first half of that decade, and because it’s useless in the age of digital broadcasts.The unlikely inspiration for the project came from the 1970s British sci-fi TV series, in which portable CRT-based communicators were a prop. They were typical of the sci-fi vision of the future in shows of the period, one that got so much right but didn’t quite see the smartphone coming.The Watchman features Sony’s angled CRT, and called for some careful insulation of its parts with Kapton tape. He’s even included a Pi camera module with a contorted run of flexible cable, placing it beneath the screen where a tuning indicator once sat. He has no sound as yet, but is able to demonstrate a working videophone using as a client. He has a few more Watchmen, and has plans for a suite of retro videophones, and.Surprisingly this isn’t the only Sony Watchman that’s had this kind of treatment, previously we’ve brought you.
Posted in Tagged. Everyone has heard of a computer mouse before, but what aboutGranted, Electronic Grenade’s all-in-one computer in an oversized mouse-shaped case is almost without practical value.
But that’s hardly the point, which was just to do something cool. Inspiration came from keyboards stuffed with a Raspberry Pi to make a mostly-all-in-one machine; this Rodent of Unusual Size is the next logical step. With a Pi Zero W and a LiPo battery alongside a mouse mechanism inside the 3D-printed case – alas, no real mouse currently on the market would house everything – the computer sports not only a tiny and nearly-usable LCD display, but also a slide-out Bluetooth keyboard. The ergonomics of a keyboard at right angles to the display gives us pause, but again, usability is not the point.
And don’t expect much in the performance department – the rig barfs after a few seconds of playing Minecraft.Still, for all its limitations, this mouse computer has a certain charm. We always enjoy “just because I can” projects, whether they be. Such projects are often valuable not for what they produce, but for pushing into areas where no one has gone before.Posted in Tagged,.
Send free smtp server. Solved!Amongst the many reems of info I've perused I came across a registry edit for enabling email notifications with exchange servers that didn't require authentication.
Like many other hobbies, astronomy can be pursued on many levels, with equipment costs ranging from the affordable to the – well, astronomical. Thankfully, there are lots of entry-level telescopes on the market, some that even come with mounts that automatically find and track heavenly bodies. Finding a feature is as easy as aligning to a few known stars and looking up the object in the database embedded in the remote.Few of the affordable mounts are WiFi-accessible, though, which is a gap Dane Gardner’s aims to fill. For the price of a $10 Pi Zero W and a little know-how, Dane was able to gain full control over his ‘scope. His instrument is a Celestron NexStar, a Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector with a 150-mm aperture, has a motorized altitude-azimuth mount. The handheld remote had enough room for him to add the Zero, powering it from the mount’s battery pack. The handset has an RS-232 serial port built-in, but with the level differences Dane just connected the Pi directly to the handset before the UART.
Running INDI, a cross-platform astronomical instrument control library, he now has total control of the scope, and he can use open source astronomy software rather than the limited database within the handset. As a neat side trick, the telescope can now be controlled with a Bluetooth gamepad.Astronomy and electronics go hand in hand, whether in the or part of the spectrum.
We like the way Dane was able to gain control of his telescope, and we’d like to hear about what he sees with his new tool. Assuming the Seattle weather ever cooperates.Posted in Tagged,. Quick, what’s the price of Bitcoin?
Raspberry Pi Zero Projects Reddit
Is it lower today than yesterday? Are you overdrafting your Lamborghini account? What if you had an easy way to tell at a glance how much you could have made if you sold in December of last year?
Is all about, and it’s a great use of existing electronics.The hardware for this build is a traffic light table lamp available on Amazon for twenty bucks. Inside this traffic light, you get a PCB with three LEDs and a small microcontroller to control the LEDs. The microcontroller isn’t used in this case, instead the microcontroller is removed and a few wires are soldered up to the base of the transistors used to drive the LEDs. The other ends of these wires are attached to a trio of pins on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, giving this traffic light table lamp Linux and a connection to the Internet.On the software side of things, we’re looking at a Docker container running a Python script that fetches the latest Bitcoin price from Coindesk and calculates the change from the previous fetch of the price of Bitcoin. This data is shuffled off to another Python script that actually changes the LEDs on the lamp.Sure, these days a ‘bitcoin price tracking traffic light’ is as simple as connecting a red LED to a battery, and if you’re feeling extra fancy you can add a 220 Ω resistor.
