Audio, GPIO boards, Making, Music, Sensors, Tutorials

Dual ultrasonic sensor theremin uses Sonic Pi and a Raspberry Pi

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Hi everyone. Caught a particularly nasty chest infection and flu on the flight back from Belfast, hence the lack of updates. I’m about 60% at the moment, but wanted to try and keep the bloggage going as best I can!

Robin Newman, who is an expert with Sonic Pi, has created a lovely theremin-like musical instrument using a Raspberry Pi. He has wired up two ultrasonic distance sensors to his Pi using a RasPiO Pro HAT and then created some Python code which reads the sensors and pipes the measurements into Sonic Pi to create sound. He can then vary the sound by holding his hands at different distances from the Pi. You can see it in action below and find out more about the project on Robin’s blog:

Camera module, Games, Making, Programming, Robotics

Magic: The Gathering fans – find out how much your collection is worth with a Raspberry Pi and some LEGO

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Michael Portera has a large collection of Magic: The Gathering (MTG) cards and he wondered how much they were worth. For those not in-the-know, MTG is a “customisable card game” launched in the 1990s in which you put together a deck of cards from your collection and seek to win games in which you are pitted against other players’ decks. There are around 20,000 official cards (as well as countless unofficial ones!) and some of them are quite rare and, therefore, quite valuable.

Michael has constructed a card-feeding mechanism out of LEGO and then written scripts on his Raspberry Pi to scan them with a camera module, recognise them (courtesy of AWS Rekognition) and then call an API to get the expected value of the cards. A full write-up of the project, including the code, is available here. You can see the mechanism in action below:

Thanks to Raspberry Pi for spotting this one!

Environment, Making, Nature, Programming, Sensors, Tutorials

This planter-with-personality has an air quality sensor read by a Raspberry Pi

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Using a Raspberry Pi Zero W and an SGP30 air quality sensor from Adafruit, one Instructables user, Tim Clem, has created a plant pot with personality. They’ve added a small amp and speaker for sound and a Pimoroni Blinkt for indicator lights. Finding no Python library for the I2C-accessible SGP30, they’ve written their own (which is available on Github). They’ve also added Google Sheet logging for the readings. The real magic came when they added sound effects for when the air quality dropped – they recorded a coughing sound for this which is routed through the amp and speaker. The enclosure is a mixture of wood and acrylic (which keeps the electronic components dry). All the code is available on Github and you can read how to build your own on Instructables. A video of it in action is below:

Making, Programming, Software

This robotic button box vomits out joke comics and is powered by a Raspberry Pi

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One enterprising programmer has created a Raspberry Pi script that generates random comic strip jokes. They’ve then adapted the script to print out on a tiny thermal printer and wrapped the whole thing up in a laser-cut wooden box. The result is a robot face which ‘vomits’ out the printout through its mouth! You can see details of the whole build process here and see the software, written in Processing, on Github.

Events, Raspberry Jams

Potton Pi & Pints Raspberry Jam – Saturday, 2nd June

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Hi everyone. Just got back from a great weekend in Belfast visiting the Northern Ireland Raspberry Jam. Was really great to see everyone at what was an excellent Jam with lots of learning and excitement!

We (Mike & Tim) are holding a Raspberry Jam in Potton, Bedfordshire on Saturday, 2nd June. Although it’s held upstairs in a pub, this is a family-friendly Jam and will be a mixture of Show and Tell and drop-in activities using our pi-topCEED workstations.

If you’d like to attend (and it would be lovely to see you!), please visit Eventbrite and pick up a free ticket (or more!). You can just turn up on the day, but it’s nice to know how many people should be coming!