Open Hardware: Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 05, 2023

• Raspberry Pi is this church’s new organist

  A few months ago, Eugene Olsen’s church lost its organist when they moved out of the area, but Eugene noticed that the organ happened to have a MIDI interface. He used a Raspberry Pi 4 and grabbed MIDI files of the hymns, then wrote a custom hymn player in C++.

• DIY force feedback steering wheel receives motor from an old power drill

  Racing simulators these days are very good, thanks to incredibly realistic graphics and physics. Developers have recreated the effects of everything from tire composition to asphalt temperature. But a lot of that effort goes to waste when you’re playing with a standard gamepad, because that can’t probably any feedback other than some vibration. To make the most of racing sims, Jason Winfield built a DIY force feedback steering wheel using the motor from an old power drill.

  Force feedback steering wheels act as both input devices and output devices. As input devices, they monitor the angle of the wheel to provide a steering value to the game. As output devices, a motor forces the steering wheel to rotate based on what occurs within the simulation. In a hard turn, it might provide resistance. If you spin out of control, the wheel might move around wildly. Because that has to overcome the player’s own grip on the wheel, the force feedback motor needs a lot of torque and that’s why Winfield chose to scavenge the motor from a power drill.

• Sine Wave generator

  This project visualizes a sinusoidal function on an OLED screen, and a LED can simulate these fluctuations, with a bit of trigonometry. It is easy to understand the code, although the LED may seem to increase and decrease its brightness, in reality, this process is digital and not analog, using a process called PWM.

• Highlights from Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 2023

  Last weekend I went to my first vintage computer festival: Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 2023.

  There are a number of Vintage Computer Festivals around the US throughout the year. Check out the VCF web site for a list.

  Here are some of the highlights of what I saw.