Using an Old Cassette Tape to Enclose a Battery-powered Raspberry Pi Zero

Raspberry Pi Zero Cassette Tape Enclosure

If you’re old enough you may have a stock of old cassette tapes that may or may not work anymore. The good news is that if you have time on your hands, you could recycle those as a Raspberry Pi Zero enclosure, including even other components like a small battery, battery charging board, and display. That’s exactly what Martin Mander did with his Cassete Pi IoT scroller project that receives notifications via IFTTT service and displays them as scrolling text on a small display connected to the Raspberry Pi Zero W. Here’s the detailed list of components used in this project: Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless Pimoroni LiPo SHIM LiPo/LiIon power supply shim for Raspberry Pi boards Adafruit Micro Lipo charger board with micro USB port Pimoroni 11×7 LED Matrix 150 mAh Li-Polymer Battery Cassette Tape DPDT Slide Switch Vibration motor Once assembly is done, you can flash a Micro SD […]

Renesas ZMOD4410 Indoor Air Quality HAT for Raspberry Pi Measures VOC, Humidity, and Temperature

Renesas ZMOD4410 Indoor Air Quality HAT Raspberry Pi

We’ve recently covered a few products or solutions designed to report indoor air quality (IAQ) including ESPurna firmware getting support for BME680 precise indoor air quality measurements and Metriful Sense indoor environment monitor for Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Avnet has now introduced its own Raspberry Pi IAQ add-on board with “Renesas ZMOD4410 Indoor Air Quality HAT for Raspberry Pi” capable of measuring VOC (volatile organic compounds), humidity and temperature, as well as estimating carbon dioxide (eCO2) levels. Renesas ZMOD4410 TVOC Sensor Hat (AES-RHSEN-ZM44-G) key features and specifications: Sensor – Renesas ZMOD4410 TVOC / IAQ I2C sensor, Renesas HS3001 relative humidity & temperature I2C sensor Misc – Power LED; software-controlled status LEDs for “sample active” and “limit” Host Interface – 20-header for Raspberry Pi with configurable alarm/interrupt output Power Supply via header Jumper for supply voltage selection between 1.75V and 3.9V (default:  3.3V) Test points to measure ZMOD4410 current consumption Avnet […]

Folding@Home ARM64 Linux Beta Release for COVID-19 Vaccine Research

Folding@Home ARM64 Raspberry Pi

A few months ago, we reported that Rosetta@Home supported 64-bit Arm SBC’s and Servers in the Fight against COVID-19. But Folding@home did not support Arm hardware just yet, but thanks to work from Neocortix, Linaro, Arm, miniNodes, and Packet.com, we now get support for Folding@home on ARM64 meaning you can help researchers studying SARS-CoV-2 virus and help them develop a COVID-19 vaccine with Raspberry Pi 3/4 boards, or other 64-bit Arm SBC’s and servers. The solution relies on Neocortix Cloud Services Platform allowing the unused capacity of large numbers of individual mobile phones or other connected nodes to be harnessed into a single, unified computational engine. The very first application that made use of the platform was Neocortix PhonePaycheck were users get paid to let businesses perform calculations on their phones at night while charging and connected to WiFi. That way users of premium phones like Galaxy S10 or S20 […]

Zero Terminal V3 is a Modular Raspberry Pi Zero W Powered HandHeld PC

Zero Terminal V3 Raspberry Pi Zero W Handheld

Hardware hacker NODE has created a slick handheld Linux PC based on the Raspberry Pi Zero W board. About the size of a thick smartphone, Zero Terminal V3 also includes a touchscreen display, a built-in battery, a USB Type-A port, and a microSD card slot. The keyboard found in previous iterations of the Zero Terminal is gone, as the new version focuses on modularity thanks two 40-pin sockets that connect to the GPIO pins, video output, camera connector, USB ports, power indicators, etc… in order to allow people to create and add custom backpacks to change the functionality as needed. Zero Terminal V3 specifications: SBC – Raspberry Pi Zero W with Broadcom BCM2735 ARM11 processor, 512MB RAM, MicroSD card socket, WiFi 4, and Bluetooth 4.0 Display – 5.5″ 1080p AMOLED touchscreen display bought on Waveshare and designed for Raspberry Pi 3/4, but NODE designed an adapter for RPi Zero. Audio […]

