Raspberry Pi

I’ve been a bit of a Raspberry Pi enthusiast ever since the first-gen Model B. (Frankly, I’ve never really bothered to take a look at the many alternatives. Lack of time, I guess, and the fact that there’s such a large, and active, community surrounding the Pi.)

Anyhoo, I’m setting up this page to sort of help myself keep track of the different projects I have going (and have attempted).

MPD Music Player

There’s a cheap AF USB sound card, an old external HDD, and—pretty cool, huh?—an actual vintage radio housing a small power supply, amp, and speakers. (I had to get rid of its original guts, which had rusted and leaked far beyond repair.)

The two knobs in the front are hooked up to actual pots, which I was going to (but never did) connect to the Pi’s IO pins by means of an—I think —MCP3008.

Plays internet streams, too. I’ve got most mainstream Belgian radio stations on it. Been using MPDroid on my phone and tablet since just about forever to control it.

pilight Smart Plugs

Wanted to be able to switch the amp above on and off with the same device I’d use to control MPD, so invested €3 or so in a wireless transceiver. Using pilight, I got it to work—from the command line, at least—but the speakers would hiss every time I hit send, and I decided to stick with the standard remote instead. (I was going to create a web front end, obviously.)

Budget Touch Screen

Before these “official” touch screen modules came out, there was a cheaper alternative that required a sort of hack to actually work. I remember wanting to build this into a “digital multi-effect guitar pedal,” but lack of time and proper metalworking tools decided otherwise. I’ve still got the enclosure lying around—two, in fact, and they weren’t cheap. 🤷

Pure Data Guitar Pedal

I definitely wasn’t the first to want to create Pure Data guitar effects. So, yeah, I remember being able to run Pure Data headlessly, and use a hacked up Behringer UCG102 clone to get sound in and out.

SoundFont Player

Another thing I was able to do was use my KORG padKONTROL to get some drum sounds out of the Pi. I know other folks were working on proper software synths at the time, but sort of stopped following up.

RetroPie Arcade Cab

Got an old but empty Taito-like upright cab, completely refinished its hacked up control panel, put in some power supplies, a Raspberry Pi, HDMI-to-VGA converter, 4:3 TFT monitor, an old pair of speakers, and an LED strip.

I also got an N64 controller-to-USB converter to play (Super)NES classics with, on a regular LED TV.

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