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Raspberry Pi Roundup - use Philips Hue lights from Python, build a hexapod, making gates 'smart'
Philips Hue with Python
Tim Richardson has been experimenting with the Philips Hue range of connected lights. He’s got a set out in his shed Cabin and he wanted them to be controlled remotely from another Raspberry Pi (primarily so that people in the main house could ‘call him in’). He struck upon the idea of using a Pimoroni Touch pHat in the main house so that different colours were triggered in the Cabin when the buttons were pressed. This gives granularity over how urgent the ‘call’ is. He’s used and adapted the phue library and developed some custom scripts. All the instructions, and the code, are available on Github. You can get hold of Hues by doing a quick search on Amazon! They’re not cheap, but they’re great fun!
Hexapod
Roland Pelayo has written up his project in which he creates a hexapod walking robot with a Raspberry Pi for control. He’s used a piece of acrylic as the main chassis and then fashioned legs out of strips of aluminium. The servos are powered by AA batteries whilst the Pi is powered by a 5V “lipstick” power bank. He’s added an ultrasonic distance sensor for autonomous operation. The software is Python on the back end and he’s also created a PHP/Javascript front end to operate it manually. A write-up of the project is available here, the code is available from GitHub and you can see a video of it in action below:
Smart Gates
Evghenii has developed a system that automates the process of recognising cars and opening gates based on who they are. The system, which uses a Raspberry Pi, an IP camera and some relays plus a mixture of Python (including OpenCV), shell scripting (I can feel a headache building already) and Telegram messaging has the following principles of operation:
- The car drives up to the gates.
- Camera reads the car plate numbers.
- Checks the read number with the database; if it finds one, then it opens the gate and lets the car pass.
- Each car at the gates is photographed, then a photo is sent to the Telegram application with the car plate number and its status.
- Telegram bot has the ability to open and close the gates, take a current photo and add an unknown car to the database.
