Open Hardware: Adafruit, Pi, and More
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Auto-pause your TV - Hackster.io
I'm often tired when I sit down to watch TV at the end of a day, so I want the experience to be as easy as possible. One simple improvement I've dreamt about is having the TV notice when I've got up so it can automatically pause the current show, and then resume it when I return. I decided to prototype this using one of our Person Sensors, together with a Circuit Playground Express board from Adafruit. This guide will show you how to build one too, with no soldering required!
The video above shows how the final device works. When no face is detected for five seconds, an IR signal is sent to the TV emulating pressing the pause button on your remote control. When a face is detected again for at least one second, the code for play is sent. It's definitely still a prototype, with lots of rough edges to be smoothed out, but I've had fun playing with it myself and demoing it to other people. I'd love to see a commercial product like this, so I hope it sparks someone's imagination.
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Pi Pico Pinout Display on the Command Line - Raspberry Pi Spy
Displaying the pinout of a Raspberry Pi Pico is possible using my “picopins” script. The script displays the pinout in a colour coded format showing the location of power, ground and GPIO pins. I find it useful if I’m coding Pico projects on my laptop or Pi 400 and need to check the location of a GPIO pin.
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[Older] Pi Pico W Pinout and Power Pins - Raspberry Pi Spy
The Pi Pico W Pinout is identical to that of the original Pi Pico. The Pi Pico W microcontroller board offers all the features of the Pi Pico with the addition of WiFi and Bluetooth.
The Pico W can accept 0.1″ pin-headers which can be soldered to the board as required.
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Scanntronik Manuals - pagetable.com
The German company “Scanntronik” offered a lot of high-quality hardware and software for the Commodore 64 series computers, most in the space of graphics and desktop publishing. They are well-known for their Pagefox and Printfox software as well as their Handyscanner 64 hardware. This page offers most of the German-language manuals from across their product range as searchable PDFs.
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Let’s build a nixie watch - jaeblog jaeblog
Ok ok ok, this is not a Nixie, it’s a Panaplex watch, but that sounds so much less fun. They work like nixies, but they are flat and often 7 segment displays, somewhat common in alarm clocks and tech gear.I got a few of them from a friend and compared to nixies, they are rather small and flat. So why not make a wristwatch with them!
Like nixies, panaplex displays require a high voltage to operate, around 200V. Which, on a wristwatch is a little challenging. I also wanted this to be a somewhat usable watch, unlike some of the nixie watches that, while cool, look quite cumbersome to wear due to their size.
This display is the ZM1570, which according to the datasheet, is similar to the ZM1550 but a little radioactive, fun!
So let’s look at what it takes to make a watch with these and how small all the circuitry can be.
So for a simple watch, without any smart nonsense, just a few things are needed. A display, a simple microcontroller, a somewhat accurate clock source and a battery. Of course, this display also needs quite a unique power supply, so let’s start with tackling that.