Room 7609

You know what it’s like – so many Raspberry Pis at home… what started with a genuinely simple question: “how many Raspberry Pis on the home LAN are actually powered on right now?”

I last gave up on my Psion/EPOC32 habit sometime in 2003/4 when I sold my Psion Revo (that I was using with an Ericsson T28s mobile phone and its iRDA link to get it online) and went over to a Sony Ericsson P800 all-in-one solution.

I’ve previously talked about why I think 1981 was a pivotal year for UK pop music – and a huge part of that is down to what happened during the two years previous, in a tiny World War 2-themed basement club in Covent Garden, London known as “The Blitz”.

So the title really should be a bit longer: “QR codes on a laptop from 1989 with 256k RAM and no native graphics support” – but that doesn’t sound quite so snappy The laptop in question is my Psion MC400 – a marvel of engineering and industrial design, co…

I was instantly drawn to this little cutie as soon as I read this article – a Pi Zero powered tiny handheld with a super-crisp Sharp 400 x 240 2.7″ LCD, LoRa module & 56-button keypad… as soon it was announced in Sep 2022 on their crowd-supply page that t…

Growing up as a geeky teenager in the 1980s I fondly remember the “Tandy Battery club” from that era – a loss-leader from the Tandy (UK) or Radio Shack (US) chain that allowed customers to claim 1 free red “Radio Shack” branded battery every month.

I saw this advertised somewhere online and instantly fell in love with it.

My take on the old “re-purposing a dead Psion 5’s keyboard as a USB keyboard” (made from a box of dead Psions from eBay) (Not my first retro keyboard –> USB project) Psion 5 keyboard now doing USB keyboard duty!

I’ve been thinking of expanding my collection of repurposed Psion keyboards for a while now… A few years ago I converted an old mechanical Cherry keyboard from the Psion MC400 to USB and I’d heard of other successful projects that had used the Psion series

(following on from some DIY CyberDeck-ness from Nov 2022) So my Clockworkpi.com uConsole arrived earlier this month – I went for the RPi-CM4-lite version to keep the costs down as I already have spare CM4s lying around.

So, a few years after my initial post https://zedstarr.com/2021/12/08/emulating-the-psion-mc400/ contemplating the feasibility of emulating the Psion MC400 laptop from 1989 – the latest MAME release 0.273 (31/12/2024) finally contains (multiple versions of

Asking the question: does it meet BS 7671 (the 18th Edition IET Wiring Regulations)?

So I’ve made a few changes from my initial build of my adjunct/sidecar Pi to get some connectivity into my Psion MC400 – now running on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W in a flirc case with Zero4U 4-port USB hub underneath and pimoroni inky pHAT e-ink display on to…

As I sit here writing this I just thought to myself “I wonder how many Raspberry Pis* are in use here in this room, right now…?”

Sounds familiar?

9 years after I first used my trusty ASUS zenbook ux303 it’s still just about going; the keyboard’s getting flaky-er (lots of keys on the keyboard work intermittently) and of course the hinge repair (drill-through-the-lid) has kept the case mechanically a…

I’ve been testing PTP (Precision Time Protocol) support in a few Raspberry Pis at home and thought “why not use the UTC-traceable 1 Pulse-per-second (1PPS) output from my GPS breakout-board to drive a relay that flashes some Christmas tree lights?”