ClusterCTRL Stack Helps You Power and Cool up to 5 Raspberry Pi SBC’s

ClusterCTRL Stack Raspberry Pi Cluster

Building a small cluster of Raspberry Pi boards or/and other compact single board computers requires you to handle power and cooling issues, as it may not be practical to have one power supply per board, and since boards are close to each other heat may build up. There are already off-the-shelf solutions such as rackmounts for Raspberry Pi SBCs or carrier boards for multiple Raspberry Pi Compute Modules but more often they do take not take care of all issues like mounting, power, and cooling. ClusterCTRL Stack offers a solution that can power up to 5 Raspberry Pi SBC’s via a 12V/24V power supply and control up to two fans. If you could also 3D print an enclosure for your cluster in order to attach the fan. ClusterCTRL Stack is comprised of two boards with the following key features and specifications: Controller Board Power Input – 12-24V PSU. Power Output […]

Odyssey Blue J4105 Windows & Linux Mini PC Comes with a 128GB SSD, an Arduino Compatible MCU

Odyssey Blue J4105

We recently reviewed ODYSSEY-X86J4105 SBC by Seeed Studio with Windows 10, and installed it to the Re_Computer case to convert it into a mini PC. Besides being a standard Intel Gemini Lake SBC, the board also comes with an Arduino MCU and header, as well as a 40-pin I/O header so it can be an all-in-one Arduino development platform, or be used for advanced robotics projects. Both the board and case had to be purchased separately, and Windows 10 was pre-installed on the internal eMMC flash. But now, Seeed Studio has started to offer Odyssey Blue J4105 mini PC with ODYSSEY-X86J4105 SBC pre-installed into Re_Computer case and fitted with a 128GB SSD for increased storage capacity and better performance. Odyssey Blue J4105 mini PC specifications: SoC – Intel Celeron J4105 quad-core processor @ 1.5/2.5 GHz (Turbo) with 12EU Intel UHD Graphics 600 @ 250-750 MHz; 10W TDP System Memory – […]

RAK2287 Mini PCIe LoRaWAN Concentrator Module Supports up to 500 Nodes per km2

RAK2287 LPWAN Concentrator Module

RAK Wireless launched its first Mini PCIe LoRaWAN concentrator module in 2018 with RAK833 mPCIe card featuring Semtech SX1301 LoRa baseband chip. It was soon followed by RAK2247 mPCIe with a very similar design but some tweaks to increase its maximum transmission power and range, and improve thermals and stability with the addition of a heatsink. The company has now introduced a new version with RAK2287 Mini PCie LoRaWAN concentrator module being mostly inspired by RAK2247 module but replacing Semtech SX1301 by Semtech SX1302 LoRa transceiver that’s suppose to reduce current consumption (and heat), lower the BoM cost, and able to handle a higher amount of traffic. The new mini PCIe card also adds u-blox ZOE-M8Q GPS system-in-package to provide GNSS functionality. RAK2287 key features and specifications: LoRa Connectivity Semtech SX1302 LoRa Transceiver with 2x SX1250 Tx/Rx front-end Tx power – up to 27dBm Rx sensitivity – down to -139dBm […]

MEGA-RTD Raspberry Pi HAT Offers up to 64 Resistance Temperature Detectors (Crowdfunding)

MEGA-RTD Raspberry Pi HAT

Sequent Microsystems like to make stackable Raspberry Pi HATs. After their stackable 4-relay board allowing for up to 32 relays controlled by a Raspberry Pi board, the company has now launched MEGA-RTD 8-channel RTD Raspberry Pi HAT enabling up to 64 resistance temperature detectors via 8x MEGA RTD board stacked on top of a Raspberry Pi board. If you haven’t heard about this type of temperature sensors, we wrote a post explaining the advantages and drawbacks of resistance temperature detectors last year. Basically, those temperature sensors contain a resistor that changes resistance value as their temperature changes, and support much wider temperature ranges than traditional temperature sensors such as DHT22 while keeping a <0.1°C accuracy. The price of the sensors themselves is similar to traditional sensors, but the total price is more expensive since they require extra hardware to measure the resistance/voltage value. MEGA-RTD key features and specifications: MCU – […]