Raspberry Pi Roundup - a security drone, a musical instrument and a VR gaming character moving via sensors

Security Drone

Max Kern has taken a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a camera module and some power circuitry and sensors and created a first-person viewpoint wheeled security drone, the ZeroBot Pro, an upgrade from the previous ZeroBot (without the Pro!). The software UI has been created using Node.js and Socket.io and the motors are controlled using PWM through the pigpio library. The hardware is packed inside a delightful 3D-printed chassis and he has open-sourced the whole design. The STL files are available on Thingiverse and he has uploaded a custom Raspbian image with all the software pre-installed which is available here on Hackaday.io, along with all the instructions you’ll need to build the robot. A brief walk-round of the robot can be seen below:

Touch Synthesizer

Called the Nsynth, this tablet-with-controls device is powered by a Raspberry Pi and accepts MIDI inputs which it then feeds through an openFrameworks app. The MIDI samples are then processed using the app according to whatever the user does with the controls. It uses “machine learning” to work out how to process the sounds using samples from Google. This is an open-source project from Magenta, a research group within Google, and all the files are available on GitHub.

You can see a demo of Google’s version below:

Virtual Reality Gaming

Jean Perardel has taken several Arduino Fio boards, 6-Degrees-of-Free sensors and a Wii Nunchuck and attached them to his body to detect movement and orientation. The signals are received by an Arduino Micro and a Raspberry Pi is then used to interpret the incoming data and produce a gamified virtual reality representation of the movement which it outputs over HDMI. You can read more over on Hackaday.io