Accessories, Internet of things, Sensors, Tutorials

Monitor for barks and calm down your dog by playing sounds on a Raspberry Pi

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Cute Dog Alert!

It must be Animal Day…

Jennifer Fox’s dog (pictured above – awwww, cuteness!) has a habit of barking whilst Jennifer is away from the house. This does not go down well with the neighbours. So, she’s developed a system which monitors the sound levels in the house and then plays a sound file to calm the dog down. To monitor the sound level, she uses a MEMs microphone board from SparkFun together with a good old MCP3002 analog to digital converter. She also uploads any data produced to CloudMQTT. You can read about this lovely project over on the FoxBot Industries blog.

Here’s a demo of the system in action:

Camera module, Environment, Internet of things, Photography, Research, Science

Animal monitoring system uses a Raspberry Pi and Watson IoT

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Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM has been helping Marwell Zoo in Hampshire to develop an Internet-of-Things monitoring and control device for animals. More specifically, he has been developing a system that monitors the sleeping area of certain animals in the Zoo and controls the heating based on infra-red photographs. Using a combination of a Raspberry Pi, a Pi camera, Andy has developed a system which uploads the photographs and sensor readings to the Watson IoT platform which then would send a command to another system to control the heating. This is but the tip of the iceberg of this project write-up which is covered in more detail by Karen Lewis over on the IBM blog. Here’s a photo of Poppet, a Nyala, one of the animals being monitored, just because I love animals 🙂

GPIO boards, Internet of things, Tutorials

E-ink status display uses MQTT and a Raspberry Pi to provide status updates

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IoT enthusiast James Sutton has created this lovely e-ink status display using a Raspberry Pi Zero and a Pimoroni Inky pHAT. It uses an MQTT service to provide status updates to the display and there’s a web-based interface to change that status. You can read how he did it and see his code here. See a video of it in action below:

Accessories, Camera module, Making, Nature, Photography

Portable trail camera uses a single power source and a Raspberry Pi

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Gary has taken a Raspberry Pi 2, a Pi NoIR Camera and an Infrared LED light source and created a portable ‘trail camera’. A 12V power source provides the necessary juice for the LEDs and a PiBorg BattBorg steps the 12V down to 5V for the Raspberry Pi. There’s a bit of circuitry on a proto board to add buttons and LED indicators and the UI is shown on a small Adafruit TFT screen. You can read how he did it over on his blog.

AIY, Making, Reviews, Robotics, Tutorials, Video

A jumping jack Google AIY project and a video review of the kit for the Raspberry Pi

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Instructables user DrH has written up an interesting project that uses a Google AIY kit and some servos to create a robotic responder to your voice commands. You can read about the project here and see a demo video below.

Also in AIY news, YouTuber Allie Weber has posted up a video unboxing, review and walk-through of the AIY kit. You can see the video below:

Security

Spectre and Meltdown threats do not affect the Raspberry Pi

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Two security vulnerabilities announced in recent days, Spectre and Meltdown, affect modern CPUs from Intel, ARM and AMD. There has been a fair amount of press coverage (Google it for more!) and, until a recent tweet from Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton, there were fears that the Raspberry Pi could be affected. We now know that the Pi is not susceptible to either threat. Eben has written a fascinating article over on raspberrypi.org that explains why the Pi isn’t affected in a great deal of detail. Head over there to read all about it.