Reddit user oculiaeternam took the (non-functioning) guts out of a 1984 Bentley portable TV, and replaced them with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, a 5-inch LCD screen, a new speaker, and a single-channel amplifier. The result is a portable TV with a load of spare room inside the case, with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W inside.
There are a few things to note here. The first is that the original volume control is now attached to the amplifier, so the form of the original device follows the function of the new device. The second is that the LCD screen is ever so slightly a different aspect ratio than the original broadcast episodes of The Simpsons, so the visual joke about Duff Lite and regular Duff beer coming from the same tanks in the brewery won’t work.
The other thing that caught our eye with this build is that it uses ChatGPT for something more useful than rubbish AI art: there’s a script running which decides which episode to play next, which depending on the prompt (The Simpsons and Futurama can be streamed from Disney+), may be as good a way as any to get randomness on a computer.
Ultimate Lego 3D printer
Before Raspberry Pi, before Arduino, there was Lego Mindstorms. Mindstorms was an early attempt at putting physical computing into the hands of Lego aficionados, and while it was relatively expensive and relatively fiddly to use, it retains a core of dedicated fans who love that you can build computerised robots out of original Lego parts that were first released in the late 1990s.
This 3D printer from the Creative Mindstorms YouTube channel is the latest Mindstorms build we’ve seen that’s really impressed us. It uses Lego Mindstorms components, including four motors, and a load of Lego bricks to form an actual, working 3D printer. There’s a 3D printer pen to produce the hot plastic rather than an extruder, but that could change in a later iteration. What’s important here is that the Lego setup can print 3D models just like any other printer. It’s not as neat as a Prusa XL, but after you’ve built one of these you’ll know a lot more about how a 3D printer works.
