Raspberry Pi Roundup, featuring a door that recognizes callers, a SenseHAT C++ library and a Wizarding World clock

Cognitive Callers

Masato Sudo, a software engineer in the Microsoft Windows IoT team has developed a system which recognises a person approaching a door and then unlocks (or doesn’t) accordingly.

A standard USB camera captures the image, the Pi takes the image in and, using the Microsoft Cognitive Services API, identifies the person.

“It’s a prototype that identifies the visitor.” If the door recognises the visitor, it will greet them by name, and the door will be unlocked and opened.

If they aren’t identified, the door remains firmly locked. The opening of the door is controlled by a GPIO pin that sends a signal to a relay. The code is C# and was written using Visual Studio.

You can read more here and see a full tutorial of how he did it, including the code, here.

SenseHAT / C++ / C#

Achilleus from Samnium has developed a light framework for the Raspberry Pi 3 for reading data from multiple sensors and sending them over the network. It’s called IoTWork.Reader and was developed in C++ and C#; it can be executed using Mono.

The code is available on GitHub. The current release supports the SenseHAT and Achilleus has made pre-packaged binaries which are also located on GitHub.

The application is customizable: you can write your own sensor handlers and configure them via the XML file.

More documentation is available on GitHub.

Wizarding World Clock

Pat Peters from Omaha, Nebraska has taken inspiration from the Wizarding World’s famous Weasley Clock and built his own Internet of Things clock, using a Raspberry Pi (a B+ in this case). Tracking the locations of both himself and his wife, the clock’s Pi subscribes to an MQTT broker service that their phones publish events to using the OwnTracks GPS app. Added into the mix is an Adafruit ServoHAT and some servos to move the hands. He has published how to do it on an Instructable, so you can have your very own clock!