Raspberry Pi Roundup - a compact commuting deck, a weather lamp and a security camera system

Commute Deck

Kerry Scharfglass was finding typical portable computers difficult to work with in confined spaces, such as on a plane or on a train. So, he decided to build his own which he called the Commute Deck. The main chassis is made from plywood and he created his own, custom, keyboard for the purpose (which uses a Teensy to read the key matrix) which was split in half on either side of a screen. The Raspberry Pi is the heart of the machine. He’s ended up with something which is part-laptop and part-cyberpunk device, although I’m not sure how great it will be for the restricted width of a plane seat! Read more over at Make.

Weather Lamp

“The Modern Inventor” has written a great Instructable which helps you to create your very own weather forecasting lamp called the Storm Glass. The lamp, which has been given the ability to simulate lightning, fog, rain and thunder using off-the-shelf parts is partly a glass tube and partly 3D-printed and houses a Raspberry Pi Zero. The Weather Underground API is used to read weather conditions from a location and then the weather is simulated inside the lamp. This really is pretty nifty, and quite beautiful. Take a look at the tutorial here.

Security system

The folks over at Diligence Technologies have written an interesting Instructable that can be used for simple home security. A Pi is connected to a camera module and then a piece of software written in Python is used to detect motion and then send a notification to you, via the PushBullet web service platform. Take a look at the tutorial here and look at their code here. A video walk-through is shown below: