With my MX-5 tucked up for winter I needed another activity to distract me from doing the really important chores round the house. So I dug out my old raspberry pi and have started the slow painful process of relearning how it works, what each gpio pin does and how to make an LED flash!
Anyone else here enjoy messing round with electronics?
More of an enthusiastic bungler than a nerd really but I have a couple of hifi related RPi projects. Mainly trying to achieve hi end streaming on the cheap. Pretty good success rate but some of my programmes are not the most stable for day to day use.
My other love is modifying vintage amps. I have some splendid results with the old British made Quad amps & dabble a bit with some of my old valve guitar amps.
I’ve been playing around with Ras Pis for a few years now
I use 2 (Pi3b and Pi Zero 2W) for PiHole, which blocks advertising on websites, games and some streaming platforms e.g. ITVX.
A Pi5 16Gb as a PiOS and Win11 workstation
A Pi5 8Gb as my main music player (moOde).
As well as Pi Zero W as a Proxy Server
I’ve a couple spare (Pi4 and Pi5) for other ‘fun ‘ projects.
They’re great machines and all of them together use less than 1/8 the power of my main PC Workstation.
I used to do bit of a tinkering, did electronics city and guilds in the 1980’s with the intention of becoming a TV /video service engineer.but never did that. Repaired Photocopiers for a living then I T for a copier company. Moved into X ray equipment for whilst. Had a couple of raspberry pi’s mostly for reto gaming and TV streaming. Recently got into watching other people repair stuff on YouTube mostly to reminisce about when my eyes and fingers worked well enough to repair PCBs.
Can’t even read a book these days. Fingers work well enough to play guitar still and that’s enough for me.
That’s the sole reason I have a Pi Zero.
I’ve always had shaky hands, tends to make a mess of trying to take photos and soldering is a bit iffy. Also I can get too engrossed in trying to do the soldering, as in not destroy what I’m working on so that one time, I was concentrating too much on the PCB that I picked up (grabbed with a closed hand) the soldering iron by the wrong end… (I had put it down on my heat proof mat as opposed to putting it back in the stand).
From an early age!
My mother had a box of 1930’s junk including parts for a few crystal sets (look up “cat’s whisker radio” and “coherer”) and some very high impedance headphones.
So the first radio programmes I ever listened to was long wave home service on a setup I cobbled together from the junk.
A complete radio was; a long aerial, ground connection, a tuned circuit of coil and variable capacitor, the cat’s whisker (predecessor of the germanium diode) and the headphones.
Two elements of skill are required; 1) find the sweet spot for the whisker of wire on the galena crystal where it could detect (rectify) the signal, 2) tune in.
It was a Catch 22 situation how to do one without the other? But this ten year old had not read the yet to be published novel, so it was merely a challenge, and amazingly satisfying once the trick to it was found, and then when the sound came though the heavy old Bakelite headphones.
Happy days.
Richard, you sound like a perfect candidate to fiddle with a raspberry pi.
Good Morning, I confess to holding a class A Radio transmitting license and working in the electronics industry until retirement. When not stopping the house falling down or digging the garden I construct/ repair radio equipment, preferably vintage (at least I can see the components) I guess that makes me a nerd!
As a very good friend might have said, “Does it taste good?”
I built a CP/M computer in 78-79, good old Z80, before the Spectrum or BBC micros appeared. It still works, better than my subsequent versions with 64180 (complicated DRAM refresh system inadequate).
The CP/M needed all the drivers etc to be created from scratch to complete the CBIOS, only the kernel (the CP/M bit from Digital Research) was pre-written.
A group of us designed our own circuit boards; choosing and laying out the components and tracks, making photo masters, printing, etching, drilling, soldering, debugging, etc
It had a massive amount of DRAM a whole 64Kbytes, of which 57K of TPA was available for the user.
On my version the 7K held the operating system, including memory mapped VDU, keyboard buffer, RS232 and printer parallel ports, real-time clock, DAC for audio playback, disk-drive interface (3", 2 x 5", 8") with all its buffering etc. All of it was written in a mixture of assembler and machine code.
I moved on from there over the years, and later at work built items for novel custom applications, all short run, designed from scratch and with embedded micros. All the code for these was in C or Assembler and written using appropriate cross-compilers on Sun or PC.
Fortunately I’ve never been forced into the straight-jacket purgatory of writing any code for an overweight PC!
Great to see a few who like to ‘tinker’ with stuff other than cars.
For my part I’ve experimented lots with raspberry pi and built a water level monitor for my rain water ■■■■, a temperature monitor for the hot tub, another temperature monitor to control a cooling fan and my last project was an autonomous toy car that sensed its surroundings and avoided obstacles using LiDAR sensors.
Now I’m getting back into it, I’m thinking of building something to deter pesky mice from eating the car!
My garage benefits from an ancient mains-powered ultrasonic “Victor Pestchaser” with two “speakers” at 90 degrees for a wider coverage.
It has a lead allowing it to be on the floor for the U/S to pass under the car. No trace of it on Amazon now so no link possible.
I can’t hear it, but one of the young delivery drivers hears it when he walks past the garage door, so it’s still working, and I guess it’s much louder inside!
Earlier in the year, built a time delay circuit to delay airhorn kicking in if I just tap the horn quickly, so I have polite and angry mode 
. Angry is holding the horn button down for more than about half a second.
Inspired, a Great idea!
Deffo a nerd 
I started in electronics in the mid seventies with the Babani book Practical Transistor Novelty Circuits and later computers with an Ohio Superboard with home-built RAM expansion (to 8K) and video doubling to 80x24 characters.
More recently I’ve been using ESP32 series (microcontroller with wi-fi capabilities) devices for various things including a desktop toy which shows location and magnitude of earthquakes around the world. These can be programmed with the Arduino IDE, but I use Annex RDS which is a very fully featured BASIC with inbuilt support for many peripheral chips.
I use a couple of Raspberry Pis around the house running my music library and 3D printer but never really picked up on the programming of them.
I’m currently putting together a simple circuit for footwell lighting for the MX-5 which includes a night running mode with reduced brightness and uses relay logic. How old school is that? 
Forgot to mention as it’s been on the back-burner for a while, I’m building a Pi powered retro arcade games console too. All constructed and about to load up the Pi with Recalbox, Batocera or one of the other emulator front-ends, not sure which one to use yet.
Love the footwell lighting idea. I just installed led lights in my footwell. I might need to copy your idea and program in some options.
relay logic. How old school is that?
Very !
Great projects though.
Relays are superb!
More are probably in use today than at any time before.
My introduction to them was a school project involving a set of relays, and these lit pictures of the farmer, his goose, the grain, and his fox(?), showing their progress across the river, and which item was eaten in red if he made a mistake.
To everyone’s surprise it actually worked. It was used at the end of year garden fete.
But there was a (lack of) speed problem on one essential transition, when for an instant timing errors suggested there might be more than three in the boat, so I managed to cheat it by slugging the red light response.
Modern electronics is full of “cheats” like that.
I’ve just resurrected my old r-pi to try and build a diagnostic reader for my mk2. Before I try to re-invent the wheel has anyone done this already?
A friend sent me this link
Might be some help
