Raspberry Pi

Building A Dashcam With The Raspberry Pi Zero W

I've been playing around with the Raspberry Pi Zero W lately and having so much fun on the command line. For those uninitiated it's a tiny Arm computer running Raspbian, a derivative of Debian. It has a 1 GHz processor that had the ability to be overclocked and 512 MB of RAM, in addition to wireless g and bluetooth.

FOSS Project Spotlight: Daylight Linux Version 3

Daylight Linux is the only official distribution for the Raspberry Pi to work with the Fluxbox interface. With Fluxbox, Daylight Linux is one of the lightest and fastest distributions for all Raspberry Pi models. Many programs, games and system tools were developed during a long year of work in Python 3 to create version 3.

The Single-Board Computers Issue

When I was a child in the 1980s, I had a computer—a very 1980s computer. It had a hefty, rectangular, grey case made of some sort of industrial sheet metal. Two plain (but rather large), square buttons adorned the front, begging to be pressed: "Reset" and "Turbo". On the right side of the case, far in the back (nearly out of reach), sat an almost comically large, red power switch. It was the kind of lever that would look right at home in an action movie—used to cut the electricity to all of New York City.

Weekend Reading: Raspberry Pi Projects

The Raspberry Pi has been very popular among hobbyists and educators ever since its launch in 2011. It’s a credit-card-sized single-board computer with a Broadcom BCM 2835 SoC, 256MB to 512MB of RAM, USB ports, GPIO pins, Ethernet, HDMI out, camera header and an SD card slot. The most attractive aspects of the Raspberry Pi are its low cost of $35 and large user community following. Join us this weekend as we explore some cool Raspberry Pi projects.

Two Portable DIY Retro Gaming Consoles

A look at Adafruit's PiGRRL Zero vs. Hardkernel's ODROID-GO. If you enjoy retro gaming, there are so many options, it can be tough to know what to get. The choices range from officially sanctioned systems from Nintendo all the way to homemade RetroPie projects like I've covered in Linux Journal in the past. Of course, those systems are designed to be permanently attached to a TV. But, what if you want to play retro games on the road? Although it's true that you could just connect a gamepad to a laptop and use an emulator, there's something to be said for a console that fits in your pocket like the original Nintendo Game Boy. In this article, I describe two different portable DIY retro gaming projects I've built and compare and contrast their features.

eCosCentric Limited's eCosPro

In contrast to general-purpose operating systems for the Raspberry Pi, the new eCosPro from eCosCentric Limited is a lightweight, multithreaded, industrial-strength RTOS delivering reduced latency with bounded response times. eCosPro's resource requirements are a fraction of those demanded by a general-purpose OS and maximize the RAM resources available to applications.

Low Power Wireless: 6LoWPAN, IEEE802.15.4 and the Raspberry Pi

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the new kids on the block. It promises connection of sensors and actuators to the internet, for data to flow both ways, and once on the internet, to become part of new and exciting business systems, reaching up into the realms of big data and artificial intelligence.

Flash ROMs with a Raspberry Pi

I previously wrote a series of articles about my experience flashing a ThinkPad X60 laptop with Libreboot. After that, the Libreboot project expanded its hardware support to include the ThinkPad X200 series, so I decided to upgrade. The main challenge with switching over to the X200 was that unlike the X60, you can't perform the initial Libreboot flash with software.

A Switch for Your RPi

In a previous article, I talked about an add-on card for the Raspberry Pi called the ControlBlock. It allows game controllers to be connected as regular joystick devices, but it also has a really incredible power switch feature.

My Childhood in a Cigar Box

I grew up in the 1980s. That meant we drank far too much Kool-Aid, and on Saturday mornings, we got up early to watch cartoons. It also was the heyday of arcades, but I lived in the ghetto of Detroit and couldn't afford quarters to play games. Plus, there were none anywhere near the neighborhood where I lived. For me, the first real video-game experience was the Atari 2600.

Build Your Own Raspberry Pi Camera

During the past few years, my BirdCam setup has evolved significantly. As I mention in the UpFront section of this issue, I hope to get the stream transferred to a YouTube Live stream at some point, so I can watch the feathery show on my television. And although watching the birds is the end goal, I'm constantly on a mission to improve the quality and flexibility of my setup.

RPi-Powered pi-topCEED Makes the Case as a Low-Cost Modular Learning Desktop

It's hard to go a day without seeing interesting and compelling Indiegogo or Kickstarter projects that feature the Raspberry Pi, Pine 64 or the Intel Edison inside some sort of embedded device or standalone computer or laptop. Last fall, I stumbled across one such project that billed itself as "the first $99 Raspberry Pi desktop", and I felt the need to have it.
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