Tinning Solution From the Hardware Store

Making your own printed circuit board at home often leads to a board which looks homemade. Exposed copper is one of the tell-tale signs. That may be your aesthetic and we won’t cramp your style, but exposed copper is harder to solder than tinned copper and it likes to oxidize over time. Tinning at home can bring you a step closer to having a full-featured board. In the video after the break, famed chemist [nurdrage] shows us how to make tinning solution at home in the video below the break.

There are only three ingredients to make the solution and you can probably find them all at a corner hardware store.

• Hydrochloric acid. Also known as muriatic acid.
• Solid lead-free solder with ≥ 95% tin
• Silver polish containing thiourea

Everything to pull this off is in the first three minutes of the video. [nurdrage] goes on to explain the chemistry behind this reaction. It doesn’t require electricity or heat but heat will speed up the reactions. With this kind of simplicity, there’s no reason to make untinned circuit boards in your kitchen anymore. If aesthetics are very important, home tinning yourself allows you to mask off certain regions and have exposed copper and tin on the same board.

[nurdrage] is no stranger to Hackaday, he even has an article here about making your own PCB etchants and a hotplate to kick your PCB production into high gear.

Thanks for the tip, [drnbutyllithium].

Filed under: chemistry hacks

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Are Microwave Guns For Real?

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Programming FPGAs With Themselves

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What Makes A Hacker

I think I can sum up the difference between those of us who regularly visit Hackaday and the world of non-hackers. As a case study, here is a story about how necessity is the mother of invention and the people who invent.

Hackaday has overlap with sites like Pinterest and Instructables but there is one vital difference, we choose to create something new and beautiful with the materials at hand. Often these tools and techniques are very simple. We look to make things elegant by reducing the unnecessary clutter, not adding glitter. If something could be built with a 555 timer we will let you know. If there is a better choice for a processor, we will tell you.

My first real work commute was a forty-minute eastward drive every morning and a forty-minute westward drive every evening. This route pointed my car directly into the sun twice a day. Staring into a miasma of incandescent plasma for an hour and a half a day isn’t fun, and probably isn’t safe, but we can fix that.

Monday, the Day I was Annoyed

The first Monday, I was annoyed by the sun hovering over the road. To and from work, I squinted and used the visor as best I could, but it was a losing battle. The visor made it difficult to see cars in my lane even when the sun was off to one side.

We have all been here, metaphorically. We encounter a problem and at first, it is just a thing that is. Our brains register this as a new event and file it under something which annoys us.

Tuesday, the Day I Made the Easy Choice

On Tuesday, I bought sunglasses, but they were not enough. When the sun was right on the horizon I could not lower the visor far enough and sunglasses did not help while staring directly into that distant nuclear reactor.

At this point, regular problem-solving skills start to kick in. The standard solutions, like sunglasses, are tried and maybe we get a little upset that things are not going our way. Our brains start to see a pattern after four commutes full of looking at a burning ball of hydrogen.

Wednesday, the Day I Did Something

On Wednesday, I diverged from the path of a non-hacker. The non-hackers would go on to complain about the layout of the roads. They would whine about how the roads should not run east-west and how their tax dollars were paying for roads that weren’t usable during rush hour. They would spend all their energies coming up with new ways to gripe.

Not me. I grabbed a couple of magnets from the refrigerator and a 3×5 note card before I left for work that morning. I put one magnet on the outside of my windshield and I placed the other magnet and the note card on the inside. The magnets held the note card in place and allowed me to position it anywhere on the windshield. Unfortunately, the flimsy note card did not do a good enough job of blocking light. That space orb was more powerful than thinly pressed dead trees.

Thursday, the Day I Did Something Better

On Thursday, the design was revised. The magnets did a good job of moving across the windshield so I did not change them. The size of the note card seemed a bit larger than necessary and I needed something which could block light more effectively. A poker playing card was swapped into the design. Playing cards are designed to keep light from passing through so no one can read your card from the backside. A fortunate side-effect was that the low-friction finish on the card helped it shuttle around the windshield.

