Mathieu Bonte has written a great Instructable in which he creates a model house and then wires up a Raspberry Pi to various lamps to light the model. In the Instructable, he takes you through wiring it all up, via relays so you can transfer it to a ‘real’ house eventually if you so wish, and then developing the software using the Pi, MySQL and the Flask web server library. It’s an assignment for school and it’s a great proof-of-concept. Take a look here.
There are many reasons why you might want to try out your ‘hacking’ or penetration-testing skills. These range from a simple proof-of-concept as to why systems should be locked down to more aggressive hacking to prove the vulnerability of parts of a system. There are, likewise, many ways of setting up a system to be vulnerable – but you really don’t want to do this to your family’s precious PC or Mac. Enter the Raspberry Pi: it’s cheap, it’s easy to re-image the SD card and now, thanks to security expert Re4son, it’s simple to set it up as a target. On his website, Re4son provides pre-configured images to prove vulnerability – one of these, “Damn Vulnerable Raspberry Pi” is simple to download, install and switch to ‘vulnerable’ mode. Take a look on his website for the image and test your white hat hacking skills safely.
Please note: this is for experimental purposes only – it’s not an excuse to do it ‘for real’!
Here’s an interesting article from The MagPi. A Swedish team has developed a system to record and stream the activity and experiences of a person via the Internet. Called Tele 2, the system is worn as a back-pack and headset by a user. A GoPro camera and a microphone is used to capture a live video stream which is then altered according to the heart rate, emotions, and sweat level of the wearer. The medical information is captured using the e-Health v2.0 board and then processed using a Raspberry Pi 3. Wearers “included Simone Giertz, a robot maker from Stockholm, Joel Kinnaman, an actor from Vancouver (and star of the RoboCop reboot), and Noor Daoud, a female drift racer from Dubai”. An impressive system – read more about it over at The MagPi and see a video of Kinnaman’s session below.
There will be a Raspberry Jam at Pi Towers in Cambridge on Saturday, 1st July. The event, which runs from 11am-4pm will feature an intro session, three workshops and, probably, some Show and Tell. Ben Nuttall’s running the Jam and it’s sure to be a great, family-friendly morning/afternoon. I’m popping along to help Barry Byford with his SenseHAT workshop. You can get free tickets from Eventbrite. As well as attending the event as a participant, Ben’s looking for volunteers to help, so if you can spare some time, please be generous! You can see his planning document here where you can sign-up for various duties.
Texas-based Computer Scientist Estefannie has rigged up a GoPro camera to take photographs of herself. The GoPro cable is fed into a backpack which houses a Raspberry Pi 3. The Pi has a GPS board connected to it and calculates the distance between where Estefannie is now and a list of stored co-ordinates. In the case of her test run, this was a collection of London landmarks. A good usage of velcro allows all the kit to stay in place!
She’s written the whole thing up on Hackster.IO and you can view that by visiting this page. You can visit Estefannie’s website here and see a video of the camera in action below.
The organisers of Pi Wars (that’ll be me and Geeky Tim!) have just announced the possibility of a 2018 competition! Currently, we’re trying to gauge interest and find out how many teams are likely to enter. Rules will be similar to last year (especially in terms of permitted robot size) and we are again hoping to generate enough interest to hold it over two days in April.
If you are interested in forming a team, building a robot and joining us in Cambridge for the event, please Register Your Interest.
Last year, we had teams competing from as far as Switzerland and New Mexico, making it a truly international competition!
