Ivan Holland over at CPC Maker Space has done a great write-up of this little board that gives your Raspberry Pi ears. He takes you through the steps of installing the software necessary to use Google Voice Services. This makes the pHAT a great, smaller alternative to Google’s own AIY Voice kit. You can read the tutorial here. You can get the Re-Speaker 2-Mics pHAT from CPC or from Seeed Studio, the original makers.
Matt Hawkins, over at Raspberry Pi Spy, has written a great article on the dangers of buying microSD cards from eBay. There are numerous scammers out there selling fake SD cards and Matt has identified, and reported, one such seller. With a little vigilance, it’s clear that the problem is pretty widespread, from not being delivered from the correct location, to corrupt cards, to cards pretending to be high capacity or high speed when they’re just not. You can read more here but the TL;DR summary is: Don’t buy them from eBay. Why take the risk? To save a couple of quid? If you’re in the UK, I recommend getting SanDisk Ultra microSD cards from Amazon – 16GB and 32GB.
James Adams from Raspberry Pi Trading has written a fascinating article about the new power management chip on the 3B+, which is the MXL7704 from MaxLinear. There’s lots of technical detail here, but it’s quite accessible. You can read more here.
You’ll either love it, or you’ll hate it. That’s the most important thing about the Fribo, a Korean research project.
The Fribo is a black cat-alike construction with an in-built screen that, thanks to sensors and microphones, detects when someone arrives home and then broadcasts that to friends in the user’s list via a Raspberry Pi inside. These friends also have Fribo devices and they can respond to welcome the user home or send them a message.
As I said in the title… slightly creepy because it means that someone’s always “watching”. Not sure I’d like one, and I’m pretty sure it brings home all the perceived privacy concerns of Amazon Alexa or Google Home, but what do I know? It might, as the researchers state, help people who live alone to feel more connected to others.
You can read more on the IEEE website and see it in action below:
Michael Teeuw has done a fantastic job on this interactive control panel for his son, Enzo. It uses a combination of Arduino and Raspberry Pi along with several other components including replacing LEDs inside buttons with Neopixels, an Adafruit Speaker Bonnet and a rotary encoder with Neopixel circle surround. It’s even got 3D printing and lasercutting, making it a Maker’s dream project. It’s amazing, and you can start reading his blog posts about the project here.
An Imgur user and his brother have built a dartboard scorer surround and inside is buried a Raspberry Pi. Button presses to keep track of the score are detected by an Arduino Leonardo and these are then fed into a Pi which translates them into calls which keep track of the score on an external website. The website is then displayed on an old monitor by the Pi, using Chromium in kiosk mode, to show the scores. This seems needlessly complicated to me, but it’s a nice make. You can see more photos of the build here.
