Raspberry Pi Roundup - a Spiderman Twitter monitor, a home alarm system and a personal trainer

Spiderman Twitter monitor

Maker and Educator Spencer Organ has recently re-launched his website and can now be found at www.themakercupboard.space. As part of the re-launch, he’s blogged about his latest project – a Spiderman-themed lamp which changes colour when he is mentioned in a Tweet. He’s used the Pimoroni Blinkt for illumination (also available here) and the Twython Python library to communicate with Twitter. Everything’s connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero W for connectivity. A very nice project that shows what you can do with a little bit of programming and some know-how. Take a look at the code and build details here.

Touchscreen Home Alarm

Colin O’Dell has taken a Raspberry Pi Zero W, an Adafruit 3.5″ touchscreen, a PIR motion sensor and a 3D-printed enclosure and created a home alarm control panel. The system uses Z-Wave door sensors which send MQTT messages to the Pi via the Home Assistant open-source home automation platform. The PIR sensor is used to only activate the screen when someone is near – thus further reducing the power requirements. It’s an ingenious system and you can read more about it here and see a video below.

Personal Trainer

Richard Hayler likes to keep fit but his recent job change has meant that he unable to get to fitness sessions with an instructor. He now exercises in his back garden but wanted some way of having a visible and audible cue to his programme of exercises. Enter the Raspberry Pi. Richard’s taken a Raspberry Pi Zero, Pimoroni Scroll pHAT HD, a Pico HAT Hacker, a couple of buttons and a buzzer to make his own Pi-rsonal Trainer. The exercises are programmed in and the buzzer sounds when he needs to move onto the next one. The Scroll pHAT is used to display the current exercise and the whole thing is portable thanks to USB battery pack. Read more about the build here and see a video of it in action below: