The Rusty Rocket

Have you ever wanted to start your own radio station? For a number of years, I have. Even from an early age I've always been fascinated with radio and this is probably why so many of my projects are radio-based. My most recent project is my pop-up pirate radio box that's designed to serve two purposes. The first will be to stream my broadcasts online using Anchor ( https://anchor.fm ) and there are really easy to follow tutorials on YouTube if you wish to give it a go yourself. Secondly it will broadcast over FM with the help of a series of modified in-car FM transmitters (my video tutorial can be found here ) relaying the online stream of the broadcast at various locations. I have put together a short video on how the pop-up pirate box was built and what plans I have for it. Now let's rewind a little bit to understand how I got here. The pirate box uses a similar set up to a previous radio beacon project of mine. At the heart of the FM beacon lies the Microbit , w...

It was my son who gave me the idea for this. We’re rationing his gaming time and he wished he had a secret gaming setup that nobody knew about but him – The retro gaming picture frame idea was born. What if we made a picture frame hanging on the wall that displayed a photograph and somewhere in that photograph/artwork there was a screen cleverly concealed within it. Then on connecting a controller to the frame, the screen will come to life and allow you to play games on it. I got hold of a nice chunky picture frame from Ikea, this allowed me enough room to house the screen, Raspberry Pi and everything else. It’s running  Retropie  which will allow me to emulate games from a wide range of consoles, so I can see myself easily carrying on this idea with a series pictures depicting retro gaming through the ages.