Raspberry Pi Roundup - 26th October 2015

Video player

Craig Hissett has taken a Raspberry Pi, a touchscreen, some batteries and some nice BIG buttons and created a video player for children. It all sits in a laser-cut wooden enclosure. Nice job, Craig. Take a look at the Instructable here.

Booth

Frederick Vandenbosch decided he wanted to make a photo booth. So, he took a thermal printer and connected it up to a Raspberry Pi. Then he added the 7″ Raspberry Pi touch screen as a control interface and built a wooden surround for everything. It’s a very neat set-up and he’s written it all up as a tutorial with included code. The prints of the photographs are, of course, black and white and low-res, but it’s a great thing to do if you have the equipment. You can achieve the same result using the Pipsta printer. Take a look at Frederick’s blog post here.

Eyes

The Interactive Architecture Lab is based in University College London and they have been working on producing a prosthetic suit called the Polymelia. It’s all about improving the human body through a series of prostheses… I think… it’s all a bit science-y and arty if you read their description here. Part of the Polymelia is the PolyEyes which is a massive great headset housing a Raspberry Pi Compute Module and uses two camera modules on motorised gimbals. You can see a video of the 'making of' below:

Decryption

The Turing-Welchman Bombe was a decryption machine used in World War II to decipher Enigma-encoded German messages. There is a real one running atBletchley Park.

New Zealander Simon Jensen visited Bletchley and decided that he wanted to build a replica of the machine, but in desktop form and using a Raspberry Pi.

He initially wrote the software on a home-made 6502 computer in BASIC and then ported the general algorithm to C++ on the Pi. He uses an Arduino to control three stepper motors which animate the dials on the front.

You can see a video of the working machine below and read a lot more about it on his blog, including a full account of the build.

Simon also built a wrist-mounted Enigma decoding machine using a tiny Arduino and OLED screen which is just lovely. You can read about that here.