Raspberry Pi Roundup - 15th May 2015

Bike

International company PTC has unveiled a new concept known as a “Digital Twin”. They took a CAD-designed mountain bike and mounted a bunch of sensors on-board. These sensors feed into a Raspberry Pi which interprets the data and creates a virtual ‘twin’ of the mountain bike. It is hoped that this concept can be used with any computer-designed item to test out prototypes and see how different factors affect performance. Read more over at The IET.

Fridge

American Steve Hickson has done an excellent home automation proof-of-concept. He’s placed a Raspberry Pi and camera module inside his fridge (and made sure that the light stayed on). The Pi takes a picture, analyses it and identifies whether there is any fruit there. If there isn’t, it uses the API of a service called Instacart to add a bunch of fruit to a shopping cart. You then access the service and arrange delivery manually. It’s a nice proof-of-concept, although obviously it still requires some manual intervention, but it’s good to see the Pi being used for a practical purpose. Read how he did it and look at his code here.

Cluster

Ceph is a software package that allows you to create a cluster of machines that act as a file store. Using Vess Bakalov’s work on CephPi, Bryn Apperson has written a tutorial that helps you get a Ceph cluster up and running on a bunch of Raspberry Pis. Read more here.