3D printing, Accessories, Artificial intelligence, Health, Home automation, Making, Sensors

Using a Raspberry Pi and the Amazon Alexa SDK to help tetraplegics

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It’s always nice when you see an engineering project that attempts to really help people, and this is one of the best I’ve come across.

A recent hackathon, hackABILITY, brought together teams to concentrate on providing solutions to disabled people. One team of the seven that competed, AIDex, came together to use AI and speech recognition to help tetraplegics carry out specific tasks, with specific reference to one of their own team, Deborah Kennard who is herself a tetraplegic. The team, led by Tom Burgmann, used the engineering.com projects site to brainstorm and storyboard their ideas. As Burgmann said:

We wanted to go from a custom, expensive, service-heavy system to something that’s an off-the-shelf consumer product.

The whole set-up comprises the following components:

 

  • Raspberry Pi 3B
  • 16GB Micro SD Card
  • Raspberry Pi 3 Enclosure
  • Dual Microphone Mic-hat from Seeed Tech
  • External Speaker
  • 5V Power Source/Charger Battery Pack
  • Custom MicHead Assembly
  • 8 RGB LED Indicator Strip
  • 3D Printed Enclosure with Gooseneck Mounting

The Pi runs Raspbian and is programmed with modules in Java, Python and C with an analytics hub hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform. After evaluating and costing out a variety of solutions, the team eventually settled on the Amazon Alexa Software Development Kit and created their first ‘skill’ called AIDrian.

One of the key things that the team wanted to address was how to enable Kennard to contact the emergency services. For this, they added a time-of-flight sensor to the microphone mouthpiece. If she opens and closes her mouth three times, Alexa will ask her if she wants to make an emergency call. If she repeats the action, Alexa connects her to the emergency services.

 

The great thing about this project is that it brings the cost of a solution down from around $10,000 to easily less than $1,000. The team’s next step is to take it from this prototype to a fully working, reproducible product.

You can read more about the project over at engineering.com and via the links in the above article.

Image from the AIDex Team

Events, Raspberry Jams

Cotswold Raspberry Jam – Saturday, 27th January

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Cotswold Raspberry Jam is happening again on Saturday 27 January from 1-4pm at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham. This month, their workshops include special sessions on updating and backing-up your Raspberry Pi, so you can find out how to make sure you have the latest versions of Pi software. Keeping your software up-to-date not only fixes bugs and keeps things secure, but can also be a prerequisite to following online tutorials. They’ll also show you how to back up your files, including those all-important Minecraft worlds and Python projects, onto a USB memory stick.

Other activities include Minecraft coding, making your own reaction timer with LEDs and buttons and Micro Pi Noon balloon-popping robots. Cotswold Jam also has special prizes for those who bring along their own projects to show off – and it’s a great place to get help with half-finished projects.

Spread across a whole university building with five rooms, free parking, and only 10 minutes’ walk from the railway station, this is a large, family-friendly event, so bring along mum, dad, brothers, sisters, vaguely embarrassed boyfriends and that goth you met in the library!

Book your free tickets on Eventbrite. You can visit the Jam website here.

Raspberry Pi Zero, Shopping

Raspberry Pi Zero WH – a Zero with pre-soldered headers – is launched

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The Raspberry Pi Zero has always had the issue that the owner of the Zero has needed to solder their own headers if they wanted them. Until now, the only non-solder solution has been the Pimoroni Hammer Header kit. Well, The Pi Hut and Pimoroni have just now announced the availability of the Raspberry Pi Zero WH – a Zero W with the header professionally soldered in place. This is sure to be of interest to those people who want the cheaper Pi but want to do physical computing without soldering. You can pick one up for around £13.30 (plus shipping) from The Pi Hut or Pimoroni.

Events, Pi Wars, Raspberry Jams

Upcoming events from Cambridge Raspberry Jam – January, March and April

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Hi everyone,

I just thought I’d bring to your attention three events from Cambridge Raspberry Jam that are coming up in the next few months.

The first is, in fact, a CamJam – a full Jam including workshops, a Marketplace, talks & Show and Tell. It takes place on Saturday, 27th January at Impington Village College (which is just North of Cambridge itself, just off the A14). The event is completely free and you can pick up free tickets from Eventbrite.

The second event is Potton Pi & Pints – a smaller, more social (but entirely Family Friendly!) Jam which takes place upstairs at our local pub (The Rising Sun) in Potton, Bedfordshire. The date for this one is Saturday, 3rd March and is part of the Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend in which Jams from all over the world are holding their events over the same weekend. In our case, we’re holding our Jam in the afternoon so that people can attend the Milton Keynes Raspberry Jam in the morning and then shoot over to ours in the afternoon. Tickets for Potton Pi & Pints have only just been made available. They’re free and they’re available from Eventbrite. We had a great time at our Christmas event, and we always look forward to this one!

Last, but not by any means least, we have our third event, Pi Wars. This is the fourth time we’ve run this highly successful event. Over 70 teams (some of them from as far afield as Hong Kong, Turkey and the USA) compete over the weekend of 21st-22nd April on our seven fiendish challenge courses. We invite as many people as possible to attend the event, which is taking place at the prestigious Cambridge Computer Laboratory, to spectate and enjoy the competitive, yet very friendly atmosphere. There’s plenty to see and there’s even a Sponsors’ Marketplace to pick up Pi-related goodies. More information about the event can be found on the Pi Wars website and you can book your tickets here. Tickets are free for under-18s and just £5 per day for adults (£7 for the whole weekend). Here’s a video of last year’s competition from the perspective of one of the teams:

Accessories, Cases, Home automation, Raspberry Pi Zero, Tutorials

Build a universal remote control using a Raspberry Pi Zero W and LIRC

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Here’s a nice project which is sure to get TV lovers making. BBTinkerer has taken a Raspberry Pi Zero W and some simple circuitry and wrapped it in a nice enclosure. This Pi device has been programmed to generate IR codes to control an AV set-up and it does so with a programming library called LIRC. He’s then created a web UI for the device which can be accessed from a mobile phone, thus enabling him to control his television from his phone. You can read the (extensive) instructions on how to do it yourself here.