Carl Monk has taken a model A+ and a Unicorn HAT add-on board and created a clock which tells the time in plain English. It does this by lighting up the Neopixels on the HAT in a specific pattern to illuminate the words, which have simply been printed onto a piece of paper. Very nice use of the Unicorn and well worth taking a look at. Read how he did it here.
Raspberry Pi Lunchbox Arcade machine
This is quite an old blog entry, but not one I think I’ve covered before.
Stiggy has taken a plastic lunchbox, some arcade controls and created an arcade machine! The arcade controls are linked to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO and he’s used MAME for software. Read how he adapted the controls here and how he built the lunchbox here.
A Raspberry Pi VAX cluster
Following on from a previous post in which he showed how the Pi can be used to emulate a mainframe, Andrew Back has now moved on to describing how to turn a couple of Pis into a VAX cluster. He uses a piece of software called SimH to emulate the VAX hardware. Read more detail, including how to do it yourself, here.
Raspberry Pi arcade game emulator in an Atari Lynx
David Hooker has taken an old Atari Lynx handheld computer, ripped the guts out of it and fitted a Raspberry Pi along with a bunch of other electronic components (an amplifier for instance). He’s installed Shea Silverman’s PiPlay and used one of those car reversing screens as a display. Read about his build, and how to replicate it, here.
New prototyping board for the Raspberry Pi B+ and A+
Richard Saville (aka The Average Man) has created a new prototyping board for use with the A+/B+. It’s called the ProtoPal and it plugs into the 40-pin +-sized GPIO pins. It has plenty of prototyping space and has two long power rails running along the centre of the board. Richard has designed the board to give you the maximum amount of prototyping space so it doesn’t use the 4 mounting holes of the A+/B+. Instead it has one hole through which you can push a spacer which helps further balance the board. I’ve got one ready to have a play with so expect to hear more about the ProtoPal soon. You can read more about the board on Richard’s blog.
You see a video about the board below and you can buy it from eBay (£4.99) or from Tindie ($8)
A Raspberry Pi remote controlled police van
“seeourfamilytravels” (actual name unknown) has taken a Pi and shrouded it in a chassis that looks like an old-fashioned police van. Details of his build are here and you can view a video of the project above.