YouTube streaming typically involves a camera with an HDMI output, a USB3 HDMI digitiser, and a suitably beefy PC to run it all. It’s quite a process, and for [Coreymillia], more complex than it needs to be. He’s come up with something simpler, a dedicated self-contained streaming rig using a Raspberry Pi 4.
As you might expect it uses the Raspberry Pi HQ camera at the optical end, but it’s the software surrounding it that transforms it from a mere camera into a streaming rig. There’s a web based user interface, but perhaps more interesting are the companion dashboard peripherals. A Raspberry Pi or an ESP32 Cheap Yellow Display can both serve as a small in-view dashboard and controller.
We know from experience that a stream can be a difficult thing to get right even with high-end hardware, and we’re interested to see this standalone device allowing , we hope, an easier way to do it. If you’re a streamer we’re guessing you’ll be taking a closer look. Even so, this is surprisingly, not the simplest Raspberry Pi based streaming device we’ve seen.
Something happened this morning which will have been unnoticed by many, but which for a certain breed of radio enthusiast marks the end of an era. The BBC stopped broadcasting Radio 4 on their 198 kHz Long Wave frequency, ending over a century of transmission in the band. For now the transmitter carries a recorded message telling listeners that the service has ended, but it’s expected that this will soon be turned off.
The main 198kHz BBC transmitter, at Droitwich. Bob Nienhuis, Public domain.
American readers may be unfamiliar with Long Wave as it’s a band not allocated in their region. Covering 153 to 279 kHz, it’s a relic from the earliest days of high-power broadcasting in the 1920s, used because of the enormous distances that could be covered with its lower frequencies. The main long wave transmitter for the BBC is at Droitwich, and its demise comes because there are no more spares for its high-power transmitter tubes. It joins many Medium Wave, or AM, as it is commonly known, stations in leaving the airwaves, as increased interference from switch mode electronics and the availability of higher quality alternatives took away their listeners. It’s fair to say that there will be few whose lives are inconvenienced by the switch-off in 2026, but it’s worth taking a moment to remember.
The first BBC Long Wave transmissions in the mid-1920s were on a 1600 metre wavelength, or 187.5 kHz. A series of international agreements saw them move to 193 kHz, and then 200 KHz or 1500 metres in 1934. They stayed on that frequency until another shift down 2 KHz to 198 kHz in 1988. They were atomic-controlled, and thus usable as a frequency standard. The programming started with station names redolent of their era, first the BBC National Service, then the Light Programme you’ll see on the dial in the header image, and finally the more modern-sounding Radio 4. A famous BBC programme tied to Long Wave is the Shipping Forecast, a weather bulletin for deep-sea fishermen which became cult listening on land and now features on FM and digital services too, and there’s even a probably-apocryphal tale that British nuclear submarine captains would once use its presence or absence to judge whether nuclear war had occurred.
In an Oxfordshire farmhouse not far short of fifty years ago, a young child who would later become a Hackaday writer heard a radio show like nothing before, which made an impression that continues to this day. The show was one of the earliest airings of the original Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy radio series, through a 1970s ITT radio tuned to BBC Radio 4 on (then) 200 kHz Long Wave. So long, Droitwich, and thanks for all the fish.
The smart TV is a fixture in most houses, variously an entertainment portal, corporate data gathering tool, or sometimes an outright spy. It’s a nice monitor with a computer built in, so can that computer be released to do something else? It’s a question [Xen’on] is answering, on an Android-based TV.
The guide is not too different from many others relating to Android phones, with a few quirks. An Android Debug Bridge (ADB) connection is established, root access is gained using Shizuku, and then it’s a case of installing a more conventional Linux front end with the Openbox window manager through Termux. There are some TV-specific things to do with handling power cycles, but the TV is now a usable Linux box.
