Justin Platz and Kevin Gleason from PubNub have published a tutorial that uses the Raspberry Pi camera module to take pictures and then upload them to online service Parse. The program hooks into a PIR sensor to detect movement then uses OpenCV to detect faces. The upload only happens if a face is detected. For fun, they overlay superhero masks onto the faces! All the code is available and there is also a wiring diagram for the PIR. Read more here.
The organisers of Pi Wars (aka Tim and I), the challenge-based robotics competition based in Cambridge, UK, have just announced that registration is now open for this year’s event. There are two application forms:
More information about the competition is available on the Pi Wars website.
Here’s a video of the highlights of last year’s competition:
Matt Timmons-Brown continues his long-running series about robots with episode 3. This episode covers setting up your 4tronix Pi2Go Lite robot to follow a black line on a white background. As usual, Matt’s video is clear and informative and he’s done a great job cutting it together. You can watch the video below. Head over to YouTube to leave him a comment!
A team from Sparkfun have created a full-sized prototype replica of the BB-8 droid from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Inside the sphere is a Raspberry Pi which provides the ‘brains’ for the robot. The team, comprised of Pamela Cortez, Allison Cavis, Casey Kuhns and Maurice Woods, created their robot using 3D printing and other wizardry. It truly is a work-of-art. You can see a lot more photographs and read more over at the Makezine website. The only thing they’re really missing, unfortunately, is a video of it in action! They’ve promised to document the process of building the robot in future articles.
Alex Eames from RasPi.TV promised in his RasPiO Kickstarter campaign that he would produce a series of video tutorials for the RasPiO Duino board. The RasPiO Duino board is like having an Arduino plugged into your GPIO pins and is great for a variety of purposes including reading analog sensors and doing ‘real-time’ operations. The first video tutorial details some input/output ‘flip-flop‘ experiments. At almost 20 minutes, it’s very comprehensive and is delivered in Alex’s usual clear, detailed style.
Hadoop is all about processing large amounts of data (so-called Big Data) across a cluster of nodes. In this case, the nodes are Raspberry Pis and Nigel Pond has written a PDF tutorial on how to do it. Read it here.
