Well this has been a week! Here’s to hoping President Biden can usher in some new progressive policies and finally have a government that takes the Coronavirus Pandemic seriously. All I want is my vaccination ASAP!
Tryign to take my mind off everythign I’ve been throwing myself into lots of projects that I KNOW I can complete. One of those was to upgrade one of my older GBA SP AGS-001 consoles with an awesome IPS LCD screen.
The difference between the original frontlit screen versus the new one is night and day!
This is a time-lapse of me refurbishing and upgrading a beat up original Japanese imported GameBoy Advance that used a front-lit screen.
I take it apart, clean it all out, then replace the screen with a back-lit IPS LCD and new casing for the screen.
The actual hardware swap took less than an hour including soldering the LCD brightness control wire and then me messing up and forgetting to put in the hinge locking screw the first time around.
I also found some awesome shiny “silk” green PLA filament and printed this giant Bulbasaur!
It came out so great!
Finally, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released a new board! The Rasberry Pi Pico! Their first microcontroller!
I haven’t had much need for advanced microcontrollers like these, a regular Arduino is plenty for the little hobby projects I work on, but for $5, I’m definitely going to see if I can swap these in at some point.
I’ve been a big supporter of Kano Computing since they did their original Kickstarter for the build it yourself computer kit featuring the Raspberry Pi and awesome wireless keyboard (that I use on almost every project. That thing has been a lifesaver at every Maker Faire I’ve participated in!)
I’m going to be brutally honest: There is no way I can use the Kano mouse as my daily driver. It is way too small for my normal sized hands. I can also see it being a tad too difficult for a kid to put together by themselves due to one step in the instructions.
You have to route the USB cable inside the case and around some plastic pegs, but the cable is just a tad too thick to make it a non-frustrating experience. Once it’s pushed down the rest of the process is pretty straight forward.
The idea to make the top shell magnetic is also super cool. I find myself pulling the top off just to hear the magnetic click over and over again.
All in all – An excellent first attempt. If I was a kid again I would be loving this mouse. I remember taking apart one my favorite mice years ago and switching out the LED to be blue so it would glow throughout. Having a DIY mouse kit brings a smile to my face. I hope the next version is made to grow with the users – hopefully with some hardware hacks available along the way!
The next piece of kit I got was the Kano Webcam! Who would’ve thought I would be excited by a webcam… but this is what 2020 has made of me lol. With the shortage of webcams last year, and both my wife and I working in the education sector, seeing an inexpensive and new take on the webcam made me quite happy.
Two cool features of the webcam include a “macro lens” (really just a magnifying glass) and a flexible but fixable position cord. You can position the webcam in any direction and it will just stay there!
Now, to be perfectly realistic, this is a 2.1mp fixed focus lens and only costs $29.99. I am not expecting the picture quality to be impressive. It is 100% adequate for Zoom use, whether it’s in a classroom or a meeting.
The feature that does make it shine is it’s “macro mode” though. Simply move the lens cover over and you are ready to take close ups.
I am going to really enjoy the macro mode for my electronics projects, and the flexible cord for my Octoprint 3D printer time-lapse videos.
That’s it for this week! Happy New Year! Hope it’s treated everyone great so far!
So, like my last post stated, I did some things while stuck at home.
My absolute favorite project was this:
I followed this guide (https://github.com/geaz/simplyRetro-D8) and built this awesome 3D printable desktop arcade cabinet. It of course uses a Raspberry Pi running RetroPi and uses an awesome readily available 4 x 3 LCD screen!
And of course my little guy helping me build and test it 😀
I got a small CNC machine in January and hadn’t had time to use it until recently but I have been having fun making some videos of it in action.
That’s a 3040T CNC Machine. You can find a lot of them on eBay and various other importing sites. More fun hobbies that involve turning one thing into another thing 🙂
On that note, I repurposed my 4k LED display for a lot of statements this year!
My house got egged for one of those statements. Worth it.
I edited and 3D Printed a mini Dreamcast case for the Raspberry Pi! Did you know you can play Dreamcast games at 60FPS on the Pi4 now? No? WELL YOU CAN! Using Redream it’s totally possible! You can download the case files here https://thingiverse.com/thing:4539273.
And we got a new kitten!
Say hi to Dash. Our Manx kitty. He’s kinda awesome.
If you’ve gotten to this part of the post, all I can say is thank you! It’s been a year. Please stay safe out there. Wear a mask. Keep on making. I’ve missed y’all!
Authors Note: While PCBWay has offered to sponsor a run of the boards, everything purchased for this post was paid for out of pocket and without their knowledge. I wanted to make sure they were good on my own.
Hey All,
I’m a collector. I like to collect things. Video games, Raspberry Pis, Pokemon cards, and Pins. I don’t have many pins, but they really appeal to me. It’s like pixel art. Making awesome designs with limited colors on a small canvas.
The department I work for has always made our own logos for our teams and projects. We usually print stickers and give them out at conferences, or to our students when they hit certain milestones (like their first commit).
Techrangers Logo
A eureka moment hit when PCBWay contacted me this month asking if they could sponsor my next PCB board. I’m not ready to make another PiPlay run of boards (we are slowly working on version 2), but I loved the silkscreen art I was able to put on our original run.
What if I could turn our teams logo into a PCB?
I quickly started investigating and found an awesome plugin for Inkscape called SVG2Shenzen!
