Events, Raspberry Fields, Raspberry Jams

Raspberry Fields – a festival of digital making in Cambridge run by Raspberry Pi – is this weekend!

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This weekend (30th June-1st July), digital making festival Raspberry Fields comes to Cambridge. Run by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and coming off the success of previous “Big Birthday Weekend” celebrations, it’s sure to be a lot of fun.

I will be there both days, helping out in the Drop-in and Exhibitor area, so come and say hello!

Tim Richardson and I will be doing a 20-minute talk on how Pi Wars has progressed from its humble 2014 beginnings to the two-day robotics challenge event it is now. This is in the auditorium at 2pm on the Sunday.

Immediately following that talk, at 2.30pm on Sunday, myself and Albert Hickey will be co-facilitating a drop-in and discussion session about Raspberry Jams in J3. If you’re involved with a Raspberry Jam, or would like to set-up/help at one, this is a great session and should hopefully answer any questions you may have.

Tickets for Raspberry Fields are still available here and are £5 each per day for adults; under-16s go free.

3D printing, Android, Geeky Techiness, GPIO boards, Making, Operating systems, Programming, Robotics

This Raspberry Pi-powered robot can change the shape of its wheels to overcome obstacles

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Al Bencomo has created this wonderful 3D-printed robot that can overcome obstacles by changing the shape of its wheels. FRILLER (FRILL Explorer Robot) uses a Raspberry Pi 3 with Android Things OS to control motors connected via an Adafruit Motor HAT. As Al explains it:

The wheel deformation mechanism is composed of two DC geared motors, sliding racks, and an elastic cord. When the motors push out the racks, the wheel diameter becomes larger. The elastic cord around the wheels assists with the return of the spikes to the close position when the motors pull the racks back inside. The wheels remain round for faster travel on roads or indoors, but transform into spikes to overcome obstacles off-road.

You can read more and download the STL files for the 3D printer here and view his code on GitHub here. See it in action in the video below:

Photography, Programming, Software

Multiple Raspberry Pis used to detect illegal pornography

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Christian Haschek from Austria has developed a system to identify illegally uploaded pornographic images. Following the upload of a child sexual abuse image to his image hosting platform, Pictshare, Haschek naturally contacted the police who told him to print it out and give it to them. Knowing that this was illegal in itself, Haschek instead turned to the Raspberry Pi to solve the problem.

Three Pis were used, two with Intel Movidius USB dongles, used to classify images together with open source algorithm NSFW which available from Yahoo free of charge.

He set the scanning system to find any image with a 30% or more chance of being dodgy and got it to report the images to him so he could send them to Interpol and then delete them. So far, he has found more than a dozen illegal images on the platform.

You can read more over on Christian’s blog.

Arduino, Books, Robotics, Shopping

Humble Bundle releases a great selection of Raspberry Pi and Arduino books at knock-down prices

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The latest Humble Bundle book deal (just a sample of which is shown above) contains several books from Make including “Make: A Raspberry Pi-Controlled Robot” by Wolfram Donat and various other electronics and programming volumes. Well worth a look if you like your books electronic and informative. Visit Humble Bundle here.

Thanks to Doug Gore for spotting this!

Camera module, Photography, Software

Simple GUI for creating stop motion animations with the Raspberry Pi

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Martin O’Hanlon, who recently joined Raspberry Pi as a Content and Curriculum Manager, has been playing around with the PiCamera library in conjunction with guizero which helps you to create simple user interfaces. He has created an app that runs on the Raspberry Pi that helps you to create stop-motion animations. You can download the software from his blog where there are instructions and information about how the app was written.

Databases, Research, Science, Sport

Ocean race team uses Raspberry Pi to collate wearables data

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The Volvo Ocean Race is held every three years and covers 45,000 nautical miles in 10 legs. Starting in Alicante, Spain and finishing in The Hague, Netherlands, it takes around nine months to complete with gaps in between legs – sailing teams can expect to spend over 100 days at sea, sometimes up to 21 days at a time.

Team AkzoNobel from Holland, competing for the first time, have a particular interest in how technology can assist the crew. They decided to go with a Garmin wearable to monitor the health of the crew, collecting data on sleep, heart rate and nutrition and a Raspberry Pi server running SAP Leonardo’s IoT platform to collate the data.

You can read more over on TechRadar.