TECH

The cassette tape of the 21st century

Those who are old enough may still have audio tapes lying around, which are of little use today. The good news is that, over time, its case can be used to house the interior of the Raspberry Pi Zero, in addition to other components such as a small battery, battery charging plate and display.
This is exactly what Martin Mander did with his Cassette Pi IoT scrolling project, which receives notifications through the IFTTT service and displays them as scrolling text on a small screen connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero W.
Here is a detailed list of the components used in this project:
-Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless;
-Pimoroni LiPo SHIM LiPo / LiIon power supply adapter for Raspberry Pi cards;
-Adafruit Micro Lipo charger plate with micro USB port;
-Matrix Pimoroni 11 × 7 LED;
-Lithium polymer battery with a capacity of 150 mAh;
-Audio cassette;
-DPDT slide switch;
-Vibromotor.

Once the build is complete, you can install the Raspberry Pi OS on a microSD and run a Python script that will receive IoT notifications from the If This Then That (IFTTT) service to Pi0 through the Adafruit.IO channel. When receiving messages, the cassette vibrates and the text changes on the LED display. If desired, you can connect to such a cassette, for example, Twitter notifications. The script can be found on Github and the instructions are on Hackster.io. It should be noted that, in this project, the battery charge is sufficient for only one hour in duration. Several commentators noted that replacing the Raspberry Pi Zero card with a smaller one like the ESP8266 or ESP32 like the Wemos D1 Mini will reduce power consumption and use a larger battery, while the script can still be run using MicroPython.
Martin Mander also uploaded a video to his Old Tech YouTube channel, New Specs - he first describes the Cassette Pi IoT scrolling project and then shows how it was created.

AVnews