Events, Raspberry Jams

Milton Keynes Raspberry Jam – 19th January – So, you got a Pi for Christmas… what next?

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Did Santa bring you something small, square-ish and green? Are you not sure what to do next? Need some inspiration? Want to see what others get up to with their Raspberry Pis? Come along to the Milton Keynes Raspberry Jam on 19th January and find out more.

The MK Jam is going back to basics for the first event of 2019 which runs from 10am-1pm at the National Museum of Computing on the Bletchley Park site. Makers and tinkers, bring along projects that won’t scare newbies away. Whether it’s playing with LEDs or simple robotics, show us something from when you were getting started. If you could supply details of how others can make the project too, that would be awesome.

You can get free tickets from here.

Industry, Robotics

Revitalising an old vending machine with a Raspberry Pi

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Grant Gibson led a team over at Bright Signals which was tasked by a client with creating a prototype vending machine which would incorporate touchscreen product selection and NFC payment tokens.

A single AC motor powered various mechanisms to vend cans, and that part worked, but it was impossible to test it fully due to the absence of one of the circuit boards.

Due to the requirement for NFC payment, Gibson and his team decided to drop all the electronics currently in the machine and replace them with a Raspberry Pi and some relays. A series of microswitches determined whether a can slot was empty or ready and these were hooked up to the Raspberry Pi to detect the machine’s state. A Python script was written to read the machine state and a simple inventory system allowed the mechanism to switch over to a different ‘column’ of cans if it detected that a column was empty.

You can read a bit more about it over on Grant’s blog.

Camera module, Making, Transport, Video

Learn how to make a simple Raspberry Pi bike dashcam with RasPi.TV

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Alex Eames has been doing a lot of cycling recently as part of a keep-fit regime, and just for fun. He’s decided to make himself a bike dashcam. The set-up will include a Pi 3A+ at the front and a Zero at the back. As he explains it:

The front Pi will act as a wireless access point and the rear Pi will connect to it. Both Pis will be set up to record video while powered up. The rear Pi will also stream its video to port 8090. The front Pi will grab that stream and display it, probably using vlc, on the screen so I can see what’s behind me. This is just the day 1 design ‘specification’ in my head. No plan survives contact with the enemy, so you can be sure it’ll change as we go. That’s half the fun.

He’s decided to blog the project as he goes and you can read the first part here.

Arduino, Blinkies, Making, Programming, Tutorials

Make a networked nightlight with the Raspberry Pi and ESP8266

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Andy Warburton has taken his initial concept of a Raspberry Pi-powered nightlight and re-invented it using an ESP8266 board. The ESP8266 (which you can find on, for example, the Wemos D1 mini) is a marvellous chip which is Arduino IDE-compatible and has built-in wifi capabilities. Andy has used WS2812B strip LEDs wired to the ESP8266 board to illuminate a diffuse, smoked enclosure.

He’s then started up a Pi, which controls the timing and colour of the LEDs, and developed his own stripped-back protocol to communicate the status of the LEDs with the ESP8266. The practical upshot is that he’s got multiple ESP8266-powered nightlights which receive instructions over his home network from a Raspberry Pi.

You can see how he did it, including all the wiring-up instructions and the code as part of his extremely well-written blog post here.

Crowdfunding, GPIO boards

New power board for the Raspberry Pi on Kickstarter is perfect for an in-car situation

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Good evening all.

I just thought I’d share with you this Kickstarter for a Raspberry Pi power board. Designed to go in a car, and to take a 12V input and a signal from the ignition, the board sports the following features:

  • 12V power input (reduced to 5V for the Pi)
  • Real Time Clock
  • Battery monitor
  • External trigger
  • Cooling fan
  • Sleep mode
  • Timed shut-off
  • Programmable via an ATtiny.

Here’s how the project creator, from Italy, describes it:

The Attiny85 senses ignition switch, car battery voltage and Raspberry Pi status (Powered On, Powered Off or Screensaver), then (based on a Python script on your Pi) determines to shut off the buck converter or keep it on.

The board design frees almost all the gpio pins as Attiny and RTC relies on i2c to communicate back and forth with Rasberry, Fan is on the same 5v bus as the Pi, so It’s ON whenever the Buck Converter is on.

For quiet operations and non stressing applications I choose a 12v fan working on 5v, for more demanding uses It’s best to use a 5volt one at full speed. It could also be tied on a GPIO pin to enable PWM control based on processor temp.

The Attiny85 senses ignition switch, car battery voltage and send data to the Pi, which, in turn sends its status (Powered On, Powered Off or Screensaver).

The Raspberry, based on a Python script on your Pi desktop determines to stay on, on screen saver or to shut down; in case of shut down sends a command to the Attiny to shut off the buck converter to minimize battery consumption. A battery voltage threshold can be used to trigger also a clean shutdown before battery goes flat.

The fully-assembled board on Earlybird is 25 Euros rising to 35 Euros after the first 100 have gone.

You can take a look at the Kickstarter, and pledge, here.