To have a proper gaming “rig”, you need more than a powerful GPU and heaps of RAM. You’ve also got to install a clear side-panel so lesser mortals can ogle your wiring, and plenty of multicolored LEDs to make sure it’s never actually dark when you’re up playing at 2 AM. Or at least, that’s what the Internet has led us to believe.

The latest project from [Michael Pick] certainly isn’t doing anything to dispel that stereotype. In fact, it’s absolutely reveling in it. The goal was to recreate the look of a high-end custom gaming PC on a much smaller scale, with a Raspberry Pi standing in for the “motherboard”. Assuming you’re OK with streaming them from a more powerful machine on the network, this diminutive system is even capable of playing modern titles.

But really, the case is the star of the show here. Starting with a 3D printed frame, [Michael] really went all in on the details. We especially liked the little touches such as the fiber optics used to bring the Pi’s status and power LEDs out to the top of the case, and the tiny and totally unnecessary power button. There’s even a fake graphics card inside, with its own functional fan.

Even if you’re not interested in constructing custom enclosures for your Raspberry Pi, there are plenty of tips and tricks in the video after the break that are more than worthy of filing away for future use. For example, [Michael] shows how he fixed the fairly significant warping on his 3D printed case with a liberal application of Bondo and a straight-edge to compare it to.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a Raspberry Pi masquerade as a high-end computer, but it’s surely the most effort we’ve ever seen put into the gag.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/06/29/mini-gaming-pc-nails-the-look-streams-the-games/

To have a proper gaming “rig”, you need more than a powerful GPU and heaps of RAM. You’ve also got to install a clear side-panel so lesser mortals can ogle your wiring, and plenty of multicolored LEDs to make sure it’s never actually dark when you’re up playing at 2 AM. Or at least, that’s what the Internet has led us to believe.

The latest project from [Michael Pick] certainly isn’t doing anything to dispel that stereotype. In fact, it’s absolutely reveling in it. The goal was to recreate the look of a high-end custom gaming PC on a much smaller scale, with a Raspberry Pi standing in for the “motherboard”. Assuming you’re OK with streaming them from a more powerful machine on the network, this diminutive system is even capable of playing modern titles.

But really, the case is the star of the show here. Starting with a 3D printed frame, [Michael] really went all in on the details. We especially liked the little touches such as the fiber optics used to bring the Pi’s status and power LEDs out to the top of the case, and the tiny and totally unnecessary power button. There’s even a fake graphics card inside, with its own functional fan.

Even if you’re not interested in constructing custom enclosures for your Raspberry Pi, there are plenty of tips and tricks in the video after the break that are more than worthy of filing away for future use. For example, [Michael] shows how he fixed the fairly significant warping on his 3D printed case with a liberal application of Bondo and a straight-edge to compare it to.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a Raspberry Pi masquerade as a high-end computer, but it’s surely the most effort we’ve ever seen put into the gag.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/06/29/mini-gaming-pc-nails-the-look-streams-the-games/

Ask ordinary software developers how to code an exponential function (that is, e^x) and most will tell you to simply write an expression in their favorite high level language. But a significant slice of Hackaday readers will program tiny machines down to the bare metal or need more speed or precision than available with a customary implementation. [Pseduorandom] knows quite a few ways to do the calculation, and while it isn’t light reading for the math-phobic, it is an interesting tour.

The paper covers a variety of ways to calculate the function ranging from various Taylor series approximations, Lagrange interpolation, and Chebyshev interpolation. The paper is someone abstract, but there are Python and C++ examples to help make it concrete.

The paper does cover a bit about why you might want to compute e^x, but, honestly, we still love the Better Explained post about how it relates to any continually growing process. If you missed it, you can see the related video, below. We sure wish our math teachers had explained this to us.

We have to admit, if we had ever learned about some of these methods, we’ve forgotten them. But it is easier to get interested in this math when you aren’t having to cram it in right before a final exam.

