Raspberry Pi Roundup: a tweeting touchscreen, a musical instrument and a humanoid robot!

Tweeting Touchscreen

The Foundation have recently published a new tutorial which helps you to create your very own touchscreen photo booth which will tweet the photos. Dubbed “The All-Seeing Pi”, the contraption requires you to use the Raspberry Pi camera module, a touchscreen interface (such as the official touchscreen) and a few other components to read button presses. In doing the project, you will learn:

• How to set up a Raspberry Pi Camera Module
• How to connect buttons and a touchscreen display
• How to control GPIO pins with Python code
• How to control the Camera Module with Python code
• How to tweet a picture taken with the Camera Module

Take a look at the resource here.

Musical Instrument

Andy Grove has created a musical instrument by adding 8 ultrasonic distance sensors to a Raspberry Pi, via an Octasonic breakout board. The software, which is available on GitHub, is written in the Rust programming language and the synthesizer is based on FluidSynth, a piece of software I used myself in my Music Box project.

Take a look below at two videos of it in action. The first just uses piano samples:

whilst the second uses a larger area of instruments:

Humanoid Robot

I thought I’d share with you a post from Raspberry Pi magazine The MagPi about the GeRo, a humanoid robot that is controller by a Pi. German inventor Johannes Jaegers took inspiration from the Rapiro project but instead of an Arduino core, he used a Pi running ROS, the Robot Operating System. The robot features a metal skeleton and 3D-printed parts together with a custom circuit board to power the Pi and control the 17 individual servos from a battery. He has now documented the process of building the robot, which took him around two years, over on his website. Read the MagPi’s coverage here.