Meet The World’s Smallest Portable N64

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We’re all about a portable N64, but having one that fits in your hands and plays original cartridges is something we only thought the Nintendo gods could create.
But no, the modding maniac known as GmanModz is back at it again with the world’s smallest portable N64. He previously built the Nintendo 64 handheld that looked like a Gameboy Advance SP.
Somehow he has managed to modify a N64 console to fit in a tiny shell with the ability to play your best N64 games on the cartridges you still have hiding in your garage.

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A Hi-Fi Speaker From Some Foil and Magnets

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In the world of speakers, mass is the enemy of high frequency response. In order to get the crispest highs, some audiophiles swear by speakers in which the moving element is just a thin ribbon of metal foil. As the first step towards building a set of ribbon headphones, [JGJMatt] has designed a compact ribbon speaker made from aluminum foil.

A 3D-printed body holds six permanent magnets, which produce the static magnetic field necessary for the speaker to work. The sound itself is produced by a corrugated aluminum diaphragm made by taking a strip of foil and creasing it with a gear. Aluminum is difficult to solder, so electrical contact is made with a couple of short segments of copper tape. A little Blu Tack and glue hold it all together, and the result is stunning in its simplicity.

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Gameboy Glasses Exist And They’re For Video Gamers With Eye Strain

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Have you ever wondered what would happen if Nintendo released Gameboy Glasses for retro gamers? No, me neither, but the geeks over at Mutrics, have invented just that and we love it.

No they can’t play your best Gameboy Color games, but they can reduce eye strain, and connect to your smartphone to play audio through the built-in speakers at the back.

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This bin will sort your trash and recyclables automatically

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Often you might see a recycling bin next to a trash can, and notice that someone else has thrown their waste into the wrong container. To help with this conundrum, the team of Shalin Jain, Viraj Singh, Edward Chen, and Joshua Kim created a double-sided container that sorts things automatically.

Their device, dubbed “Splash,” takes a webcam image of the item presented to it, analyzes this with a Python script and the Azure Custom Vision API, and reports back to an Arduino Uno controller with its findings. Depending on the results, the Arduino then uses a driver board and motor to properly position a flap, directing refuse into in the correct bin.

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Creating an over-engineered random number generator Arduino shield

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Often when working with Arduino projects, you’ll need to generate a random number. There’s a random() function built into the IDE that works acceptably in many cases, but maker_ATOM wanted to take things to the next level, creating an “over engineered true random value generator.”

This device sits on top of an Arduino Uno as a shield, and features input from a floating pin seed value. It adds light input as a second seed value with an LDR, and ambient noise via a microphone as a third value. These are used to choose from an array of Pi digit values, which are also random, revealing outputs on its OLED display at the push of a button that would be exceedingly difficult to predict! 

More details on the project can be found in maker_ATOM’s Instructables post.

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Draw on bottles using a CNC plotter made from old printer rollers and other scraps

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To label used bottles that would otherwise go to waste, “tuenhidiy” created a CNC plotter that itself consists mostly of scraps!

The machine’s X and Z axes are formed out of a pair of old CD/DVD players, but instead of a traditional Y axis, it actuates two printer rollers to turn a bottle forwards or backwards. This allows the marking pen to be placed in just the right axial position, while still being very similar to a fully Cartesian (XYZ) plotter controls-wise.

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Robin Grosset Takes a RaspberryPi Pico’s RP2040 to New Heights with an Overclock to 420MHz

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Impressive overclock boosts the RP2040’s Arm cores to more than three times their official upper limit of 133MHz.

Engineer Robin Grosset has pushed a Raspberry Pi Pico and its RP2040 microcontroller to its limits, successfully overclocking the chip from its stock 133MHz to an impressive 420MHz.

Launched earlier this year the Raspberry Pi Pico development board plays host to Raspberry Pi’s first in-house silicon, the RP2040 microcontroller. Officially, the chip can be clocked at speeds of up to 133MHz — but unofficially the part can run considerably quicker, as is often required to get the best performance out of hacks like turning one into a fully-functional BBC Micro emulator.

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Detecting Pokemon on an Arduino using TinyML and TensorFlow

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Using colors to predict whether this is Pikachu or Bulbasaur…

The deployment environments of a machine learning (ML) model are changing. In recent years, we went from locally training models and running them on standalone scripts to deploying them in massive and specialized setups. However, the industry hasn’t been focusing only on large-scaled-productionized ML, but also its small, portable, and accessible counterpart—for machine learning has found a place in embedded systems.

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