A very clever chap over at SolderChips is currently designing and 3D-printing a scale replica of a Half Life 2 sentry gun/turret. A Raspberry Pi will be used to do facial image recognition and then tell an Arduino to control some servos to move the turret. Well worth keeping an eye on this project. Read more here.
Scott Campbell has written a tutorial on connecting directly to a Raspberry Pi using an ethernet cable from a Windows machine. Read it here.
Richard Saville (aka Average Man) lives in Southend-on-Sea, which puts him on the East coast of England. He has taken one of his prototyping boards (the ProtoPal) and the components contained in the RasPiO 7 segment display kit and created a high tide display. It uses a public API to get the next high tide time and then pushes that to the 7-segment display. He has also laser-cut a case to go around it. It’s a great little project and he has written it up into a tutorial with annotated code and everything you need to re-create it. Read how he did it here.
The Raspberry Pi Zero’s USB port is an OTG port, meaning that hardware-wise programming it over USB should be possible. Well, some clever people over on the Raspberry Pi forums have worked out how to get the software working. Andrew Mulholland has now documented the process so that more people can do it. It’s still not for beginners, and you might want to wait for a more user-friendly solution, but if you have an application for programming over USB, give it a shot. You can read the instructions over on Andrew’s blog.
During the summer, Tomomi Imura built a Node.js app which captured images from the Raspberry Pi camera module and used animal facial recognition to store them based on whether or not her pet cat was detected. The Pi uses a PIR sensor to detect movement. Read the complete write-up of how she did it.
This is just a quick message to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing tomorrow, I hope you’ll be filled with the Christmas spirit and have a lovely time. Please spare a thought for those less fortunate than yourselves who are having a tough time over the holiday period.
Now… where did I put that wrapping paper…?