Most of my problems were solved except the low-friction finish allowed the magnet to slip off the card. The card was small enough to block the sun itself but light still spilled around it and I had to keep my head in exactly the right spot. It turns out that the size of the notecard was better than I had thought.

One of the caveats of engineering is that it leads to over-engineering. My mind started swimming with ways to use a third magnet or a carefully crafted shuttle that could hold the magnet while hugging the windshield.

Friday, the Day I Had Something New and Beautiful

On Friday, the final tweaks were made. Tape held the magnet to the playing card and more tape held the playing card to the notecard. I had no problems. As I drove, I simply positioned my magnet-card on the windshield every time the sun was shining in my face. When I did not need it, I moved it off to the side so the windshield wipers could not touch it. It is a functional product but maybe it will get some finish so it looks like it belongs in the car. Faux carbon fiber?

This investment of time was a risk, a time-gamble, but the rewards were worth it. Not every creation improves life more than it costs to make it, but being willing to look down that path, instead of just resorting to constant complaining, is what separates us. We are the ones who use our energy to make our lives better and share it with the world in the hope that someone else can benefit from our experience.

Legal Note

I should warn you that this was technically illegal in my state since there is a law about placing anything between the driver and the windshield. Fuzzy dice, parking permits, and radar detectors are all illegal to display while driving. Check your own area’s laws before performing this hack on your own. Another thing that separates us from them, is that I will tell you the law and what I did then let you decide what you do with that information.

Expanding Upon a Simple Idea

If you are like me, coming up with a simple and effective idea does not mean sitting back and just using it, it has to be improved beyond the initial hack. A good idea can become a great idea. A great idea can become an awesome idea. An awesome idea, with a product to back it up, can make money or make your life significantly better.

This is also a symptom of scope-creep but that is not what this article is addressing.

Hand-operated-window-mounted-solar-blocking-apparatus, HOWMSBA, did not receive any more modifications because it suited my needs but, while my brain was set to overdrive in invention-mode, more ideas popped up. Adjusting the card by hand worked fine for a proof-of-concept but anytime the car followed a curve in the road, it had to be adjusted. Connecting strings and motors seemed like a reasonable course of action. Four motors could be attached with suction cups at the corners of the windshield to pull the shuttle around. Adjusting pulleys could be powered with some stepper motors or simple continuous rotation servos with tensioner feedback.

An X-Y table would work but it would be hard to fit the curve of the windshield without obstructing the view significantly. It would also require a lot of tension to account for hysteresis. Whichever motor was selected, a little analog joystick, the $1 variety, could control the motors like a video game. Maybe the joystick could be mounted on the steering wheel and talk to a controller wirelessly. It could have a solar-powered battery pack too. Better yet, it could all be made automatic with a sun tracker mounted on a headrest which would automatically track the brightest point and position the card for me with a short offset to account for the mounting position.

Whew.

That is what a mental dump looks like. Some of you readers undoubtedly had better ideas for ways to improve upon such a simple hack. Maybe one of those ideas will end up on Hackaday because we are not the people who just follow the recipes, we are the people who add our own ingredients.

Filed under: car hacks, Featured, Interest, Original Art

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Solving Mazes with Graphics Cards

What if we told you that you are likely to have more computers than you think? And we are not talking about things that are computers while not looking like one, like most modern cars or certain lightbulbs. We are talking about the powerful machines hiding in your desktop computer called ‘graphics card’. In the ordinary gaming rig graphics cards that are much more powerful than the machine they’re built into are a common occurrence. In his tutorial [Viktor Chlumský] demonstrates how to harness your GPU’s power to solve a maze.

