The MagPi have published their review of PiBorg’s ZeroBorg, the motor controller board from the successful Kickstarter campaign from a few months ago. In the extremely positive review, they look at the features and form-factor of the board, which is extremely powerful. You can read the review here and purchase the ZeroBorg from PiBorg here.
Brook Drumm has created a robot that will crawl along a string or fishing line above a room or area and take photographs and video. It uses some 3D printed parts and a few servos and is, of course, run from a Raspberry Pi. The camera module is used for the photography and it can even go around corners! Take a look on the Make website for more details.
Andy Baker & Andrew Oakley are running another Cotswold Raspberry Jam. This one will take place on Saturday, 24th September from 1-4pm in the Waterworth Building on the University of Gloucestershire Park Campus. There will be a mix of talks, show-and-tell and workshops going on. Tickets are available here.
Mehzeb Chowdhury, a PhD researcher in forensic science and criminal investigations at the UK’s Durham University has been looking into the ways juries view crime scenes. Ordinarily, they rely on a mixture of sketches and photographs. Recent ideas at making the scene ‘more real’ have included mapping the scene with 3D scanners and applying textures. This is less than ideal due to the inherent guesswork and bias from such techniques. Jury visits to crime scenes are, likewise, problematic:
“The most-problematic aspect of crime scene visits is that, with time, every characteristic of the scene changes in some way or the other. This is called scene degradation. Years could pass between a crime being committed, and a jury scene visit, with very little remaining the same. A contemporaneous snapshot of the entire crime scene would preserve the necessary details for investigation and trial.”
So, he has developed a new system with a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino and a 3D camera which will generate a 3D model of a crime scene which will then be viewable using 3D headsets or even something like Google Cardboard.
Peter Yoon has ported Android 7.0 (Nougat) to the Raspberry Pi 3. Apparently, it’s not stable, it’s not official and it’s certainly not what you’d call a breakthrough in usability, but it is now available if you fancy a play. You can download it from MediaFire via geektillithertz.com and see a little demo of it in action in the video below.
Best I could do for an image!
One of Mark Gibbs’ neighbours decided to make a complaint about his dog and how much it barked. Knowing that his dog didn’t bark much when he was in the house, Mark decided to count the number of barks electronically by using a Raspberry Pi, a USB sound card and a microphone. You can follow his project (part 1 of which is currently published) here.
