Raspberry Pi Roundup - a dual-sensor theremin, a sparkly pHAT and a bee counting Pi

Theremin

Robin Newman, who is an expert with Sonic Pi, has created a lovely theremin-like musical instrument using a Raspberry Pi. He has wired up two ultrasonic distance sensors to his Pi using a RasPiO Pro HAT and then created some Python code which reads the sensors and pipes the measurements into Sonic Pi to create sound. He can then vary the sound by holding his hands at different distances from the Pi. You can see it in action below and find out more about the project on Robin’s blog:

Go!

A programming language called ‘Go’ is pretty big news nowadays. Personally, it scares the heck out of me. Sooooo complicated, but what do I know? Some people like it. Tom Mitchell has taken Go and written a great script to communicate with the Pimoroni Scroll pHAT HD mounted on a Raspberry Pi Zero. He’s put a Pimoroni Button Shim in between the two boards to cycle through various modes, brightness and different parameters for the scenes. All-in-all, it creates a very attractive effect, shown above. Instructions on how to use the script can be found on GitHub.

What's the Buzz?

Mat Kelcey set-up a bee hive and wondered if there was a way to count the number of bees in the hive. This, he reasoned, would give him a good indication of the health of the hive and some interesting information for studying behaviour. He set-up a Raspberry Pi, a Pi Camera, some power circuitry and put it all inside a plastic tub. Power is supplied from a LiPo with a solar panel for charging. There’s a whole bunch of stuff on his write-up about image processing, neural networks and TensorFlow that I admit to not really understanding, but if you dig deep, there’s a tremendous amount of detail. You can read his write-up here and see his code on GitHub.