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It wasn’t an easy weekend for the rest of the world’s hackers and makers, that of the Bay Area Maker Faire. Open your social media accounts, and most of your acquaintances seemed to be there and having a great time, while the rest were doing the same at the Dayton Hamvention. Dreary televised sports just didn’t make up for it.

MCM Electronics had the Maker Faire booth next to that of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and since they needed both a project to show off and a statement item to draw in the crowds, they came up with the idea of a 10x scale reproduction of a Raspberry Pi above the booth. And since it was Maker Faire this was no mere model; instead it was a fully functional Raspberry Pi with working LEDs and GPIO pins.

The project started with a nearly faithful (We see no Wi-Fi antenna!) reproduction of a Raspberry Pi 3 in Adobe Illustrator. The circuit board was a piece of MDF with a layer of foam board on top of it with paths milled out for wiring and the real Pi which would power the model, hidden under the fake processor. The LEDs were wired into place, then the Illustrator graphics were printed into vinyl which was wrapped onto the board, leaving a very two-dimensional Pi.

The integrated circuits and connectors except for the GPIO pins were made using clever joinery with more foam board, then wrapped in more printed vinyl and attached to the PCB. A Pi camera was concealed above the Broadcom logo on the processor model, to take timelapse pictures of the event. This left one more component to complete, the GPIO pins which had to be functional and connected to the pins on the real Pi concealed in the model. These were made from aluminium rods, which were connected to a bundle of wires with some soldering trickery, before being wired to the Pi via the screw terminals on a Pi EZ-Connect HAT from Alchemy Power.

Is the challenge now on for a range of compatible super-HATs to mate with this new GPIO connector standard?

We previously covered the 2012 Maker Faire exhibit that inspired this huge Pi. The Arduino Grande was as you might well guess, a huge (6x scale) fully functional Arduino. In fact, the world seems rather short of working huge-scale models of single board computers, though we have featured one or two working small-scale computer models.

Thanks [Michael K Castor] for sharing his post with us.

Filed under: computer hacks