It’s really amazing how the world of semiconductors has evolved, especially with regard to the miniaturization of components and today you can find fully miniaturized computers in the most unexpected places. The last? They managed to place a Raspberry Pi Zero W in the case of an old music cassette.
It’s been a long time since we used cassettes to listen to our music and even more so if we talk about computers. Moreover, the new generations have not used this medium. Let’s not forget that it has been more than two decades since the pocket MP3 players that replaced the Walkman were standardized and since then they have ceased to be used by the majority of the population.
At the same time, we cannot forget the advances that enable increasingly complex chips. This not only allows them to get smaller and smaller, but also makes them smaller and smaller. So now we find complete computers in things like a wristwatch or even a headset. There is even a large community that uses boards like Arduino and Raspberry Pi to create hobbies and the last one honestly caught our attention a lot.
A Raspberry Pi in a Cassette
More specifically, it is a R aspberry Pi Zero W
The idea was realized by Stuart Brand who, in an interview with the Magazine MagPi He explained what his plan was. His idea, no more and no less, was to create a system that would let you play classic ZX Spectrum games from an emulator. From the moment we talk about one of the simplest 8-bit computers of this generation at the hardware level. So there’s no problem for it to be emulated by something as modest as a Raspberry Pi Zero W inside a cassette. However, as we mentioned earlier, its creation came with some reductions.
The first of these was that the original board had to be cut in order for the Raspberry Pi to fit into the cassette. which caused the loss of some GPIO external peripheral interface pins. In any case, it is not a loss if we take into account what is the main utility of this mod, according to its creator. Which is none other than being able to enjoy the classic British microcomputer again which was also so popular in our lands. In addition to making it much better, since it is able to run the emulator in less than 16 seconds.
