I have a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie hooked up to a television. It’s powered from a USB port on the TV, which is convenient, but it means that whenever we shut off the TV we’re pulling the plug on the Pi. While there haven’t been any problems so far, this is a classic recipe for filesystem problems or data loss at some point. I started looking into UPS options to alleviate this issue.

The Pi Zero (and Zero W) have support for acting as a USB gadget: that means that they can be configured to act as a USB device – like a serial port, an ethernet interface, a mass storage device, etc. There are two different ways of configuring this support. The first only allows you to configure a single type of gadget at a time, and boils down to: Enable the dwc2 overlay in /boot/config.

Recent releases of Raspbian have adopted the use of dhcpcd to manage both dynamic and static interface configuration. If you would prefer to use the traditional /etc/network/interfaces mechanism instead, follow these steps. First, disable dhcpcd and wpa_supplicant. systemctl disable –now dhdpcd wpa_supplicant You will need a wpa_supplicant configuration for wlan0 in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant-wlan0.conf. If you already have an appropriate configuration in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, you can just symlink the file: cd /etc/wpa_supplicant ln -s wpa_supplicant.

The DS18B20 is a popular temperature sensor that uses the 1-Wire protocol for communication. Recent versions of the Linux kernel include a kernel driver for this protocol, making it relatively convenient to connect one or more of these devices to a Raspberry Pi or similar device. 1-Wire devices can be daisy chained, so it is possible to connect several devices to your Pi using only a single GPIO pin, and you’ll find many articles out there that describe how to do so.

I was recently working on a project in which I wanted to drive a simple piezo buzzer attached to a GPIO pin on a Raspberry Pi. I was already using the RPi.GPIO module in my project so that seemed like a logical place to start, but I ran into a few issues. You drive a piezo buzzer by generating a PWM signal with the appropriate frequency. The RPi.GPIO module implements PWM via software, which is tricky on a non-realtime system.