We admit we are usually more interested in bit tweaking math these days. But we do occasionally open a program like Mathics.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/06/29/implementing-the-exponential-function/

[Jorvon Moss] a.k.a. [Odd_Jayy] is known as a maker of “companion robots” which he carriers perched on top of his shoulders. (I don’t know about you, but we’re getting some pretty strong Ash and Pikachu vibes.)

In one of his recent builds, he decided to give his companion bot a bit of sizzle. His Widget Dragon Companion Bot is an impressive 3D printed build, divided into a surprisingly few parts. The robot is controlled using an Adafruit Crickit, marketed specifically for robotics projects, and is easily programmed using the increasingly popular Microsoft MakeCode.

With a few servos, [Odd Jay] was able to animate his bot giving it more of an “alive” feel. Finally, he added a vape pen to give the dragon some pyrotechnic effects.

This is just the kind of energy we love to see here at Hackaday. While you’re around, take a look at some of [Odd_Jayy’s] other robot projects and head over to his Instagram page to see more real-time project updates.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/06/29/make-your-own-pet-fire-breathing-dragon/

We’ve seen quite a few scratch built lathes here at Hackaday, but none quite like the handcrafted pole lathe put together by [Jon Townsend] and his band of Merry Men as part of their effort to build a period-accurate 18th century log cabin homestead. With the exception of a few metal spikes here and there, everything is made out of lumber harvested from the forest around them.

The lathe is designed to be a permanent structure on the homestead, with two poles driven into the ground to serve as legs. Two rails, made of a split log, are then mounted between them. The movable components of the lathe, known as “puppets” in the parlance of the day, are cut so they fit tightly between the rails but can still be moved back and forth depending on the size of the work piece. With two metal spikes serving as a spindle, the log to be turned down is inserted between the puppets, and wedges are used to lock everything in place.

So that’s the easy part. But how do you spin it? The operator uses a foot pedal attached to a piece of rope that’s been wound around the log and attached to a slender pole cantilevered out over the lathe. By adjusting the length and angle of this pole, the user can set the amount of force it takes to depress the pedal. When the pedal is pushed down the log will spin one way, and when the pole pulls the pedal back up, it will spin the other.

Since the tools only cut in one direction, the user has to keep letting the pressure off when the log spins back around. The fact that the work piece isn’t continuously rotating in the same direction makes this very slow going, but of course, everything was just a bit slower back in the 18th century.

So now that we’ve seen lathes made from wood, intricately cut slabs of stone, and a grab bag of junkyard parts, there’s only one question left. Why do you still not have one?

source https://hackaday.com/2020/06/29/build-a-lathe-like-its-1777/

Let’s face it, those touchpads on laptops are awful, and were never meant to be the primary mouse for all-day use. Not that external mice are much better on your shoulder and neck in the long term — especially if you’re reaching past a 10-key and back to use it. So what’s the answer? What does a comfortable, portable mousing solution look like? Is such a thing even possible?

[Matias N.] has an idea: make the mouse an extension of your hand. The idea is that by wearing a battery-powered Bluetooth pointer on your thumb or index finger, you have a seamless back and forth transition with less overall stress. The trackpad includes a button that would be used to cover left clicks. To make it a full mouse, [Matias] plans to have extra buttons for right click and middle click, and a joystick for scrolling.

[Matias] started designing thumbMouse with a Blackberry 9900 trackball module in mind, but found it was way too slow for modern mousing needs. Turns out the trackpad module is much better suited: it’s a lot more responsive, and the movement is surprisingly sensitive.

Of course the standard mouse still has its place, but it can always be improved. As far as those go, this completely modular mouse might be the endgame critter.

