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:
Jay Doscher has put together a lovely kit of parts to make the Raspberry Pi Quick Kit. It is a miniature cyberdeck made primarily out of a Pelican 1150 waterproof case. Inside the case is the Pi, surrounded by 3D-printed parts and cabling which brings out the Pi’s ports to the front of the case below the official Pi 7″ touchscreen. It’s a lovely build, as you can see, and you can read more about it over on his website and visit his store here.
David Pride wondered one day whether or not he could show that pigeons are intelligent animals. To do this, he created the SmartFrank 3000 (TM) which uses a Raspberry Pi 3B, a motor controller board from PiBorg and a stepper motor to control the release of bird food in response to a button press. The button part has been built to have a very “light touch” so it should react to a pigeon (or other bird) stepping on it.
You can read about the project, and follow along with the results, by keeping an eye on David’s blog.
A team of scientists from Imperial College London, Universiti Malaysia Sabah and the South East Asia Rainforest Research Partnership, together known as the SAFE Project, has been recording the health of the Borneo rainforest. Using solar-powered Raspberry Pis and sensors, they can listen to the sound of the forest and give an indicator of its health and the state of its biodiversity. The data is transmitted over the mobile data network.
Professor Rob Ewers, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial and Principal Investigator for the SAFE Project, said: “The health of a forest ecosystem can often be attributed to how much noise it creates, signalling how many species are around. As well as listening to whole soundscapes, we hope that in the future the system will be able to pick up individual species and record their presence – or absence – from certain areas.”
The team has made some of the recordings available online so that you can listen to the sounds of the rainforest. They have also, intriguingly, made instructions for recreating the Pi/sensor platform available for anyone to reproduce; this includes a full parts list and assembly instructions. The code for the platform is available on GitHub.
For a while, NODE has tried to create the most portable Raspberry Pi Zero mini computer. He’s one step closer with his latest creation – version 3 of the Zero Terminal. It has the following features:
The 40-pin header on the back allows for the creation of what NODE calls “backpacks”. One of the first he made was a keyboard backpack which slides out from underneath:
You can see a video of the device below and read more about the project over on NODE’s website:
Emmet, over at Pi My Life Up, has received a review unit of the Elecrow CrowPi 2, the STEM educational laptop featuring the Raspberry Pi. I previously covered the launch of their Kickstarter in this blog post.
He has taken a look at the product and reviewed both the hardware and software in this excellent blog post.
If you’d like to take a look at their Kickstarter, which has just a few days left, visit this page.
