Groovejolo
Raspberry Pi-augmented toy keyboards turned into powerful grooveboxes with Pure Data

During the course of a days-long conversation, back in 2019, with a friend about grooveboxes like Teenage Engineering's OP-1 and Critter & Guitari's Organelle, I came across a flea market in Steglitz, here in Berlin, where I found an old Casio SA-10 keyboard, which I managed to haggle the price down to 5€. Then, arriving home, it clicked: I could use Pure Data with one (of the not so few) Raspberry Pi boards that I collected, and through some electronics interfacing I could stuff that Pi inside the keyboard.

This series of project logs will cronicle the saga of this project, that also started including other acquired (and subsequently hacked and pure-data-ified) toy keyboards.

• <To be filled up, sorry for the inconvenience!>

LED Face Mask
Voice-reactive interactive LED face mask with BLE connectivity

As an effect of the COVID-19 pandemic that evolved throughout 2020, we all started using facemasks to protect each other from contamination. But as it gets harder to convey expression with a mask on, I started developing this mask (which was definitely not inspired by helmets worn by the Daft Punk duo _*sarcasm*) to give others some proxy visualization of my emotional state.

I'm using the powerful and surprisingly energy-efficient ESP32 as a basis for this project, running with a Li-Poly battery with a charger/voltage converter module that I adapted to use USB power to charge. I also managed to make it display looped animations from .gif formatted images (try finding - or even making - 32x8 pixel sized animations...) and scrolling text (with accents and everything), and these visualizations can be switched with a Bluetooth Low Energy serial port app, which is usually readily available on major mobile app stores for free.

This series of project logs will cronicle the saga of this project.

• <To be filled up, sorry for the inconvenience!>

Portfolio Pi
Upgrading an Atari Portfolio with a Rapsberry Pi 3 A+

So, there's this portable computer from the early 90's, the Atari Portfolio - it's a cozy little machine, that even made a cameo on one of the Terminator movies as the ATM-hacking machine - and a few years ago I bought one at a flea market here in Berlin. When I tested the machine, the LCD display was kind of messed up, and I became terribly aware that the machine lacked any built-in storage, relying on either keeping data in RAM (thus having it wiped whenever batteries got empty) or using specific low capacity (for nowadays standards) memory cards.

Well, the display was already a candidate for replacement, so I started measuring some things, and came up with an idea: what if I replaced its guts with a Raspberry Pi? A Pi Zero would fit in there with room to spare, and a Pi 3 A+ looked promising with the size of the board. A "dead" Macbook Pro battery provided a set of surprisingly healthy 3.7V Li-Poly cells to use in more projects, and a single cell fit snugly inside the Portfolio chassis (upon removal of a few plastic posts), along with the charger circuit with a DC-DC boost converter up to 5V. Slap a small MIPI display and we're in business.

This series of project logs will cronicle the saga of this project.

• <To be filled up, sorry for the inconvenience!>