Raspberry Pi Roundup
Raspberry Pi Roundup - a music box for dementia sufferers, a Pi-powered dolls' house and a flower that opens up for smiles
Dementia Music Box Ross Porter’s father could no longer operate his CD player to play his favourite music due to impaired mental function caused by dementia. Knowing that music was incredibly beneficial to people in his father’s position, Ross set about making a music box that could be operated simply. He used two rotary encoders fed through to a Raspberry Pi to do this. Pressing or rotating either knob starts the music going. One knob controls the volume and the other changes songs from a playlist stored on a USB drive. His final product came out as above. He’s now documented...
Raspberry Pi Roundup - a Mafia-inspired pinball machine, a computerised shuffleboard and a way to make a wireless access point
An offer you cannot refuse Janos Kiss, Otília Pasaréti and Romain Fontaine set up a pinball manufacturing company, called Team Pinball, in Cardiff a little over a year ago and have been quietly, and secretly, beavering away on their new machines. The game, based on a Mafia theme, features a 10.1″ LCD built into the back board. Although most of the mechanical parts in the machine are standard and easily available (for easy replacement in case of breakdowns), the main ‘brain’ inside the machine is a Raspberry Pi 3! Janos explains the electronics pictured above: The platform is composed of a...
Raspberry Pi Roundup - a 3D-printable robot, a Pi Wars interview and a robot that stops itself from falling over
3D-printed robot Nik Ivanov has released plans for a low-cost, 3D-printable rover called Watney which features cheap, yellow Chinese DC motors inside a pretty lovely 3D-printed chassis and case. It’s all run off a Raspberry Pi Zero W and you can download the code and 3D printer files, and see some detailed assembly instructions, over on GitHub. Pi Wars interview Issue 9 of Hackspace magazine is out! There’s some great articles in there, from Rachel Wong and her wearable tech to Lorraine Underwood and her fantastic LED cube. Of particular interest to the Raspberry Pi community is a terrific 8-page interview with Tim Richardson who...
Raspberry Pi Roundup - a cartoonifying camera/printer, a gun range assistant and a rotary phone conversion
Cartoonify Dan Macnish has taken a Raspberry Pi 3, a camera module and a thermal printer and created a set-up that ‘approximates’ what the camera sees and then prints it out. It’s sort of like a rubbish Polaroid, but it’s more artistic than that. Using a piece of software called Draw This, the Pi recognises objects in front of the camera and then mines Google’s Quick, Draw! dataset to find the images that are closest (in a cartoon fashion) to what the camera saw. After that, it’s just a case of sending the data to the thermal printer and voila – a...