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Open Hardware/Modding: Pine64, PCBs, and More
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CNX Software ☛ Pine64 Pinevoice – A $50 RISC-V Smart Speaker for Home Assistant based on Bouffalo Lab BL606P MCU
After over two years in the making, Pine64 has now launched the PineVoice (previously PineVox) smart speaker based on the Bouffalo Lab BL606P RISC-V wireless microcontroller with WiFi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee radio interfaces. The device also features two microphones, a speaker, a USB 2.0 OTG port, volume buttons, a mute button with LED, a start/stop button, and four RGB LEDs.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Koi-pond-shaped guitar powered by Raspberry Pi spotted at New York Fashion Week
The Koi-Tar guitar is a MIDI controller made from an SLA-printed housing with PCB capacitive touch sensors designed to look like lily pads. The beautiful resin body was modelled in Blender using water physics simulations to make it look like a splash frozen in time. It’s powered by a SPOKE-mini resistor array that’s home to a Raspberry Pi Pico. During the development process, musicians Benn Jordan and Venus Theory played the guitar and gave feedback on how to improve the design.
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Hackaday ☛ Creating Beautiful Light Shows With Soap
If you’re looking for some suitably psychedelic lighting effects for your next house party, you really ought to build one of these. We’ve featured some other fun classic lighting effects before, like these wonderful bubble lamps.
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Hackaday ☛ Making An Ultra Minimal Cyberdeck
The build is based around a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, which has a lighter power draw than the full-fat models at the trade-off of some processing power. Since it’s a W model, it has the benefit of wireless connectivity baked in from the factory. The Pi is paired with a Gherkin 30% layout keyboard kit, which neatly matches the 7″ Waveshare touch display in width. Power is courtesy of a juicy 4000 mAh lithium-ion cell, which is taken care of by an Adafruit Powerboost 1000 charger module. Everything is then laced up together inside a nifty 3D printed case.
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Hackaday ☛ PCBs Straight From The Magazine
It’s never been easier to get a printed circuit board made. In fact, almost every electronics video out on the internet will incessantly remind you of this fact now. But making a custom PCB wasn’t always as straightforward as sending a KiCad file to a board house. Many DIY methods involve harsh chemicals and tedious processes, but did have the potential benefit of taking much less time than waiting on boards to arrive in the mail. [Bettina Neumryr] is demonstrating one of these older methods, called the toner transfer method, using a circuit that was printed directly in an old magazine.
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Maury ☛ Glassblowing #2: Making a tungsten lamp and (bad) vacuum diode
Once one end was sealed, I connected the other to a rotary vane vacuum pump, and pumped it down while lightly heating the tube to remove moisture. After a few minutes, I headed the middle of the tube to sale the bulb, and pulled off the excess tubing.