The folks over at Synchro.io have come up with a lovely robotic bartender solution using a Raspberry Pi. Called Drinkro, the system makes drinks out of vodka and several mixers using DC peristaltic liquid pumps connected to the Pi. There’s even a mobile app to allow you to order drinks! It’s very slow at the moment, as you can see from the video below, but you can read more about it on their blog.
In the MagPi issue 47, Phil King wrote a review of the RasPiO ProHAT. This clever prototyping HAT breaks out all the GPIO pins in numerical (BCM) order to female headers as well as adding several power and ground ports. The pins surround a mini breadboard and they are all protected by a resistor and a diode, making it much safer to prototype with. If you’re in need of unprotected GPIO pins, however, the pins are also broken out again to an unpopulated header. It’s a great, very positive review and you can read it here.
Rachel Gibbs, over at Initial State, has written a great tutorial which gets a Pi Zero online via a mobile data connection. She’s added a GPS module to the FONA board and then powered the lot using a small LIPO battery. The system streams to their IoT service. You can read the full tutorial here. If you’re in the States, you’ll probably be looking to go to Adafruit for some of the bits. If you’re in the UK, Makersify is probably your best bet for everything except the LIPO.
Kevin Uhlir has been in contact. He’s built a lovely clock by using a Raspberry Pi. Built into the screen of an old monitor, the Pi retrieves data from Weather Underground and maps from Google Maps. He’s built several of the units, including some for friends and family. It looks lovely! He’s even extended it with amblight effects on some of the units. You can read more over on his blog or at Hackaday. Full instructions and the code can be found here.
An engineer over at Device Plus has come up with an over-engineered solution to the perennial problem of knowing when to take an umbrella with you. An ultrasonic sensor detects when someone has approached the front door, the Weather Underground API is used for forecasts and a Grove Pi board is used to hook everything up. If you’d like to do a similar project, take a look at their tutorial here.
Pi Borg pride themselves on having the best robot motor controller boards on the market. They’ve come up with a really interesting idea: a league of autonomous racing robots which use the Raspberry Pi. You download the base code, alter it to make it competitive and then send them the program. They then load their bots up with the code and set them racing, broadcasting the race live across the web. They’re running a Kickstarter to fund the league. Well worth a look – visit the Kickstarter here.