Software that runs on a GPU is called a shader. In this example a shader is shown that finds the way through a maze. We also get to catch a glimpse at the limitations that make this field of software special: [Viktor]’s solution has to work with only four variables, because all information is stored in the red, green, blue and alpha channels of an image. The alpha channel represents the boundaries of the maze. Red and green channels are used to broadcast waves from the beginning and end points of the maze. Where these two waves meet is the shortest solution, a value which is captured through the blue channel.

Despite having tons of cores and large memory, programming shaders feels a lot like working on microcontrollers. See for yourself in the maze solving walk through below.

If we got you hooked on GPU programming keep your eyes peeled, there’s more on the way. Until then you may enjoy creating pixel shaders from the command line or using them to drive WS2811 LEDs with VGA.

Filed under: how-to, video hacks

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MakerBot Really Wants You To Like Them Again

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The Grafofon: An Optomechanical Sequencer

There are quick hacks, there are weekend projects and then there are years long journeys towards completion.  [Boris Vitazek]’s grafofon falls into the latter category. His creation can best be described as electromechanical sequencer synthesizer with a multiplayer mode.

The storage medium and interface for this sequencer is a thirteen-meter loop of paper that is mounted like a conveyor belt. Music is composed by drawing on the paper or placing objects on it. This is usually done by the audience and the fact that the marker isn’t erased make the result collaborative and incremental.

 These ‘scores’ are read by a camera and interpreted by software.This is a very vague description of this device, for a reason: the build went on over six years and both hard- and software went through several revisions in that time. It started as a trigger for MIDI notes and evolved from there.

In his write up [Boris] explains the technical aspects of each iteration. He also tells the stories of the people he met while working on the grafofon and how they influenced the build. If this look into the art world reminds you of your local hackerspace, it is because these worlds aren’t that far apart.

We sure do like large musical machines like this contraption by [Wintergatan] and sequencers made from random stuff also get our love. If this kind of project piques your interest, be sure to check out the ‘musical hacks’ category below.

Filed under: digital audio hacks, musical hacks

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Lithium Ion Versus LiPoly In An Aeronautical Context

When it comes to lithium batteries, you basically have two types. LiPoly batteries usually come in pouches wrapped in heat shrink, whereas lithium ion cells are best represented by the ubiquitous cylindrical 18650 cells. Are there exceptions? Yes. Is that nomenclature technically correct? No, LiPoly cells are technically, ‘lithium ion polymer cells’, but we’ll just ignore the ‘ion’ in that name for now.

Lithium ion cells are found in millions of ground-based modes of transportation, and LiPoly cells are the standard for drones and RC aircraft. [Tom Stanton] wondered why that was, so he decided to test the energy density per mass of these battery chemistries, and what he found was very interesting.

The goal of [Tom]’s experiment was to test LiPoly against lithium ion batteries in the context of a remote-controlled aircraft. Since weight is what determines flight time, cutting even a few grams from an airframe can vastly extend the capabilities of an aircraft. The test articles for this experiment come in the form of a standard 1800 mAh LiPoly battery and four 18650 cells wired together as a 3000 mAh battery. Here’s where things get interesting: the LiPoly battery weighs 216 grams for an energy density of 0.14 Watt-hours per gram. The lithium ion battery weighs 202 grams for an energy density of 0.25 Watt-hours per gram. If you just look at the math, all drones are doing it wrong. 18650 cells appear to have a much higher energy density per mass than the usual LiPoly cells. How does that hold up in a real-world test, though?

Using his neat plane with 3D printed wing ribs as the testbed, [Tom] plugged in the batteries and flew around a field for the better part of an afternoon. The LiPo flew for 41.5 minutes, whereas the much more energy dense lithium ion battery flew for 36.5 minutes. What’s going on here?

While the lithium ion battery has a much higher capacity, the problem here is the internal resistance of each battery chemistry. The end voltage for the LiPo was a bit lower than the lithium ion battery, suggesting the 18650 cells can be run down a bit further than [Tom]’s test protocol allowed. After recharging each of these batteries and doing a bit of math, [Tom] found the lithium ion batteries can fly for about twice as long as their LiPo counterparts. That means an incredibly long test of flying a plane in a circle over a field; not fun, but we are looking forward to other people replicating this experiment.

