Items tagged with DIY
There's no shortage of options in the DIY micro-PC market, one that Raspberry Pi arguably spearheaded over five-years-ago with the release of its first unit. Since that time, a lot of competition has risen to the surface, including none other than Taiwan's GIGABYTE, a company that knows a thing or two about developing motherboards worth using. The GA-SBCAP3450 is an iterative design that builds on the initial release last year. Notably, the biggest upgrade includes the boost to a quad-core processor, a rather gargantuan leap from a dual-core. That chip, Intel's Celeron N3450, can boost up to 2.2GHz, so it has a fair amount of oomph for such a small form-factored PC. While this 14.6cm x 10.2cm...
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Intel has always been an interesting company to watch, but lately, we've been looking at how it's adjusting focus to better handle the current competitive landscape. On the CPU side, the fact that AMD is more competitive than ever has been well-documented, both on the desktop side and in the enterprise. Intel has already reduced its focus in some key places, such as wearables. In one example of readjusted focus, the company is now targeting augmented reality as the next big thing it can play a part in. But we're not through with the deaths yet, as today we learn of yet another in the Intel product family: Arduino 101. This DIY tinker board was first revealed a couple of years ago, and with a...
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The Nintendo Switch is selling like hotcakes, but that does not mean that the console is without its fair share of imperfections. Some have complained that the Switch’s dock is a little too big and cheaply made. Nintendo fan Alexander Blake’s solution was to turn his old Game Boy Advance SP into a custom Switch dock. Blake remarked, “In the process of tinkering with a second Nintendo Switch Dock, I realized the circuit board was pretty much the exact same size as a Gameboy Advance SP. And then I remembered one of my old SPs doesn’t work anymore. So I got to work.” He replaced the inner workings of the Game Boy with the guts from the Switch dock. Blake then used an X-Acto knife to carve a hole...
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Are you a do-it-yourself fiend that is always looking for a new project to tackle? Well, Google is calling out to you with its new Artificial Intelligence Yourself (AIY) Projects initiative, which will allow Makers to get their hands dirty with DIY AI projects. The first fruit produced by Google’s AIY program is Voice Kit, which leverages the power of the Raspberry Pi platform and gives you complete access to the Google Assistant. When you obtain a kit, you’ll be supplied with the following components: Google Voice Hardware Accessory on Top (HAT) accessory board Stereo microphone Voice HAT board Arcade-style push button 3-inch speaker All necessary wiring Custom cardboard case You will have...
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In many regards, the Raspberry Pi family of computers is quite modest, which is of course by design. For a relatively small price, you can pick up a fully-functional RPi single board computer that can be used for many purposes, whether it is for learning, creating homemade bots, or cobbling together your own purpose-built media player or server solution. Given RPi's flexibility, it should come as no surprise that the open source Linux-power min PC has proven to be such a popular computing platform for scores of consumers, businesses and educational institutions. Just how popular? Well, while RPis themselves might be "modest", their sales figures are anything but. In fact, the total number of...
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Hot on the heels of our coverage of an in-depth guide showing you how to make your own "NES Classic Edition" with a Raspberry Pi, ASUS strikes with a DIY kit that it says is about twice as fast as the RPi 3. The DIY retro gaming arena could be heating up with more powerful options! The Tinker Board, as ASUS calls it, sports a Rockchip RK3288 SoC clocked at 1.2GHz. According to ASUS, and its GeekBench test, this chip is almost 2x faster than the RPi 3's Broadcom BCM2837, which is also clocked at 1.2GHz. Both chips are quad-core, but the Rockchip could help significantly with more processor-intensive tasks. ASUS has other one-ups to talk about, too. Versus the RPi 3, the Tinker Board...
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Retro gaming made a major resurgence this past holiday season, with the release of Nintendo’s ultra-hyped NES Classic, a scaled down clone of the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Out of the box, the NES Classic has thirty preloaded game titles, though some recent hacks exposed a method for uploading more if you're willing to mess with it. That's all well and good, but if you weren’t able to get your hands on one this past holiday season -- like the majority of people -- getting your retro-gaming fix isn't happening any time soon, unless you fork out an unreasonable sum, paying hundreds to scalpers, for a product that retails for $60.But, why not roll your own? The Elusive NES Classic...
