Category: Electronics

I've been working on another Raspberry Pi project while I try to decide how I want to proceed with the Gameboy. This little box is just about done. The box is made of a single, solid piece of bubinga, and houses a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie/EmulationStation. It runs all of the old console emulators - NES, SNES, Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Color, Sega Genesis - you name it. If it was out during the 80s or 90s, it probably supports it. I've got it setup with two USB-based SNES reproduction controllers, with extension cables long enough to reach the couch. As soon as I finish putting the rest of the ROMs on it, it is ready to move upstairs to the living room. I'll try to grab some "action shots" once I've moved it to its final home. too.

I've been working on a project with the Raspberry Pi to make a Nintendo Gameboy style handheld that can play all of the original NES games. It's based on this project over at adafruit. So far it has been going really well, but I've hit a snag with getting the controls to line up correctly with the cutouts in the top cover, and getting everything to fit correctly inside - it seems like I've always got at least one button that doesn't line up right and I've got to open it up all over again. I need to do a little more fussing with it before it will be finished. Stay tuned! too.

My electronics workbench has been getting a lot of use lately, and I've been steadily adding to it since I first posted about it in May. This first photo is of the original setup, as a point of comparison.

Since then, I've added a lot. More tools, more shelves, more monitors, a bookcase - and I've started taking over the nearby basement shelves as well, to make space for an inkjet printer and my latest acquisition - a 3d printer. That thing has been a blast! I'll be posting a lot more photos of stuff I've been printing in the near future.

I've been a subscriber to Make Magazine since the first issue, and I've watched the developing world of DIY with excitement. I've wanted a 3D printer for a good long time, and Sean has also been saying that we should get one for at least the last year or so. Well, the entry-level price point has finally dropped into the realm of possibility - last week we pulled the trigger on a Printrbot Simple. I've always wanted to use one for printing small sculptures or designing action figures, not to mention building some robots and printing custom parts. We played with it a ton this weekend, and printed a bunch of small things from Thingiverse. Next up is designing some of our own stuff to print, and coming up with a bigger project. Now we just need to order some more filament! We've already used up the sample filament the printer came with.

A few months ago, in an old issue of Make Magazine I saw instructions for building a soldering fume extractor, to keep you from breathing in the nasty fumes that solder produces when melted. In the article they built it all inside an Altoids mint tin, powered by a pair of 9V batteries. Then, a couple of weeks ago at a Michael's I saw a Darth Vader head lunchbox. I picked it up due to it's low price and high geek factor, assuming I would eventually think of something to do with it. Yesterday the two ideas came together - I cut out mouth of the Vader helmet, wired in a power regulator, switch, and a 12V fan, and built my own much cooler fume extractor. It works great, too!

As promised, here are the details of the photobooth I built for our Father's Day Cookout. This first pic shows the photobooth box that houses all of the electronics. The big red button on the front lights up (even though it isn't lit in this picture). Once you push that, the green "pose" LED starts blinking - when it starts blinking fast, it's about to take a picture. Once all four shots have been taken, the red LED lights up during the assembly and printing process. One of the things I'd like to improve before next time is speeding up that assembly process - it seems to take too long. Also, I'd like to paint the box a little more interestingly. I ran out of time to do much besides a black satin paint job and some letter stickers - but once I get the enthusiasm to work on it again I'd like to do some kind of custom paint job on the box - maybe even try some silkscreening again.

I built the booth itself just from PVC and curtains - but I think I am going to make a few changes before I use it again. I need to make it a little taller, so that it isn't so hard to dial the camera in to exactly the right distance to not be able to see the top bar. Also, I'd like to come up with some system that will allow for multiple backdrops - and easy switching between them. This next picture shows the internals of the electronics box.

Here is what's inside:

1) Raspberry Pi: The Raspberry Pi was configured per this instructable - Raspberry Pi Photobooth Controller. I had to do a few things differently than listed in the Instructable - mostly I had some Linux permissions problems, and I was never (so far) able to get the script to run successfully at startup.

2) Camera: The camera is controlled via USB, using the gphoto2 package under Linux. I camera doesn't have a DC input, so I make a 'fake' battery pack using some dowels and a DC adapter so that the camera could stay powered all the time. One annoying thing is that I can't adjust the flash or zoom settings on the camera while it is plugged into the Pi, but once you reconnect the camera to the Pi all the settings revert back to defaults. Which basically means I could never get the flash to stay disabled, and instead of zooming the camera I had to move the whole box closer to the chairs in the booth. Annoying - hopefully I will find a way to deal with this with a little more tweaking.

3) Photo Printer: Just a Canon Selphy photo printer - because that's what they had at Best Buy. Works pretty well, though. Only downside is the paper and ink cartridge need to replaced every 36 prints. Which means that if it were used more heavily at the party I would have needed to babysit it a lot more. As it was, it wasn't used as much as I had hoped, but that's mostly because I didn't do a good job of spreading the word that it was there to be used. Next time I will make sure everyone knows right from the start.

4) LED Control Board: I built a little LED control board for switching power for the big red button, plus the two status LEDs. This board connects to the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi.

5) USB Hub: The Raspberry Pi can't handle power-hungry peripherals on its USB ports, so you've typically got to connect up a powered USB hub.

6) Power Strip: Not much to say here - everything needed to be plugged in, so it made sense to include one. In the distant future it would be nice to rewire everything in here so that it can all be run off of a single power input to the box, and then regulated down for the individual devices. But I consider that a back-burner luxury for now.

I built a Raspberry Pi-based photobooth in time for the Father's Day Cookout - I plan to show the technical details of the booth in the next post. But below are some of the photos it took. I've still got a few kinks to work out with the software, and I think next time I will use more light and a more neutral-colored background - this came out a little on the yellow side overall. But still, it was loads of fun! Everyone really seemed to love the bucket of props - I will have to find a lot more for next time!

One of the first projects I tacked with my new workbench is something that I've been promising Sean for a long time - a stand-up arcade machine. We had one in Texas, but had no room for it in the new house and I had to get rid of it. Now with a modern LCD TV (as opposed to giant old-school tube) and a Raspberry Pi inside (rather than a full tower PC) I was able to build one both inexpensively and a lot lighter and shallower than the original. All it needs now is the bezel glass over the screen to hide the last of the wood, and then it will be done. I don't think we're going to bring it up to his room until after the cookout, though - I want to give everyone a chance to enjoy it before it goes upstairs.

I needed another workbench that wasn't in the garage, that I could use for tinkering around with electronics projects. The problem is that the garage is too cold in the winter, and all the sawdust is bad for the type of stuff I'd like to work on. So I decided to build a workbench in the basement, and what you see below is the result.

This past weekend I also started working on the software to control the light grid. For now, I just tried some very simple things - rough versions of alphabetic character, and one very simple fireworks-style effect (both of which could be significantly improved. I've got lots more that I want to do, but this was a start just to give me an early fix of the awesomeness. :)

And below are a pair of short videos of each of the two things I mentioned. This first shows the letters - the example sentence I picked had Sean cracking up. The second shows the fireworks-style effect, which could use a lot of work - especially in the smoothing and fade-out department. I think I need to tail off the color values instead of trying to play with the brightness setting to get a better fade.