Filed under: drone hacks

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Using an Arduino to Re-Create a Computer’s Keyboard Decoder

[Max Breedon] found an old Apple IIe clone twenty years ago. He recently dug this Epson AP-200 out of the salvage heap and quickly discovered that the keyboard decoder chip was fried. The old chip was way too obscure to source a replacement — and soon this post will be the top Google result for the string, ‘C35224E’ — so he busted out his trusty UNO and created a replacement keyboard decoder.

Unlike the Apple II, where all the keyboard decoding happens on the keyboard, this clone used a dedicated chip on the main board. Although it’s a rare part that’s virtually ungoogleable, this chip’s architecture and pinout can be figured out by testing out every trace for continuity. After locating what looked like four data pins, he had the Arduino send signals onto the clone to see what characters popped up. That didn’t work, but it led him to idea that two of the wires were clock and data, and after a bit of experimenting figured out that the third pin was a latch enable of some sort that sent the character.

So, [Max] created an Arduino rig to do the same thing. The Arduino uses a shift register to interact with the keyboard’s 8×10 matrix, and the sketch translates any serial data it receives into the keypresses the clone is expecting. After prototyping with the UNO, [Max] hardwired an Arduino Nano (as well as the shift register) into a daughter board with pins extending into the old chip’s sockets. A permanent solution!

In addition to a weird keyboard controller that has been lost to the sands of time, this Apple IIe clone features a few more parts that are downright weird. There are two chips that are found in a few other Apple clones labeled STK 65301 and STK 65371, used as ASICs, MMUs, or a 20-IC expression of Wozzian brilliance condensed into custom silicon. There’s another weird chip in this clone, a 27c32 ROM loaded up with repetitive bits. There is no obvious 6502 code or strings in this ROM, so if anyone has an idea what this chip does, send [Max] a note.

Filed under: repair hacks

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Hackaday Links: October 22, 2017

A few weeks ago, the popcorn overflowed because of an ambiguous tweet from Adafruit. Did Adafruit just buy Radio Shack? While everyone else was foaming at the mouth, we called it unlikely. The smart money is that Adafruit just bought a few fancy stock certificates, incorporation papers, and other official-looking documents at the Radio Shack corporate auction a few months ago. They also didn’t pick up that monster cache of Trash-80s, but I digress.

Here’s some more popcorn: Adafruit just applied for the ‘Radiofruit’ trademark. Is this Adafruit’s play to take over the Radio Shack brand? Probably not; they put a bunch of radio modules on Feather boards, and are just doing what they do. It does demonstrate Adafruit’s masterful manipulation effective use of social media, though.

Remember those 2D tilty maze rolling marble labyrinth game things? Here’s a 3D version on Kickstarter. It’s handheld, so this really needs a gimbal and associated twisty knobs.

In a video making the meme rounds, someone found an easter egg in the gauge cluster of a Russian GAZ van. It plays Tetris.

It’s Sunday, so it’s time to talk Star Trek. Here’s something interesting that hit my email: a press release telling me, “Trekkies Scramble To Get The First Toothbrush In Space As Seen On Star Trek Discovery”. This is the toothbrush, and here is the press kit. Dumb? Not at all. Star Trek has a long history of using off-the-shelf tools and devices for props. For example, the hyperspanners seen in Star Trek: Enterprise were actually this non-contact thermometer available from Harbor Freight. At least the hyperspanners and thermometers came out of the same injection mold.

There’s a new LimeSDR board on CrowdSupply. It extends any LimeSDR to 10 GHz.

Kerf bending is the application of (usually laser-cut) slots to bend plywood around corners. You’ve seen it a million times before, and done correctly the technique can produce some very interesting results. What about metal, though? You need a pretty big laser for that. [Proto G] is using a 2000 W fiber laser to experiment with kerf bending in stainless steel. It works as you would expect, and we eagerly await someone to replicate this, if only to see another 2000 Watt laser in action.

