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• Hot stuff, and a hiatus

  Rob Vincent • 06/19/2015 at 04:00 • 0 comments

  Not much of an update, I'm afraid; I'm moving out of my apartment, so the goodies are packed away until I find a new place. Wish me luck! (And hey, if you know anyone renting out a room in New York City...)

  The one bit of additional info I do have to report comes from before I had to pack up my workbench: upon running this for any extended length of time, the screen gets hotter and hotter until it goes out. I'll have to address this somehow; either finding a way to run the screen on less power, and/or heat-sinking it somehow.

  I look forward to being able to work on this again; rest assured, this is not abandoned. I will pick it up again ASAP, I will finish it, and it will be awesome.
  

• Pi time!

  Rob Vincent • 04/29/2015 at 06:47 • 3 comments

  Now that we've disassembled the toy tricorder, and my Adafruit order has arrived, we're going to have to do some modding to what's left of the tricorder to fit the hardware we want to cram into it.

  Let's take a closer look at said hardware.

  • Raspberry Pi Model B+ - I chose the B+ over the more powerful Pi 2. I don't think I'm going to be pushing this gadget to do multi-core-level work, but we still get the extra GPIO pins and improved power-efficiency. While my primary goal is just to get a Pi running in the tricorder shell, I think if we do end up adding sensors to this, we'll need all the pins and battery power we can get.
  • 2.5" diagonal TFT television - The find that put me over the edge toward finally starting this project, after having it in the back of my mind for a long time, was this screen which happens to be just about the same size as the simulated screen in the toy. I knew it'd be a distinct possibility of fitting this perfectly in place of the toy's screen. Plus, though this is specced at a 6V minimum, it seems to do just fine connected to the Pi's 5V pin.
  • Misc - I have a cellphone recharger I'll be using as a battery, and a wireless handheld keyboard/mouse combo.

  Here's the hardware connected up and running. The USB dongle you see is the receiver for the keyboard.

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• Toy Tricorder breakdown

  Rob Vincent • 04/29/2015 at 04:42 • 0 comments

  Let's pull this toy apart! Read more »

• Starting out

  Rob Vincent • 04/25/2015 at 02:16 • 0 comments

  At the moment, the one component for this project I have handy is the toy tricorder itself.
  

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