The Pinecil is a very handy and affordable USB-C powered soldering iron (running on open firmware!) with an OLED monochrome display. This soldering iron is made by PINE64, and is delivered in nice carton boxes. But once you start using it, you quickly need another way to keep the different tips at hand.

As part of the Pi4J project, we created an example game with JavaFX and FXGL that uses an Arcade kit with a Joystick and big push buttons. The test setup for this project was kicking around my desk, so that was the perfect victim for my next 3D printing project…

After my first 3D-printing experiment “A 3D printed multi-functional tripod (well actually quadpod)”, I wanted to clean-up my desk. I have a lot of Raspberry Pi boards lying around for various test projects, and that was one of the quick-wins to organize better.

The power of technology is something that keeps amazing me every day. The number of things you can do with some small electronic components and a bit of programming is overwhelming. But 3D printing is really on top of my “WOW AMAZING” list. As I work in a company building fully 3D-printed robots (EEVE), I felt I had to investigate some budget and time into this whole new world.

As I wrote in my previous post “Using a Raspberry Pi as HDMI camera”, you can build your own inexpensive HDMI-camera with a Raspberry Pi Zero and a camera module.

TL;DR; Yes, you can build your own Raspberry Pi HQ camera to use as an HDMI source for the ATEM Mini Looking for an affordable camera with HDMI output? Build one yourself with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2!

In the previous two posts in this series, we used Java on the Raspberry Pi mini-computer to send sensor data to HiveMQ Cloud, and visualize it on a dashboard.

In the previous post we started our discovery of HiveMQ Cloud with Java on the Raspberry Pi. We created an application to send measurements of various sensors to the HiveMQ Cloud MQTT broker. Using an online websocket client we verified the transition of the messages, and could see the data being published to this online message queue.

A few years ago I did my first experiments with an MQTT server (Mosquitto) running on a Raspberry Pi to connect an Arduino and Raspberry Pi for the drumbooth of my son. The full process is described in my book “Getting Started with Java on the Raspberry Pi”.

The Raspberry Pi in combination with an inexpensive touch screen, makes a perfect controller for a machine or game console. Let’s see how we can use Java and JavaFX to build a test application which also communicates with the pins of the Raspberry Pi to control a LED. We have done something before already in the post “Light Up your Christmas Tree with Java and Raspberry Pi”, so what’s new?