Filed under: Hackaday Columns, Hackaday links

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Apparently Fruit Flies Like a Raspberry Pi

Groucho Marx famously said, “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.” As insulting as it is, researchers often use fruit flies for research because they have similar behavior and genetics to humans. For example, the flies exhibit signs of anxiety, stress, and many common diseases. Researchers at Imperial College London built an inexpensive and customizable research platform for fruit flies — the ethoscope — that uses a 3D printed enclosure and a Raspberry Pi to study our winged counterparts. You can see a video about the ethoscope, below.

By using a camera, the Pi can watch the flies, something researchers used to do by hand. The software is easy to customize. For example, while studying sleep deprivation, the ethoscope could detect when a fly didn’t move for 20 seconds and rotate its tube to wake it up.

In addition to 3D printing, the ethoscope can also be made with folded paper or construction bricks. Regardless, you are still going to have a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino. The specifications are online and are the result of seven years of refinement, according to the team.

The platform uses a web interface and has facilities for doing data analysis on results from research. You can also find their paper detailing the ethoscope, if you would like to learn more.

We’ll be honest. Although the team makes ethoscope sound like a new idea, we couldn’t help but remember FlyPi, but we aren’t smart enough about labwork with flies to know if they are really similar or not. Speaking of things we’ve seen in the past, we looked at some genetic hacking on fruit flies.

Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, Arduino Hacks, Raspberry Pi

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Hazardous Dollhouse Teaches Fire Safety

Fire safety is drilled into us from a young age. And for good reason, too, because fire hazards are everywhere in the average home. Even a small fire can turn devastatingly dangerous in a matter of minutes. But how do you get kids to really pay attention to scary (and often boring) adult concepts? You can teach a kid to stop, drop, and roll until you’re blue in the face and still might not drive home the importance of fire prevention. Subjects like this call for child-sized visual aids that ignite imaginations.

That’s exactly what firefighters in Poznań, Poland did in collaboration with mlabs, a local software company. They built a mobile, interactive fire safety education tool that simulates common household fire hazards in great detail (translated). This is easily the most tricked-out dollhouse we’ve ever seen. The many different hazard scenarios are controlled via touchscreen using a custom-built application. At the tap of a button, the house becomes a total death trap. The lamp-lit hazards glow realistically and with varied intensity, and there is actual smoke coming out of them that triggers smoke detectors. Cameras embedded throughout the house provide a first-person view of the terror on a nearby monitor.

Almost no room is safe for the figurine family that lives inside this intricately detailed 1:12 scale dwelling. Dad’s in the kitchen standing idly by while food scorches on the stove. Grandma’s sitting on her bed upstairs, her forgotten cigarette burning a hole in the duvet. Daughter is overloading the electrical outlets in her bedroom with all her gizmos. Smoldering coals have spilled out from the toppled stove in the utility room.

This isn’t the first smart dollhouse we’ve seen, but it’s probably the most intriguing. The fire safety dollhouse was on display this week at POL-EKO-SYSTEM, an annual environmental fair in Poznań. Nowhere near Poland? Check out the video after the break.

Thanks for the tip, [Radomir]!

Filed under: misc hacks

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Making the Best Plywood for Laser Cut Puzzles

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The Web Clock You Can Control Over a LAN

Not every project is meant to solve a new problem. Some projects can be an extension of an existing solution just to flex the geek muscles. One such project by [limbo] is the Web Clock 2.0 which is an internet-connected clock.

Yes, it uses a WEMOS D1 mini which is equipped with an ESP-12F (ESP8266) and yes, it uses an LCD with an I2C module to interface the two. The system works by connecting to the Google servers to get GMT and then offsets it to calculate the local time. It also has the hourly nagging chime to let you know that another precious hour of your life has gone and you need to set it up.