The HackadayPrize2020 is Sponsored by:

source https://hackaday.com/2020/06/29/thumbmouse-keeps-your-hands-on-the-keyboard/

At some point, you simply run out of processing power. Admittedly, that point keeps getting further and further away, but you can still get there. If you run out of CPU time, the answer might be to add more CPUs. However, sometimes there are other bottlenecks like memory or disk space. However, it is also likely that you have access to multiple computers. Who doesn’t have a few Raspberry Pis sitting around their network? Or maybe a server in the basement? Or even some remote servers “in the cloud.” GNU Parallel is a tool that lets you spread work across multiple tasks either locally to remote machines. In some ways, it is simple, since it looks sort of like xargs but with parallel execution. On the other hand, it has myriad options and configurations that can make it a little daunting to use.

About xargs

In case you don’t use xargs, it is a very simple program that among other things lets you do something with a list of files. For example, suppose we want to search all C source files for the string “hackaday” using grep. You could write:

find . -name ‘*.[ch]’ | xargs grep -i hackaday

Here, xargs grabs an input line, calls grep and after grep completes, it repeats the process until it runs out of input lines. (Note: handling files with spaces is a bit tricky. Using -d ‘\n’ might help, although not all versions of xarg support it.)

In the simplest case, Parallel does the same thing, but it can execute grep — or whatever you are using — multiple times at once. On a local machine, this allows you to use multiple CPUs to improve timing. However, you can also spread the work among different machines that have passwordless ssh logins.

Demos

The author of GNU Parallel has a multipart video demonstration of the system. You can see the first part, below. The tutorial is also very good, and clears up a number of details that might not be obvious from the man page.

Just for my own amusement, I took a directory with some large mp4 files in it and used both xargs and parallel to gzip each file. I know, I know. The files are already compressed, so gzip isn’t going to do much. But I just wanted some large task to time. Here are the results:

[:~/Videos/movies] $ time find *.mp4 | xargs -d '\n' gzip

real    6m10.796s
user    2m52.828s
sys     0m9.718s
[:~/Videos/movies] $ time find *.mp4 | parallel --jobs 8  -d '\n' gzip

real    5m25.050s
user    2m56.676s
sys     0m7.732s

Admittedly, this wasn’t very scientific, and saving about 45 seconds isn’t a tremendous gain, but still. I picked eight jobs because I have an eight-core processor. You might vary that setting depending on what else you’re doing at the time.

Remote

If you want to use remote computers to process data, you need to have passwordless ssh remote access to the other computer (or computers). Of course, chances are the remote computer won’t have the same files and resources, so it makes sense that — by default — your commands only run on the remote server. You can provide a comma-separated list of servers, and if you use the server name of “:” (just a colon), you’ll include your local machine in handling jobs.

This might be very useful if you have a mildly underpowered computer that needs help doing something. For example, we could imagine a Raspberry Pi-based 3D printer asking a remote host to slice a bunch of models in parallel. Even if you think you don’t have any computational heavy lifting, Parallel can do things like process files from a tar archive as they are unpacked without waiting for the rest of the files. It can distribute grep‘s work across your CPUs or cores.

Honestly, it would take a lot to explain each feature in detail, but I hope this has encouraged you to read more about GNU Parallel. Between the videos and the tutorial, you should get a good idea of some of the things you could do with this powerful tool.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/06/29/linux-fu-parallel-universe/

If you’ve got a few self-designed PCBs under your belt, you probably know the pain of missing some little detail and having to break out the bodge wires to fix it. So we feel for [Arsenio Dev], who placed an SD card slot next to an SoC, only to find that it was the wrong way round. Rather than tossing it in the bin, he decided to employ a particularly crafty set of bodge wires that curve over the board and connect to an SD card adapter on the other side.

Our attention was taken by the board itself, he’s posted little information about it and taken pains to conceal one of the pieces of text on it. Since it has an Octavo Systems BeagleBone-on-chip, a slot for a cellular modem, and a connector marked “CONNECT AERONET HERE” which we are guessing refers to the Aeronet sun photometry network, we’re guessing it might be a controller for remotely-sited nodes for that system. Either way it’s enough to have us intrigued, and we wish him every success with the next spin.

Meanwhile, this certainly isn’t the first PCB CAD fail we’ve brought you.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/06/29/fail-of-the-week-this-sd-card-wont-slot/