In a classic episode of Star Trek, Spock attempts to get data from a tricorder while stuck in the 1930s using what he described as “stone knives and bearskins.” In reality, he used vacuum tubes, several large coils, and a Jacob’s ladder. Too bad they weren’t in the year 2017. Then Spock could have done like [Directive0] and used a Raspberry Pi instead. You can see the result in the video below.

The build starts with a Diamond Select Toys model tricorder. The Raspberry Pi, a battery, a TFT screen, and a Pi Sense Hat make up the bulk of the build.

Truthfully, this is one of those projects that isn’t rocket science (or perhaps warp core engineering) electronically. It is just stringing together some off-the-shelf modules with Python code. But the refitting of the toy tricorder is where the real story is and the video shows details of how it all goes together.

We have seen quite a few duplicates of the next generation tricorder. We’ve also seen devices that claim to be tricorders even though they don’t always look like any we’ve ever seen. We live in a world where hoverboards don’t hover and AI assistants aren’t really that smart. So I guess we can overlook that none of these tricorders can really do half of what the ones on Star Trek could do.