Raspberry Pi Roundup - a cosmic dart board, an out-of-this-world activity board and a virtual friend

Darts

An Imgur user and his brother have built a dartboard scorer surround and inside is buried a Raspberry Pi. Button presses to keep track of the score are detected by an Arduino Leonardo and these are then fed into a Pi which translates them into calls which keep track of the score on an external website. The website is then displayed on an old monitor by the Pi, using Chromium in kiosk mode, to show the scores. This seems needlessly complicated to me, but it’s a nice make. You can see more photos of the build here.

Activity Board

Michael Teeuw has done a fantastic job on this interactive control panel for his son, Enzo. It uses a combination of Arduino and Raspberry Pi along with several other components including replacing LEDs inside buttons with Neopixels, an Adafruit Speaker Bonnet and a rotary encoder with Neopixel circle surround. It’s even got 3D printing and lasercutting, making it a Maker’s dream project. It’s amazing, and you can start reading his blog posts about the project here.

Virtual Friends

You’ll either love it, or you’ll hate it. That’s the most important thing about the Fribo, a Korean research project.

The Fribo is a black cat-alike construction with an in-built screen that, thanks to sensors and microphones, detects when someone arrives home and then broadcasts that to friends in the user’s list via a Raspberry Pi inside. These friends also have Fribo devices and they can respond to welcome the user home or send them a message.

As I said in the title… slightly creepy because it means that someone’s always “watching”. Not sure I’d like one, and I’m pretty sure it brings home all the perceived privacy concerns of Amazon Alexa or Google Home, but what do I know? It might, as the researchers state, help people who live alone to feel more connected to others.

You can read more on the IEEE website and see it in action below: