Tooth fairy conduit system with a vacuum and a Raspberry Pi

toothfairy

Jeff Highsmith, who previously created the wonderful Mission Control Desk and bedroom Apollo Mission has been hard at work again. This time he’s installed a hatch in each of his children’s bedrooms which give access to a pair of tubes into which they can put their fallen-out teeth. A vacuum cleaner in the loft is then controlled by a Raspberry Pi, which is itself triggered using an iPhone app. The vacuum sucks the capsule containing the tube up and away to the tooth fairy’s magical tree house. It’s a great piece of work and just shows what you can do if you’ve got imagination and time to spend. Below is a video of the project in action. Thanks to the Raspberry Pi Foundation for spotting this one which first appeared back in September 2013 on Make.

Raspberry Pi add-on board RasPiO Duino gets new PWM video

duino pwm

Alex Eames has been busy creating a new video for owners of the excellent RasPiO Duino board. This one takes you through experiments you can do with the PWM pins on the Duino and helps you to create a colour-fading ball display using a ping-pong ball as a diffuser. You can take a look at the video here. You can get hold of the Duino from the rasp.io website or from The Pi Hut for about £12.

Pigeon racers unite – photo-finish photographs with the Raspberry Pi

Robert Threet is a pigeon racer from Evansville, Indiana. He has added to the high-tech equipment used for recording pigeon arrivals (RFID tags – very swish) – a Raspberry Pi with a motion detector that triggers the attached Pi camera to take a photograph. Read more about Robert and his efforts over on the Raspberry Pi Foundation blog.

Photo credit: Robert Threet

Out for the count

Hi all.

Apologies for the lack of blog posts over the last few days. I was struck down with food poisoning on Monday afternoon and have been out of commission since then. I’m hoping to start doing plenty of blog posts come the weekend, but I should certainly be okay again by Monday.

Reinvigorating a vintage radio with a Raspberry Pi

Gordon from IQAudIO has done a bang-up job at restoring his late grandmother’s vintage Roberts radio. He’s used one of IQAudIO’s own boards, the Pi-DigiAMP+ and a pair of small speakers to output music from a variety of online sources via Shairport Sync software (which is an AirTunes emulator). It really is a labour of love and he’s not done yet! Read more about the project over on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s blog.