Raspberry Pi Roundup - a retro gaming IKEA table, a Santa Detector and a tea-making robot

IKEA Retro

Matt Hawkins has taken a reclaimed IKEA Gulliver table, added an old VGA monitor and loads of arcade buttons and created himself a Raspberry Pi-powered arcade console. He’s written the whole thing up over on his blog, Raspberry Pi Spy, including a list of materials and construction method and you can read more there. See a video of the build below:

Santa Detector

Dr Adrian Rosebrock has written several tutorials on deep learning with Python image searches. Well, now he’s used a Raspberry Pi and deep-learning system Keras to develop a video stream detector that alerts you when Santa Claus enters the frame and flashes the lights on a Pi Hut Christmas Tree.

You can see more in the video below and read more on his blog which features an extensive tutorial.

Teasmade

In recent Channel 4 documentary Guy Martin Versus the Robot Car, they had a need to construct a robotic teasmaid. Called R2‑Tea2, and built by Running in the Halls, the teasmaid uses an Adafruit 16-channel PCA9685 PWM/servo board (USA/UK) and 2 H-bridge DC motor drivers to control the various motors. Communication is achieved via SMS to the Raspberry Pi by using Twilio and Google Dialogflow to interpret the commands. You can read more about this project over at The MagPi.