Raspberry Pi Roundup - an amazing instant GIF camera, using NGINX and PHP and a connected picture frame

GIF Camera

Abhishek Singh has created this awesome GIF camera from two Raspberry Pis. Called the Instagif NextStep, a Pi 3 with a camera and preview screen records a short video clip and then transmits that clip to a Pi Zero which is then ejected in the form of a cartridge. The cartridge has its own Pi, battery and screen and displays the GIF recording.

All the parts are held together using 3D printed cases. You can see a video of it in action below and read a lot more about the build here. 

NGINX/PHP

Gus, over at PiMyLifeUp, has written this great tutorial to get your started with the NGINX web server. He goes through all the commands you’ll need to install it and everything you need to know to get the PHP language working with it correctly. Take a look here. For those of you who have never heard of NGINX, it is a lightweight web server that is considerably less resource-intensive than the more popular Apache.

Connected Picture Frame

Frederick Vandenbosch has taken a Raspberry Pi 3 and an Official Touch Screen and created a ‘connected picture frame’. The frame displays pictures which are periodically downloaded from Dropbox and allows the user to ‘like’ individual photos, thus indicating their favourites. These likes are sent over the Internet to the resin.io IoT service. The screen of the frame is turned off and on depending on the settings in the Raspberry Pi’s cron file. You can read more about how the project was done over at Element 14. You can see a video of the frame in action below: