John over at Dexter Industries has been in touch. He’s been playing around with Google Cloud services, and in particular the Google Cloud Vision API. The API is able to take an image and then interpret it to determine what the camera is “seeing”. He’s written the whole thing up as a tutorial. Bear in mind that GCV is a paid-for service but there’s a 60-day free trial to try things out with. Take a look at the tutorial here.
There is a security vulnerability affecting Linux at the moment called “Dirty Cow”. It affects the copy-on-write mechanism (hence the name) and can be very dangerous as it allows malicious hackers to take control of your computer or device, including the Pi. Thanks to the engineers at Raspberry Pi, there is already a fix available for our single board computers. To install it, do the following at the command prompt:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-kernel
Thanks to The MagPi for posting about this.
I’ve just received word that 4 new MagPi Essentials books have made their way into print and are now available at The Pi Hut. The books that have been published are:
The Raspberry Pi Foundation have just blogged this so I thought I’d share it with you.
Mike Smith has a lot of vinyl records and he has trouble keeping track of where they all are located on his shelves. So, he took a Raspberry Pi, lots of Neopixel strands and Adafruit’s FadeCandy board to control them. The Pi has a web interface and database of all the records and their locations. When you select the record, the Pi sends a signal to the FadeCandy which then flashes all the Neopixels in the individual cubby hole where the record resides, followed by a single flash of the Neopixel closest to the record. The whole system is also capable of putting on some impressive lighting effects, also controllable via the web interface. If you want to know more, Mike will be filling in details here and you can view the system in action in the video below:
Today, I attended my first Maker Faire at the Silk Mill in Derby. Took a couple of hours to get there, and I have to say it was worth every minute of travel. Raspberry Pi highlights included Steve Upton and his Wall of Enlightenment (huge strings of blinkies), Brian Corteil’s Micro Pi Noon and Derek Woodroffe’s Tesla Coils driven from a Raspberry Pi Zero. There was loads of stuff on show – bizarrely lots of micro:bit stuff – including plastics, wood, metal, textiles. Anything you can name under the broad heading of “things we make” was featured. There were around 100 maker stands and the setting was wonderful. Highly recommended for next year! I took some video footage of the day and cut it together into a 20-minute highlights reel which you can see below:
Andrew Gale previously ran a Kickstarter for a Christmas decoration powered by the Raspberry Pi. He has now re-spun his idea and has created a decoration using RGB LEDs. It plugs directly into the GPIO pins of the Pi. He has also created a version for the micro:bit and CodeBug that attaches using crocodile clips. Both boards are available in kit form for £5 (early-bird) £6 (regular). Take a look at the campaign here.
