Instructables user ElectricSpace has written a great tutorial on creating your very own radio telescope with a Raspberry Pi. He’s listed all the parts you’ll need and documented how to do the build. Great for astronomers! Read how he did it here.
Make your wedding sparkle with these ESP8266 LED lamps controlled by a Raspberry Pi Zero
Brian Lough wanted to put his own stamp on his wedding. He admits his wife did most of the actual planning of the day, but Brian brought some electronics and wifi magic to the table centre decorations, pictured in action above. He used Ikea Grono lamps as the main structure of each lamp and then added a Wemos D1 mini and a Neopixel ring for illumination. Each lamp was powered by two 1200maH battery banks bought from Poundland. The Wemos boards are sent commands from a Raspberry Pi Zero via a cheap wifi router which connected everything together. The programming on the Pi was done with NodeRED. You can read how to do it yourself over on Instructables and you can also see how it all works in the video below:
Converting a Chinese digger toy to use a Raspberry Pi Zero and PS3 controller
Australian John Graves has a 5-year old son who loves to play with construction toys. So, John has taken a Dark Water 640 motor controller board, which allowed him to control all 6 motors on a Digger Toy at once, and a Raspberry Pi Zero to create a new control mechanism. He’s then paired a PS3 controller to the Pi over Bluetooth and written some code to tie everything together. He later added LEDs and a Pi camera to the toy, just for fun. You can read all about how John did it over on his blog and see a video of the final test below.
Make your own VR goggles using a Raspberry Pi Zero
Caleb has put together this lovely hack which involves a Raspberry Pi Zero, an accelerometer breakout board, a 5″ TFT screen, some cables and a shedload of cardboard. It all comes together as a pair of VR goggles and uses the p3d library on the Pi to display a 3D image. Read how to do it yourself here.
Four Raspberry Pi Zeros with cameras that make up a 3D scanner
Jolar, from Oxford Hackspace, has come up with a great way of doing 3D scans that needn’t break the bank. He’s used four Raspberry Pi Zeros and 4 Pi cameras mounted to a triangular frame. Each camera is pointing at a slightly different angle and between them they capture a 3D image. The files are then uploaded to the Cloud and his laptop does the 3D image processing of the files. You can read more about the project over on Hackaday.IO.
Clock in and clock out with this facial recognition system running on a Raspberry Pi
dekuNukem has created a great system for keeping track of how long you spend playing games working hard in front of your computer screen. He’s taken a Pi camera module, which is focused on the computer user and a Raspberry Pi which compares the image coming from the camera with a still of your face that you’ve previously taken. The Pi then records a counter of how long you’ve been sitting there over the past day and week. He’s added an OLED to show the counters on a piece of prototyping board. The system is called FacePunch – because you’re using your face to “punch the clock”! The whole project is documented over on GitHub.
