Raspberry Pi Roundup - a portable trail camera, an e-ink status display and an animal habitat monitor

Portable Trail Camera

Gary has taken a Raspberry Pi 2, a Pi NoIR Camera and an Infrared LED light source and created a portable ‘trail camera’. A 12V power source provides the necessary juice for the LEDs and a PiBorg BattBorg steps the 12V down to 5V for the Raspberry Pi. There’s a bit of circuitry on a proto board to add buttons and LED indicators and the UI is shown on a small Adafruit TFT screen. You can read how he did it over on his blog.

MQTT Status

IoT enthusiast James Sutton has created this lovely e-ink status display using a Raspberry Pi Zero and a Pimoroni Inky pHAT. It uses an MQTT service to provide status updates to the display and there’s a web-based interface to change that status. You can read how he did it and see his code here. See a video of it in action below:

Animal Monitoring

Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM has been helping Marwell Zoo in Hampshire to develop an Internet-of-Things monitoring and control device for animals. More specifically, he has been developing a system that monitors the sleeping area of certain animals in the Zoo and controls the heating based on infra-red photographs. Using a combination of a Raspberry Pi, a Pi camera, Andy has developed a system which uploads the photographs and sensor readings to the Watson IoT platform which then would send a command to another system to control the heating. This is but the tip of the iceberg of this project write-up which is covered in more detail by Karen Lewis over on the IBM blog.