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HKCam is a Raspberry Pi Zero W based DIY HomeKit IP Camera

HKCam is an IP camera based on Raspberry Pi Zero W board and compatible with any HomeKit apps. The developer, Matthias Hochgatterer, did not make the hardware himself, and instead purchased a Raspberry Pi Zero W + camera kit sold for around $30 on Aliexpress. His main work was to design a 3D printed case and write the software running in the camera, as well as his own Home 3 smart home automation app for iOS compatible with HomeKit. The only hardware needed is the Raspberry Pi Zero W with a power supply, the official Raspberry Pi camera module with is flat cable, and a microSD card, so you could also get those locally instead of purchasing them from Aliexpress. The firmware is based on Raspbian, FFmpeg to access the camera stream, as well as hc, a lightweight framework to develop HomeKit accessories in Go. You’ll find the documentation, source […]

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NODE Mini Server V2 is a Raspberry Pi Based Storage Server for the Decentralized Web

We’ve previously covered networked hard drive enclosures with Ethernet and/or WiFi running OpenWrt or Ubuntu that allows you to easily and fairly cheaply connect SATA drives to your local network with models such as Blueendless X3. NODE has done something similar with a DIY project featuring a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. NODE Mini Server V2 connects the popular SBC to a 2.5″ SATA hard drive over USB and is designed to build out the physical infrastructure for the decentralized web (e.g. IPFS) that would allow users to replace remote servers with nodes that they themselves own and operate. Having said that nothing would prevent you from using this as a simple NAS although performance will not be as optimal as the aforementioned products due to the lack of SATA or USB 3.0 interface, as well as having “Gigabit” Ethernet limited to 300 Mbps. Having said that the design could […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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Top 5 Raspberry Pi Alternatives in 2019

The Raspberry Pi boards are great little Arm Linux SBC’s with a low price and great community support. But the Broadcom processors used in the boards are also fairly old so they may not be suitable for some projects. If your application needs or would benefit from modern features such as memory over 1GB RAM, an actual Gigabit Ethernet port, USB 3.0 port(s), 4K video output, or H.265 hardware video decoding you’ll have to find Raspberry Pi alternatives. I’ll point out 5 alternative single board computers in this post from the point of view of existing Raspberry Pi users, who will want good software support and a board with the same or similar form factor as Raspberry Pi 3 Model B/B+ in order to reuse their add-on boards and/or enclosures. Price has to be competitive as well, so nothing above $80 will be mentioned. The boards are not listed in […]

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Raspberry Pi based Hyper Keyboard Pi & hgTerm Handheld PCs, and RasPi Arcade Stick

There are so many products and projects based on Raspberry Pi that it’s difficult to keep track, and many are often not that interesting, not because they are not useful, but instead because it just feels we’ve seen those before. But this week I’ve come accross three projects that looks to be newsworthy including two handheld computers with a 4″ display, and one retro-gaming console with standard arcade buttons and controls similar to what is found in Pandora’s Box/Key 5S. hgTerm DIY Raspberry Pi  Handheld Computer hgterm is a portable computer based on a stripped down Raspberry Pi 3 where the Ethernet port, HDMI port, and most of the USB ports have been removed. It features a 4″ touchscreen display, a Bluetooth keyboard all housed in a 3D printed case. It’s not actually a product that you can buy (yet), but a project made by Igor Brkić which you can […]

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BB-400 Neuron Edge Dual Ethernet Industrial Controller Combines Raspberry Pi CM3+ and Arduino MCU

While the Raspberry Pi boards are mostly promoted as tools to teach STEM to kids and adults alike, they have found their way in a fair amount of industrial products, including ModBerry M500 industrial computer, Janz Tec emPC-A/RPI3 industrial embedded controller,  and Kunbus RevolutionPi RevPi Core among others. There’s yet another option with Brainboxes BB-400 Neuron Edge industrial controller that was announced last year with Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, but recently got an upgrade to Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+. The controller features two Ethernet ports and also includes an Arduino compatible microcontroller to control the system’s eight configurable digital inputs and outputs. BB-400 Neuron Edge industrial controller specifications: SoM – Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ with Broadcom BCM2837B0  quad-core , Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.2GHz, 1 GB LPDDR2, 32GB eMMC Flash storage MCU – Unnamed Microchip Atmel Arduino compatible microcontroller Connectivity Ethernet Uplink Port – 1x RJ45 jack, 10/100Mbps […]

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$40 Elecrow 5″ HDMI Raspberry Pi Display Features Backlight Control, a Resistive Touch Panel

There are plenty of small touch screen displays for Raspberry Pi board, including the official 7″ display that connects to the board’s MIPI DSI connector.  Some people may prefer getting a small HDMI display however, as it can be used with most devices with an HDMI input port, and the touch screen function may be achieved over USB, I2C or SPI depending on the design. Elecrow has just launched a new 5″ HDMI display with resistive touch screen designed for the Raspberry Pi boards, and whose main feature is to support backlight control over GPIO 11 in order to lower power consumption according to the announcement tweet from the company.   Specifications for RPD19048A display: Screen – 5″ TFT resistive touch screen display with 800×480 resolution @ 60 Hz; LCD Driver IC – Display Future ILI9486L (Likely wrong as this only supports 480×320 resolution) Touch controller – XPT2046 4-wire resistive […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Grove AI HAT Helps Raspberry Pi Run Edge Computing Workloads

Last year we wrote about Kendryte K210 dual core RISC-V processor  specifically designed for for machine vision and machine hearing as well as the corresponding Kendryte KD233 which enables inference at the edge, e.g. tasks such as face recognition or object detection. Latter on we found the processor in Sipeed M1 module which went for as low as $5 in a crowdfunding campaign, and was fitted to some low cost boards now selling for $12.90 on Seeed Studio. The latter company has now designed Grove AI HAT that aims to assist Raspberry Pi in running the edge computing workloads previously described, as exposes 6 Grove interfaces to extend functionality with some of the Grove add-on modules. Grove AI HAT specifications: AI Module – Sipeed “MAIX” M1 with Kendryte K210 dual core RISC-V processor @ 600 MHz, KPU Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) hardware accelerator, APU audio hardware accelerator, 8 MB general […]

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Giggle Score Says ODROID-N2 Best Value, Raspberry Pi Zero Worst Value

[Update May 7, 2019: Giggle Score has been updated to use 7-zip to benchmark the boards instead of sysbench, and the “best value” rankings are now quite different] People like to compare single board computers, and usually want to have a simple answer as to which is better than the others. But in practice it’s impossible, because the beauty of SBCs is that they are so versatile and can be used in a wide variety of project, and that means in some cases the “best board” may be completely useless to you since it lacks a critical feature and interface for YOUR project be it H.265 video encoding or a MIPI DSI display interface. Still, it’s still always fun to look at benchmark scores and trying to compare SBCs, and for projects that mostly require CPU processing power it may also be useful. Robbie Ferguson has been developing and maintaining […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC