Sam Zeloof, who is currently studying electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University as an undergraduate has taken an old Polaroid camera and retro-fitted it with a Raspberry Pi W, a camera module and a thermal printer. He added two LiPo batteries to provide the 7-8 volts needed by the printer and then programmed the whole thing to produce thermally-printed photographs whenever the trigger was pressed. You can read all about the project and how he did it over at IEEE Spectrum.
Nick decided that he wanted a more visual representation of the attempts bots made to attack and gain access to his server. To do this, he took a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a Pimoroni Blinkt and a 7-segment display and created a device called the PiAlert, the case of which was 3D-printed. For the software, he configured fail2ban (which monitors log files) to trigger a special action whenever it detected a potential intrusion. The triggered action is a Python3 script (which Nick admits is an absolute mess!) which acts as an HTTP server, listening for the notifications from fail2ban and lighting up LEDs accordingly. The 7-segment display is also updated to show the number of intrusion attempts made.
You can read more about the device on Nick’s blog, including how to do it yourself..
Here is a video of the PiAlert in action:
21st September is World Alzheimer’s Day. A few years ago, my Nan passed away. By the end, she didn’t recognise anybody and couldn’t communicate. It is not an illness or a condition I would wish on anyone.
Back in 2010, Chloe Meineck began creating the first Music Memory Box. The idea of the box was to give dementia suffers a experience of memory through the use of music. Over the next few years, Chloe developed the idea and came across the Raspberry Pi and RFID tags. Bringing these ideas together, she then developed a prototype with the Pi.
The box lid is filled with a photo collage and then other objects (with RFID tags attached) are added. These objects, when placed on the central RFID reader then trigger the Pi to play a relevant audio clip (stored on a USB stick) that matches a photograph in the lid. The person using the box then associates the sounds with the photograph.
Eventually, she developed the idea into a product and funded it through Kickstarter (although it’s darned difficult to tell if the Pi is still used!). The Kickstarter finished last year and they are now into production (although COVID-19 has delayed them somewhat). Their aim is eventually to get the MMB into care homes across the world.
The BBC’s Digital Planet covered it well in this audio segment (when it was definitely using the Pi) and Bargain Hunt today did a dementia special segment on the box which you can watch here. You can read a lot more about the project on the website here.
As an aside: you can learn about music therapy from Dementia UK.
Here’s the Kickstarter video, for those who are interested:
Jude Pullen has taken a World globe and a lot of 3D-printed parts and created himself a brilliant radio player. By positioning the arm of the contraption affixed to the globe, it is possible to tune into to over 2000 Internet radio stations. The contraption uses two rotary encoders to work out the position of the arm and then those readings are fed into the Raspberry Pi which works out if there is a radio at that position. An LED lights up when you are over a station and the information about the station appears on the little screen at the front of the control panel. You are then free to listen to whatever came up!
It’s quite some project and, frankly, it’s quite some write-up over at Instructables. You can see a video of the RadioGlobe in action, below.
Terence Eden has created a device which will allow you to play music in what he calls the most inconvenient way possible. Labelled as “lo-fi awfulness and cyberpunk grungy”, this portable music player is a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a USB floppy drive and powered by a battery. Some command line operations allow him to squeeze a full album onto a 1.44MB floppy. Further commands allow him to read the floppy drive and pipe the music into his headphones. The audio quality is similar to a MW radio station and the audio will skip if the floppy drive buffers! It’s all very 1980s!
You can read more over on his blog including his list of ideas of how to improve it, including taking it “on the road”. There are also some videos of the walkman in action!
Dane, over at 8bitsAndAByte has taken a West German Telefunken radio and retrofitted it with a Raspberry Pi and a Google AIY Voice HAT and microphone (this is made from the original version, but I’m sure the new version would work too!). He’s then used a piece of software called DialogFlow which integrates with the AIY software to create a “decision tree” for his very own spy-themed choose-your-own-adventure game.
It’s all voice controlled and works very well as you can see in the video below:
