Martin O’Hanlon is usually to be seen hacking around with Minecraft Pi. This time, however, he’s taken one of his wife’s collection of broken useless rubbish vintage radios, a Raspberry Pi, an IQaudIO audio board and amplifier and some other small parts and given it a new lease of life. Details of his build can be found here and you can see a video of the final ‘product’ below:
Alex Eames has been busy experimenting with a way to replace an old low-res security camera at his house in Poland. He’s come up with a Pi-controlled, servo-positioned camera that will accept commands over Twitter. The core of the project is a RasPiO Duino board that is connected to an old Raspberry Pi Model B and has an onboard light-dependent resistor and temperature sensor. The board communicates with the Pi over serial and sends these readings back, while at the same time accepting commands (from the Twitter feed) from the Pi to control the servos to position the camera. It’s very neat and tidy, and is an excellent extension on Alex’s previous blog posts working with the Twitter API. And, oh yeah, it can upload photos and videos to Dropbox in addition to tweeting a photo via a cron job (scheduled task). Read more here.
Karl Herrick has taken a PIR sensor and hooked it up to his Pi. He’s then used a variety of different software including the Cylon.js framework and Node.js to do the detection and provide a web interface for the sensor. It’s an interesting example of using lots of different technology to bring about a result. You can find his code here. Take a look here for more details.
Ismail Uddin over at Science Exposure has created a device that detects movement and then dispenses water. He’s taken a Raspberry Pi, a RaspiRobot board, a peristaltic pump and an SR-04 ultrasonic rangefinder module and put them together. His code and write-up is available on the Science Exposure blog – Read more here.
Richard Hayler (who has previously done very many cool things with a Pi) has developed his own “kite mapping” rig using a Raspberry Pi. He’s taken a model A+, a camera module, an Xtrinsic Sensor board and a ProtoCam prototyping board, meshed them together and come up with a slightly unwieldy, but very effective flying photography station. You can read more and see more of the results here. Here’s one of his shots:
Harrison Bradley, Jeff Bertel and Marc Welsh studied on the Advanced Mechatronics course at Georgia Tech. They’ve created an apparatus which takes in a piece of waste and then automatically sorts it depending on what the object is identified as: cans to the left, bottles to the right, landfill to the centre. It is currently a prototype but they have a patent pending.
They decided to go with ‘machine vision’ as their approach. A photograph is taken and then fed back to a Raspberry Pi for processing. They wrote some AI software which could be “taught” what objects were which. The system has an integrated 10-inch touchscreen monitor and a program running on the Raspberry Pi to display statistics and status data.
Once the waste is identified, the bin moves to the correct slot and the waste is deposited in the correct sorting container. This was done using stepper motors controlled by an Arduino Mega. They have implemented various safety features using solenoids to stop, for example, anyone putting their hand through the hatch while the mechanism was moving.
Much cheesey music abounds in this promotional video for the invention.
