17 Enjoyable Initiatives for Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Micro:Bit, and Extra

When a brand new board drops, makers across the planet instantly begin hacking new initiatives with it. Listed here are 17 enjoyable initiatives to attempt on contemporary {hardware}.

Raspberry Pi Pico

Add MIDI to Toy Keyboard
Kevin @diyelectromusic, UK
Improve a kiddie keyboard with a Pi Pico to ship MIDI notes, through UART and USB MIDI on the identical time.

Joke Texting Telephone
Sai Yamanoor, Buffalo, New York
Hack a classic touch-tone telephone with a Pico and Blues mobile Notecard, then join it to the Dad Jokes API to textual content lame jokes to no matter quantity you dial.

Automated Mannequin Railroad
Kushagra Keshari, Jabalpur, India
Hack your tracks with a Pico, SparkFun motor drivers, and IR proximity sensors to choreograph exact, point-to-point locomotive locomotion.

Computerized Guitar Tuner
Guyrandy Jean-Gilles, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Construct this robo-tuner impressed by Band Industries’ Roadie 3. A Pico listens to an electret mic and drives a motor to spin every tuning peg as much as excellent pitch.

Micro:Bit V2

Sensible Tea Cozy
Kitty Yeung, Berlin, Germany
Physicist and tech-fashion designer Kitty Yeung sewed and wired this temperature-sensing timer cozy for brewing tea, coding the brand new micro:bit V2 in Make:Code.

Adafruit Neo Trinkey

USB Rubber Ducky
Dylan Herrada, Washington, DC
Code a NeoTrinkey with Adafruit’s new Circuit-Python Ducky library to make it a “rubber ducky” — the hacker’s infamous “unhealthy USB” for injecting keystrokes into unwitting computer systems.

Zoom Shortcut Buttons
Liz Clark, Boston, Massachusetts
Conceal, mute, or simply bail from that Zoom assembly with the contact of an actual button. study.adafruit.com/neo-trinkey-zoom-shortcuts

Arduino Nano RP2040 Join

DIY Cocktail Mixer
Jithin Sanal, Trivandrum, India
Faucet your telephone and this bar-bot will combine your cocktail to order, utilizing the Nano RP2040 Hook up with set off peristaltic pumps, by the use of the Arduino Cloud IoT platform.

Animal Sound Classifier
Francesco Azzola, Perugia, Italy
Cluck! Oink! Moo! Problem your toddler to a duel with this animal noise identifier. Use Edge Impulse to coach a machine studying mannequin to categorise critter samples, then deploy the mannequin to your Nano RP2040 Join.

Pimoroni Tiny 2040

Tiny Pong
Aylesbury-Jarvis household, Harrogate, England
Breadboard two mini analog controllers utilizing potentiometers, add a 0.96″ OLED display screen and speaker, and your Tiny 2040 turns into Tiny Pong, with glorious gameplay and sound results.

Smartphone Digicam Distant
Les Pounder, Blackpool, England
Take higher selfies and wildlife pictures with a DIY distant shutter button to your Android telephone digicam. The trick is coding your Tiny 2040 to behave like a USB enter system, utilizing CircuitPython.

Microchip Curiosity Nano

IoT Contactless Thermometer
Greg Toth, Washington, DC
Scan these foreheads straight to the cloud — use an AVR128DA48 Curiosity Nano to learn a contactless temperature sensor and ship information to the Medium One platform for evaluation. Possibly you’ll spot outbreaks and superspreaders earlier than it’s too late.

NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX

SkyHub UFO Tracker
Skyhub.org, Houston, Texas
Wow, and I believed the RasPi Meteor Community was cool (Make: Quantity 77) — now there’s a community for recognizing and classifying UAPs. Join a fisheye digicam and Adafruit GPS module, then prepare your Jetson Xavier or Nano 4GB to acknowledge aerial anomalies, alien or in any other case, and report them to this international citizen science community for research.

Crop-Recognizing Agricultural Navigation
Tegwyn Twmffat / Goat Industries, UK
Farmbots that navigate by GPS can simply trample crops. Prepare your Xavier to see every particular person plant, then watch your autonomous tractor tiptoe via the tulips.

Doom Air
Nick Bild, Orlando, Florida
Demon hunters: Play Doom life-size, projected on the wall, together with your physique because the controller, by coaching a Xavier with CSI digicam (a Pi Cam V2.1) to detect your gestures for run, bounce, subsequent weapon, shoot, crouch, and extra.

Seeed Spartan Edge Accelerator

16-Bit Graphics with ESP32+FPGA
Varun Mehta, New York Metropolis
For video initiatives most of us would attain for a GPU or no less than a CPU like a Raspberry Pi. As a substitute, this hacker tweaked his Spartan Edge Accelerator to make use of the FPGA as a GPU and the onboard ESP32 module as a CPU, to generate 16-bit graphics with sprites and x-y scrolling of a number of background layers, in 720p HDMI output.

MIPI Imaging on FPGA
Adam Taylor, Harlow, UK
And this hacker pulled an identical trick, utilizing the FPGA to learn and show HDMI video from a Pi Digicam 3, with no processors. The key sauce: intelligent Vivado design utilizing IP blocks from Trenz, Seeed, and Diligent.

This text appeared in Make: Vol 79. Subscribe right this moment for initiatives delivered proper to your mailbox.