What [limbo] adds to the conventional functionality is a LAN application to send custom messages to the LCD. The software is called ‘Clock Commander’ and can be downloaded as a Windows binary through the source code is unavailable for now. Simply point it to the correct IP address and you can then send it commands to display stuff as well as control the sound. The project comes with Lua scripts and instruction how to DIY.

We imagine this can be used to create a custom geeky table clock or hack a digital coo-coo clock to drive your co-workers crazy at the press of a button. For those who are looking for something with lasers, check out the Laser Pointer Clock for a slightly more challenging build.

Filed under: clock hacks, misc hacks

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Chemotransfer for DIY PCBs

Making PCBs with the toner transfer method has been around since you could buy your traces at Radio Shack. There are a million techniques for removing copper from sheets of fiberglass, from milling to using resist pens, to the ubiquitous laser printer toner transfer. Here’s a technique we haven’t seen before. [Darko Volk] is calling this ‘chemotransfer’. It’s mostly a laser printer toner transfer process, but the toner is transferred from paper to copper with the help of a special mix of solvents.

This chemotransfer process is almost identical to the usual process of making a toner transfer PCB. First, the design is printed in reverse on dextrin-coated paper, the paper is placed down on polished copper, the entire assembly is sent through a laminator, and finally the board is etched with the chemical of your choice. The key difference here is a solvent applied to the copper just before the design is laid down. [Darko Volk] made a mixture of 25% “cleaning petrol” (benzene, naphtha, or gasoline, or some sort of light hydrocarbon, apparently), 5% linseed oil, and 70% isopropanol. This apparently aids in releasing the toner from the paper and sticking it down to the copper.

From there, the process is effectively a standard toner transfer process. [Darko Volk] is using a solution of sodium persulphate for the etch, and rigged a camera up to a CNC machine for the drilling.

This process can be expanded to two-layer boards very easily using a light table to align the layers of paper before placing them down on the copper. You can check out a video of the fabrication of a single side and double sided board below.

Thanks [Andrej] for the tip.

Filed under: chemistry hacks

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FruitNanny: The Raspberry Pi Baby Monitor For Geeks

Having a child is perhaps the greatest “hack” a human can perform. There’s no soldering iron, no Arduino (we hope), but in the end, you’ve managed to help create the most complex piece of machinery in the known galaxy. The joys of having a child are of course not lost on the geekier of our citizens, for they wonder the same things that all new parents do: how do we make sure the baby is comfortable, how many IR LEDs do we need to see her in the dark, and of course the age old question, should we do this with a web app or go native?

If you’re the kind of person who was frustrated to see that “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” didn’t even bother to mention streaming video codecs, then you’ll love FruitNanny, the wonderfully over-engineered baby monitor created by [Dmitry Ivanov]. The product of nearly two years of development, FruitNanny started as little more than a Raspberry Pi 1n a plastic lunch box. But as [Dmitry] details in his extensive write-up, the latest iteration could easily go head-to-head with products on the commercial market.

[Dmitry] gives a full bill of materials on his page, but all the usual suspects are here. A Raspberry Pi 3 paired with the official NoIR camera make up the heart of the system, and the extremely popular DHT22 handles the environmental monitoring. A very nice 3D printed case, a lens intended for the iPhone, and a dozen IR LEDs round out the build.

The software side is where the project really kicks into high gear. Reading through the setup instructions [Dmitry] has provided is basically a crash course in platform-agnostic video streaming. Even if a little bundle of joy isn’t on your development roadmap, there’s probably a tip or two you can pick up for your next project that requires remote monitoring.

It probably won’t surprise you that geeky parents have been coming up with ways to spy on their kids for some time now, and if you can believe it, some don’t even include a Raspberry Pi.

Filed under: hardware, home hacks, Raspberry Pi

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Making Music with the Wind

[Niklas Roy] built a windmill-powered music box for his backyard, and it was so awesome all the neighbors wanted to take a picture of it. Someone even liked it so much that he stole [Niklas]’s windmill in the middle of the night. (We kind of don’t blame them, it’s a gorgeously clean build.)