I use Inkscape for a lot of things, mostly for setting up projects on the Lasercutter at FamiLAB, but I never thought of using it to create PCBs! The boards came out amazing!
The boards I received from PCBWay.com blew me away.
I was not expecting much for $5 (+ $15 shipping from China).
I ordered the boards on Saturday, they shipped them out on Wednesday, and they were in my hands by Friday.
The production speed is incredible.
They audit every board before you pay and begin production.
Cons:
The ordering experience was a little clunky.
I had to input my dimensions and order details BEFORE uploading my Gerber files. Other PCB manufacturers usually get order details from the Gerbers.
Because I was making pins, I didn’t need anything drilled. This caused the audit to fail, and due to the timezome difference, their message to me and my reply caused a 20 hour delay in production. edit: Adding a note to ignore the drill file for my second order caused it to pass the audit test without delay.
The Pros HEAVILY outweigh the very minor Cons I experienced. I will have zero problem using them from now on for my board needs!
Once the plugin is installed, you goto Extensions->Prepare Document and click on Apply.
This will generate a new vector document with layers for each layer of the board. Each layer represents a portion of the boards manufacturing. They are:
Drill
Parts of the board to be drilled out
Example: Holes for a key-chain, or for through hole parts like a resistor or LED
F. Silk
Front of the board’s silkscreen
F.Mask
Front of the board mask – I have found that the Mask and Copper should be the same design
F. Cu
Front of the board copper
B. Silk
Back of board silkscreen
B. Mask
Back of board mask – Again I have found that the Mask and Copper should be the same design
B. Cu
Back of board copper
Edge.Cuts
This is the shape of your board that will be cutout.
When you are happy with your layout, click on Extensions -> Export Kicad, and click apply.
You will now need to open the generated *.kicad_pcb file in Kicad’s pcb tool pcbnew.
You can check a render of your finished board by going to View->3D Viewer. You can change all the colors and see what your finished board will probably look like. If its good, it’s time for the most important step! Generating your gerbers!
Click on File-> Plot to open up the plotter dialog. Select your output directory, and leave the settings as default for now. Click on Plot and a bunch of files will be generated in that directory. These are the files you send to your manufacturer to generate a PCB for you!
Congrats, you made a board!
Happy Birthday To Me!
On another note… I turned 35 this month. Happy Birthday to Me! I couldn’t have had a happier birthday. Spending a nice day with my Wife and Son, watching the little dude play on a swing-set his Grandpa’s built in our backyard.
I almost didn’t blog for the whole year. To be truthful, it’s been hard to write this past year. Lots of amazing wonderful things have happened to me in 2018, but I’m exhausted. And this blog was easy to overlook. I want to write again, but at my own pace. I’m going to try to start again.
That said…. BEING A FATHER IS AWESOME! I have an amazing little mini me who is 20 months old and is just so much fun. He has made me grow in ways I never even knew imaginable.
Maker Faire Orlando 2018
My friend Jacob and I worked on an awesome project for Maker Faire Orlando this year, and I am so proud to say we won Maker of Merit! It is a deep honor to me to win that award. And of course it’s Raspberry Pi related 😀
We made a 4096 LED pixel framebuffer display powered by the Raspberry Pi!
LED Display playing a clone of SnakePrototype at the Orlando Science Center
How it works?
We are using P10 LED panels as the basis for the screen. P10 means a 10mm dot pitch, so 10mm between each LED. They range from 3 – 10mm. The panels also usually come in a size of 16 x 32, but luckily they are daisy chainable!
The Raspberry Pi can even handle upto 32 of them in 3 chains! For our purposes we only used 8 16×32 panels in one chain.
8 P10 Panels, daisychained to an Adafruit LED matrix bonnet, connected to a Raspberry Pi 3b+, with power distributed via a CFOL Distro 8 board.
The above picture may look complicated, but it’s not that bad.
8 P10 panels are daisy chained together using a standard HUB75 cable (it’s like an smaller IDE cable).
The panels are mounted together with the orange and red 3D printed brackets.
The first panel is connected to a Raspberry Pi 3B+ via an Adafruit LED matrix bonnet.
The power for the panels and the Pi comes from a 10amp DC supply, which plugs into the bonnet. The bonnet powers the Pi, and has two screw terminals for the voltage output. The +/- screw terminals connect to a CFOL Distro 8 PCB (in the center of the board) which takes the input and breaks it out to 8 screw terminals. We only need 4 since each cable powers two panels, but it gives us room to expand.
Thank you, to my backers, and supporters, for helping to fund the PiPlay Portable. I’m so excited to get to make this.
We just got the latest prototype boards in, as well as our stickers from StickerMule. Â We were also able to get some polybags for real cheap (they are in beta, so why not!)
Also MegaCon is this weekend! Â I finished making my Nintendo Switch Arcade Machine and made it an Ultra SF2 Machine.
This has been an exciting week. Â The PiPlay Portable is fully funded, and we have less than 12 hours to go on the Kickstarter!
Sam has been growing so fast! Â I love being a Dad. Â It’s an experience I am so happy I get to have, and of course I have 3D scanned him and got him 3D printed…
I also won the Community Leadership award from IMS Global at the LILI conference. Â I had no idea I was even nominated!! Â I am really humbled by this. Â Thank you IMS!