It’s always good to see someone retrieve the Linux underneath a locked-down device, but the system spec tells the real story. By the looks of things this TV is a few years old as it had an Android version that’s a bit long in the tooth, and thus it also packs an aged version 4.x kernel. Couple that with a more seat-of-your-pants experience compared to a regular distro where many of the annoyances are taken care of, this isn’t an easy route to a trouble free desktop. Instead it has a lot of potential for making the TV what it was intend to be, an entertainment device. Merely one that gives much more software freedom.
An old-style PC BIOS served the function of a bootloader in loading the operating system kernel, and of an API in providing a set of standard system calls through which software could interact with the hardware. Though it as been long-ago superseded by operating system level calls and UEFI bootloaders, it was a simple and easy-to-understand firmware for the PCs of the day.
Microcontrollers usually don’t have anything quite like a BIOS because their software is more often compiled as-is without the need for one. But here’s [Rompass] who has bucked that trend, with a BIOS for the ESP32-C6.
Of course this isn’t the PC BIOS we all know, and you’ll not be running DOS on it. Instead it’s a subsystem that serves the purposes outlined above and provides an environment for dynamically loaded executables from RAM rather than an operating system kernel. The executables are compiled in the normal way for the ESP32, and can be loaded over the network if necessary.
We don’t know how popular a firmware like this one will become, but for us it’s symptomatic of how the line between a microcontroller and a microprocessor is becoming blurred. The next few years are going to continue this trend, as inexpensive microcontroller application processors such as the C6’s P4 bigger brother move into the mainstream.
The proposed new law will involve an age restriction policed through online ID verification, something which will not be limited to the young, as every British adult will also have to show ID to access large parts of the Internet.
There is little in the way of information about how this unprecedented invasion of privacy will be implemented, however we expect that it will be left to the lax security measures of a range of lowest-bidder third party identity verification services. The resulting database will become a very rich target indeed.
The EFF pull no punches in warning of the harms these measures will bring upon those it seeks to protect. Far from “Giving under-16s their childhood back” as it is being promoted, they warn that it will deprive them of access to community, friends, and distant family, as well as educational content that could be vital for them.
If it works at all. Certainly he more technically minded youth will put their efforts into the world of computer networking. A VPN ban is reportedly in the works, so a whole generation of future software developers and IT specialists will get their start running software to get round this on their Raspberry Pi.
By now we’re all used to single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi Zero, but it’s likely we’ve all been frustrated at times by the number of support components required to use one. This becomes ever more annoying out in the field away from a handy HDMI, USB desktop, and power supply.
The Edgeberry Zero is an attempt to tackle this by mating a Raspberry Pi Zero with a PCB holding a robust power supply and interface connector, all together in a case. better still it comes with Edgeberry Hub, a software management interface.
It appears to be a commercially available product, but it’s Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) certified and everything is available in a GitHub repository. Looking at it from a Hackaday perspective it’s hardly the first power supply support board we’ve seen for a Pi, but its approach of making its own expansion module format is an interesting choice. To us they are reminiscent of Game Boy cartridges in the way they slide into a slot in the case.
We like the general idea behind the Edgeberry Zero, but whether it offers enough differentiation from packaging up a Zero with cables and duct tape is up to you.
If you’ve ever taken a close look at a vacuum tube, you’ll have seen the seals around the pins that keep everything air-tight while providing the the device’s electrical contacts. As [maurycyz] finds out, it’s not an easy process to get right.
The problem is one of both chemistry and thermal expansion, as while a good seal can be made between glass and red copper oxide, it remains very difficult indeed to stop the glass cracking on cooldown due to differing thermal expansion properties. We’re led through a variety of experiments including surface treatments and flattening the metal to a sheet, with varying pros and cons. The most successful seal on the page comes from very thin tungsten wire, though hardly the most practical conductor for a vacuum tube.
It’s a fascinating investigation for the casual reader, taking them into the properties of metal-glass bonds and the difficulties involved in making them. We have even more respect for the people who make their own tubes after reading it.