In the past few weeks [Niklas] has been mass-producing 20 windmills for the KIKK Festival 2017 to be held in November in Namur, Belgium. The windmills will operate in a cluster, and all play “Für Elise” when the wind blows. However, each one is driven independently and so the music is asynchronous. Since he was building a bunch anyway, he built a replacement windmill for his backyard, and documented how to do it.

Most of the mechanical parts are 3D printed, with metal hardware such as bearings supplementing the plastic prints, with M10 threaded rod serving as the mast. He provides PDF templates for cutting the “flag”. For his instruction video [Niklas] used a double layer of coroplast (recycled political signs) stuck together with double-sided tape;  he used 3mm Forex in his installation. In addition, there’s a rectangle of some harder plastic — random stuff he had lying around — that serves as a resonator for the music box.

[Niklas] is a Berlin-based installation artist and educator and Hackaday regular; his music construction machine
and his wall-hugging fan rig is a must for any small workshop.

Filed under: green hacks

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Reading 16 Rotary Encoders at the Same Time

We’re digging these daisy-chainable encoders built by [fattore.saimon]. Each module consists of a rotary encoder attached to a PCB with a PIC16F15386 on the back. As we’ve covered in the past, the Microchip released their feature-rich PIC16 microprocessor just this year, and it’s great to see them start to crop up in projects. With 4 address jumpers on the back of each PCB, [fattore.saimon] is able to connect up to 16 of the encoders on the bus. The modules also have male and female plugs so he can connect them physically as well, to simplify wiring. Each module also has a PWMable bicolor LED for keeping track of each encoder’s setting.

If you’re interested in making your own you can buy the PCBs from Tindie or download the project files from the creator’s GitHub, including an Arduino library.

We love encoders here on Hackaday — building DIY encoders, as well as using them in projects like this precision cutting jig. And definitely read our colleague [Al]’s great piece on encoders.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks

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These Twenty Projects Won $1000 In The Hackaday Prize

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SegaPi Zero Shows Game Gear Some Respect

If you were a gamer in 1991, you were presented with what seemed like an easy enough choice: you could get a Nintendo Game Boy, the gray brick with a slightly nauseating green-tinted screen that was already a couple of years old, or you could get yourself a glorious new Sega Game Gear. With full color display and games that were ported straight from Sega’s home consoles, it seemed like the Game Gear was the true future of portable gaming. But of course, that’s not how things actually went. In reality, technical issues like abysmal battery life held the Game Gear back, and conversely Nintendo and their partners were able to squeeze so much entertainment out of the Game Boy that they didn’t even bother creating a true successor for it until nearly a decade after its release.

While the Game Gear was a commercial failure compared to the Game Boy back in the 1990s and never got an official successor, it’s interesting to think of what may have been. A hypothetical follow-up to the Game Gear was the inspiration for the SegaPi Zeo created by [Halakor]. Featuring rechargeable batteries, more face buttons, and a “console” mode where you can connect it to a TV, it plays to the original Game Gear’s strengths and improves on its weaknesses.

As the name implies the SegaPi Zero is powered by the Raspberry Pi Zero, and an Arduino Pro Micro handles user input by tactile switches mounted behind all the face buttons. A TP4056 charging module and step-up converter are also hiding in there, which take care of the six 3.7 lithium-Ion 14500 batteries nestled into the original battery compartments. With a total capacity of roughly 4,500 mAh, the SegaPi Zero should be able to improve upon the 3 – 4 hour battery life that helped doom the original version.

There’s no shortage of projects that cram a Raspberry Pi into a classic game system, but more often than not, they tend to be Nintendo machines. It could simply be out of nostalgia for Nintendo’s past glories, but personally we’re happy to see another entry into the fairly short list of Sega hacks.

Filed under: classic hacks, Raspberry Pi

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