But this is a project that’s so well executed that we’ve got to give it a tip ‘o our hat. Posted in Tagged,. Now that most of what we do revolves around our phones and/or the internet, it’s nearly impossible to take a short break from work to check the ol’ calendar without being lured by the sirens on the shore of social media. Well, samvanhook was tired of being drawn in when all he really needs is a vague idea of what’s coming up for him in the next 12 hours.Thanks to color-coded segments, sam can tell at a glance if he has something coming up soon in Google Calendar, or if he can dive back into work. When nothing is scheduled, the segments are simply unlit.We love the mid-century minimal look and craftsmanship of CalClock. This beauty runs on a Raspi Zero W, which fetches the 411 through the gooCal API and lights up the appropriate NeoPixels arrayed behind standard clock movement-driven hands.
sam could have diffused the NeoPixels with a single sheet of acrylic, but he went the extra mile to route and sand little acrylic ice cubes for all 24 segments.Want more control of your day? sam took the time to upload both and so you can. If you need help just getting started each day,. Posted in, Tagged,. Fatjedi007 recently acquired three programmable boxing gym-type clocks to help his developmentally disabled clients manage their time. The plan was to have timers of varying lengths fire at preset times throughout the day, with the large displays providing a view from anywhere.
Unfortunately, the clocks were not nearly as programmable as he needed them to be.Since he’d spent enough money already,. Each clock gets a Pi Zero W and a simple IR transmit/receive circuit that operates using. The clocks came with remote controls, so it was just a matter of re-programming them.
From LIRC, he wrote some scripts with SENDONCE and schedules the timers with a cron job. No need to get out the ladder—he can program all of them from his chair over VNC.He does have one problem, though, and that’s getting the Zeros to set themselves over NTP with static IPs. Do you have any suggestions? Put ’em in the comments and help a Jedi out.LIRC is pretty handy for anything you want to control remotely, like. Posted in Tagged, Posts navigation.
Best Raspberry Pi Projects for January 2019: The tastiest Raspberry Pi 3 and Pi Zero projects to try baking this year. From beginner builds to more advanced Pi uses, all the delicious ideas you need are right here to get making.Editor’s Note: The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently revealed a new board, the, which is a slimmed down version of the. Best Raspberry Pi Zero projects 2019Quite unbelievably, the thumb-sized Raspberry Pi Zero is more powerful than the original Pi (2012’s Raspberry Pi 1 Model B) and costs just $5/£4.The Pi Zero has fewer connectivity options than the Pi 3, but there are plenty of accessories to make up for this, and the newer Zero W board adds Wi-Fi to the fray.The result is cheaper projects in even smaller packages – and these are some of the absolute best. 1) An Alexa-powered dash camThe Dride is a Raspberry Pi-powered dashboard camera with Amazon Alexa skills built in.
It combines the Pi’s camera module with custom built open source software and a mobile app that leverages your mobile data plan to upload footage to a cloud DVR (don’t worry, files are small).It’ll also capture license plates, give out warnings if you’re swerving and alert you if in danger of a frontal collision. It also hands free messaging and the ability to sync with Google Maps and Spotify (via the mobile app) enabling you to control navigation and music while keeping your eyes on the road.It failed to reach its lofty $100,000 funding goal on Kickstarter, but the team behind the idea has vowed to push on. The good news is the platform is open source, so you can build your own model using either a Pi 3 or Pi Zero W – we’d recommend the former due to its added oomph – and, hopefully one day, benefit from an ecosystem of apps from third-party developers.Check out the full Dride starter guide 2) Electric skateboardHere’s a Raspberry Pi Zero project to assist your pursuit of the great outdoors: an electric skateboard that zooms around town at 30kmph (19mph).The brains is the £5 Raspberry Pi Zero, while your speed is controlled by a Remote over Bluetooth. There’s a motor from Alien Power Systems attached to the rear axle, plus a speed controller from the same company, and a battery offering a range of 10km.The project is the brainchild of the, the man behind the popular series of YouTube tutorial videos, and features just 100 lines of code – freely available on.
3) Disposable GIF cameraThe Pix-E, created by Nick Brewer, is a disposable camera that can be used to create animated GIF files.It uses a Pi Camera module and a custom build complete with shutter and a battery pack. A little software wizardry via tools such as PiCamera, GraphicsMagick, and GifCam and – hey presto! – homemade GIFs that can then be easily processed and shared.The case is 3D-printed and there are even some paper wrappers to print out to give the camera a ’90s retro feel.You’ll need some intermediate engineering, soldering and bread-boarding skills to achieve this, but all of the parts and instructions can be found on.Related: 4) Electronic chess boardThe art of playing chess is studying the board, seeing things from different angles, and keeping your finger on that piece until you’re absolutely sure you’re not walking into a trap. A computer chess program just doesn’t come close.Well now, thanks to the Raspberry Pi Zero – plus a touchscreen, a few magnets, some LEDs and some software wizardry – you can play against a computer on a real wooden board.It uses an open-source chess engine called Stockfish, which allows players to choose the difficulty level – novice to grandmaster – and set the personality of the opponent, as well as register all of the moves.Each piece has a magnet connected to the bottom, which tracks it from the beginning of the game.
The computer responds by lighting an LED under the piece it wishes to move, as well as the square to which it wishes to move it to.This isn’t an easy build by any stretch of the imagination, but you can find the instructions.