Raspberry Pi Roundup - a Doctor Who tribute, a Fartometer and a GPS-controlled GoPro

Canine Who?

James West‘s son is a big Doctor Who fan. So, his dad decided to build him a classic series-inspired K9 toy. He purchased some acrylic sheets and some other material and then fitted inside a Raspberry Pi Zero W with attached Speaker pHAT (to play sound effects with). The robotic part of the build was provided by a CamJam EduKit 3. You can read about the build over on his blog and see more photos and videos on Flickr. He has also uploaded the code to GitHub so you can see a GPIO Zero version of the EduKit 3 code!

Thwwwwwwp!

Dr Lucy Rogers has taken inspiration from IBM’s IoT HQ and created an ambient air quality sensor that works using MQTT messages through the IBM Watson IoT Quickstart Platform. Readings of the air are taken using a Raspberry Pi Zero and a Rehau USB stick ambient air sensor and then transmitted through Watson to a DIY GlowOrb made out of a Wemos D1 board. The orb glows green if the air quality is ‘good’ and red if the air quality is ‘bad’ (this is just based on the numerical value returned from the sensor). Instructions and code are available on IBM’s Internet of Things blog if you want to build your very own Fartometer.

GPS GoPro

Texas-based Computer Scientist Estefannie has rigged up a GoPro camera to take photographs of herself. The GoPro cable is fed into a backpack which houses a Raspberry Pi 3. The Pi has a GPS board connected to it and calculates the distance between where Estefannie is now and a list of stored co-ordinates. In the case of her test run, this was a collection of London landmarks. A good usage of velcro allows all the kit to stay in place!

She’s written the whole thing up on Hackster.IO and you can view that by visiting this page. You can visit Estefannie’s website here