Hi everyone.
I’ve just given a talk on getting into robotics at the Preston Raspberry Jam and I promised I would publish the notes and slides. They’re both PDFs and should, if I’ve done it right (!), include plenty of links to resources, videos etc. So, without further ado:
Feel free to use them as a basis for your own talk/robotics.
Hi folks. Just thought I’d take a couple of shots with the new Raspberry Pi camera. These are with the 16mm lens that I prefer (the 6mm lens being a little bit more fiddly to focus!). The subject matter’s not stellar, but you can see the high quality of the pictures okay and they’re in focus as near as I can tell!
Click to get the huuuuuuge versions.
A new camera module is released today with a 12.3-megapixel lens. The camera, which retails for $50 (yes, yes, dollars?! etc etc – it’s where the parts come from that determines the price, same as the Pi) comes with support for C and CS lenses and uses a Sony IMX477 sensor to produce crystal-clear images. Approved resellers will be selling compatible lenses: a 6 mm CS‑mount lens at $25, and a very shiny 16 mm C-mount lens priced at $50.
Buying the camera is easy enough – just use one of the Approved Resellers like Pimoroni or The Pi Hut then pick up a lens or two from them as well (The Pi Hut here and Pimoroni here).
I had a play with the camera a couple of months ago – it’s a really lovely piece of kit. It’s even got a tripod screw mount on the bottom to give you stability, which you’ll need to really take advantage of larger lenses.
Also out today is a new Camera Guide from Raspberry Pi Press which is available for £10 (or you can grab a PDF for free) covering both the new and existing camera modules and how to use them most effectively.
You can see a launch video for the camera itself below:
Hi everybody. I bought this case the other day for my media centre Raspberry Pi running downstairs in the lounge. The previous case (one of those all-metal all-heatsink jobbies) looked a bit out-of-place, so I decided to go for the Argon ONE as I’d heard a lot about it. TL;DR – just buy it if you want a brilliant case for your Pi.
At £25, this is one of the more expensive cases you can buy, but I was very impressed. It comes well-wrapped in a cardboard box and consists of:
All of the parts are very well-made/moulded – you can see and feel the reason why it is more expensive than other cases.
Assembly is simple. You plug the daughter board into the Pi’s HDMI and audio ports – this brings all the ports you associate with the Pi round to one side of the case. You apply the heat transferrance pads to the Raspberry Pi (thus allowing the whole of the top of the case, which is metal, to act as a heatsink).
The assembly (Pi plus board) then plugs into a GPIO header inside the main body of the case. You use the included screws to make sure it is firmly held in place (although, frankly, the Pi is tight enough that you don’t need to bother!) and then the bottom plate is screwed on using a different set of screws.
Once assembled, you can immediately see the special features of the case. All the ports are on the ‘back side’ as well as a power button. This button can be programmed to do different functions and you can download a script from the Argon site that will program it to safely shutdown the Pi.
Another feature that I haven’t mentioned in full is that there is a small 5V fan inside the case which will cool the Pi 4 down. There are plenty of vent holes in the case, so overheating should not be a problem. A script, which is downloadable, controls the fan speed depending on CPU temperature.
The final special feature is quite brilliant. You might think from the first picture that this is a ‘sealed unit’ useful only for media centres. You would be wrong. Full access to the GPIO pins is available by lifting off a metal plate which is magnetically held in place:
The ports are all labelled and, to add to the joy, the exposed GPIO pins are colour-coded to aid in pin-navigation! It really is a lovely feature which means that you can use it as a hacking platform as well as a “nice box to hold your media center Pi in”.
I thoroughly recommend this case if you can afford it. It is solid, well-made and has a host of features that are difficult to beat.
You can buy the case from The Pi Hut for £25 plus postage. (As of 23/4, it is sold out, but Jamie at the Hut says that they are getting hundreds in very soon!)
Disaster Zone!
For those of you who don’t already know, we have decided to postpone Pi Wars 2020 for the time being due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The full statement can be read here.
A group of researches at Northwestern University in Illinois, USA have used 100 Raspberry Pis on a small robot chassis to develop swarm behaviour. Without centralised control, these robots form shapes by communicating with each other. The robots don’t “care” which robot is in which position, but they all have the same goal so they can autonomously decide to swap positions or destinations depending on their relative positions and direction of travel. Due to the distributed nature of the movement algorithm, the researchers are confident that the robots will always end up defining the correct shape, without deadlocks. As far as they know, this algorithm is unique in its approach and the first to be able to do the task without getting in a pickle!
The robots (known as Coachbots) look like they use either 3B+ Raspberry Pis or version 4s, as they have the heat spreader covering over the CPU. Project lead Mike Rubenstein was interviewed by email by the IEEE for Spectrum and you can read more there.
You can see a video of the robots in action below. Thanks to Steampunk_prof for noticing this one and tweeting it.
