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 picture that looks almost nothing like what the camera saw! You can read more about the project here and see the code here.

Fire!

Mike Phillips has spinal muscular atrophy, leaving him only with the control of one eyebrow. However, this hasn’t stopped him creating a list of things to do that would rival most able-bodied “bucket lists”. One of the items on the list was to fire a gun, using nothing but his eyebrow. Bill Binko and the team from ATMakers took this wish and “made it so” by setting up a Glock 17 to be fired with a servo (after they’d cleared the experiment with the relevant authorities, of course!)

The interface with Mike’s eyebrow-controlled system was managed by using a Raspberry Pi Zero, an Adafruit Crickit and a custom circuit board to go between the two. A Pi camera was also used to enable Mike to ‘look down the sights’ and then take the shot.

You can see two videos below about the project and read more about it here.

Rotary

James West has taken an old rotary-style telephone and turned it into a Pi-powered jukebox.

To start with, he hooked the dialer up to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO and then used Dan Aldred’s code to count the pulses generated when the ring was turned. Having done this, he programmed the Pi to play different songs depending on which number had been dialled. He chose songs about phone calls or conversations, starting with Hanging on the Telephone by Blondiewhen you dial 1. The transfer of the Pi’s audio to the handset was achieved using a Pimoroni Speakerphat, with the volume dialled down (sorry) by simply adding a resistor.

You can see it working below and you can read more here. Take a look at other James West builds by clicking here.