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The Raspberry Pi foundation has found great success with the latest iteration of its mainline product, the RPi 3. Now, the time has come to see that RPi 3 converted to become CM3, or Compute Module 3. Whereas the mainline Raspberry Pi can be easily tinkered with by anyone, Compute Modules are even greater DIY devices, most appropriate for vendors to use in their own products. One such example is NEC, which is deploying a CM into an upcoming display. Compute Module 3 shares the same basic specs as the RPi 3, which is to say it includes a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC clocked at 1.2GHz, 1GB of memory, and 4GB of on-module eMMC flash. The company is also releasing a "Lite" version (CM3L) that moves the SD...
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When services are provided for free, it's important to evaluate whether or not there's a major caveat that comes along with it. According to an investigation by CBS News, the free "PC Health" checkup provided by Office Depot carries a big one: you could be encouraged to shell out money to fix a nonexistent problem. If this sounds like a shady mechanic or cars salesman, it's essentially the same thing. Office Depot is accused of telling customers that there are serious issues on their PCs, such as installed malware, even when that's not the case, and can charge them upwards of $180 for the privilege of "removing" it. To test the ploy, CBS purchased a handful of computers and brought them into...
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The Amazon Echo has been a pretty hot gadget to have around the home. At its core, the Echo is a smart speaker system which can respond to voice commands care of Amazon's digital personal assistant named Alexa. Alexa can queue up your favorite playlist, remind you about your meetings for the day, re-order toilet paper, or even help set some mood lighting with the right integration. For all the fun and convenience the Echo can offer, though, it doesn't come cheap with a current price point of $179.99.Fortunately, Amazon has provided a solution to this cost problem, provided you are willing to get your hands dirty. Amazon released instructions on GitHub this week on how to setup...
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It's beginning to look like Raspberry Pi's developers are keen on releasing newer models a lot quicker than before. The second generation unit was released just last February, and already we're being treated to a tease of the third iteration. Well, by "tease", we mean that the FCC has a public filing now of all of the important bits of info - including photos. At first glance the RPi 3 looks similar to the Raspberry Pi 2. With top-down images side-by-side, it took us some serious effort to spot the differences, and the differences we did see turned out to be some modification to the traces and filter cap arrangements on the board, not the ports, headers and slots. The only thing the...
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Typically when you hear of someone wearing an electronic device around their ankle, your first thought may they made a bad decision that led to house arrest. You may not have considered many other scenarios, though Netflix did, and so the concept for Netflix Socks was born. Will it spread? That may be up to you and your sleep habits. We've all been there, fighting off sleep like a grumpy child, only we're doing it because we're trying to power through yet another episode of Orange is the New Black or catching up on Breaking Bad (both are awesome shows, by the way). Eventually we succumb to our inevitable fate, drifting off into la-la land while Netflix continues playing in the background. What...
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Sometimes, it's enlightening to see what people are willing to do in order to bring the rest of us joy. Take stop motion animation, for example. It can take tens or hundreds of tedious hours to produce something that's worth watching. When watching a video like that, though, it's easy to have an idea of what to expect. Other times, you might have no idea what's coming, such as with a video posted at the end of October by YouTube user Mickey W. To give people a chance at winning one of its 34UC87C ultra-wide monitors, LG hosted a contest to get people to build computers out of cardboard. You no doubt already have some images springing to mind. Mickey W took things to the next level, though. His...
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It might have taken nearly an entire year to arrive, but the official touch display for the Raspberry Pi is here. Fortunately, the long wait isn't being met with an overpriced product - that'd be rather atypical of the Raspbery Pi foundation. Instead, you'll be able to get a very capable 7-inch touch screen for about $60 USD. With a resolution of 800x480, this is far from being a "high-resolution" panel, but the feature set more than makes up for that. It takes advantage of the RPi's DSI connector, which allows users to continue using the HDMI port for other purposes - and it is possible to use both the touchscreen and external display at the same time. Another cool perk: the chassis can be had...
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