Open Hardware: Arduino, Raspberry Pi, SparkFun, and More
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Computers Are Bad ☛ 2024-03-27 telephone cables
So let's say you're working on a household project and need around a dozen telephone cables---the ordinary kind that you would use between your telephone and the wall. It is, of course, more cost effective to buy bulk cable, or simply a long cable, and cut it to length and attach jacks yourself. This is even mercifully easy for telephone cable, as the wires come out of the flat cable jacket in the same order they go into the modular connector. No fiddly straightening and rearranging, you can just cut off the jacket and shove it into the jack.
But, wait, what's up with that whole thing anyway? and are telephone cables really as simple as stripping the jacket and shoving them in?
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Arduino ☛ This small scorekeeping air hockey game brings the arcade classic to your tabletop
The key to air hockey is right there in the name: air. All of those little holes in the table’s surface allow air flow. That creates an air cushion for the puck and paddles to float on, reducing friction and enabling knuckle-shattering gameplay. For that to work, the table needs something pushing at least as much air as escapes through the holes. This table isn’t very big, so it doesn’t need a high volume of air. Three 12V PC fans are enough. They push air into a chamber beneath the hole-filled top board. Power for the fans comes from a battery holder with 8 AA batteries.
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Arduino ☛ Don’t ignore single-axis joysticks
Allen’s device controls three different things with its three single-axis joysticks: an RGB LED, a servo motor, and a stepper motor. Each of those is an example of a single-axis at work. That axis maps to color (red and green) and brightness for the LED, horn position for the servo, and rotation direction/speed for the stepper motor. There are, of course, several other viable use cases for single-axis joysticks.
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Frank Delporte ☛ Review of the Elecrow Raspberry Pi Pico Advanced Kit
People who follow me, know I’m a big fan of the Elecrow CrowPi, the little suitcase with a Raspberry Pi and a lot of electronic components included. I used it already a lot in my presentations at various conferences to demonstrate #JavaOnRaspberryPi.
Recently, Elecrow sent me a “Raspberry Pi Pico Advanced Kit” for free, to test and evaluate it. It’s a plastic box with 32 modules, a smart car kit, breadboards, wires, and a Pico to get started quickly with electronic experiments.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Mini Observatory | The MagPi #140
The project provided a great learning experience, with the observatory, gears and mechanism all home-grown. The ‘semi-intelligent’ motor controller for the telescope is probably the most novel element. Matt needed a way for the telescope to move while Raspberry Pi was busy taking photographs, so gave the motors a little RP2040 microprocessor brain. “They were released at the perfect time.”
Matt was able to make use of Python packages such as Skyfield, OpenCV, PiDNG and Astroalign and says it was a good choice for his Mini Observatory project. He is also really keen to process the photographs in real time onboard the telescope. “I haven’t solved that yet, so I still need to do some offline processing afterwards. Realtime processing must be possible, I just have to research more.”
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SparkFun Electronics ☛ 2024-03-26 [Older] Science History is Women's History
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SparkFun Electronics ☛ 2024-03-22 [Older] Go Global (for Less!) with SparkFun's New Budget-Friendly GNSS