Author Archives: clive

Raspberry Pi car computer

via Raspberry Pi

Raspbian running in the dash of a Ford Focus

Last century I spent weeks researching car computers. I wanted mp3s, videos and access to Notepad on the road. I wanted my car to respect and love me, just like KITT loved David. I wanted it to shout, “Right on tiger!” when I achieved an optimum MPG and to flash up encouraging messages like, “Hello Clive, might I say that you are driving very handsomely today” on a heads-up display.

Sadly it was never to happen. The reality was that you needed a PC the size of a coypu in the boot; an industrial 12/240v inverter; a 15″ CRT monitor strapped to your dash; and hawseholes in your bulkheads. And after a week of constant rebooting halfway through Captain Sensible’s Happy Talk, your hard drive failed because of the vibration and your battery discharged for good.  (I gave up and bought a 32Mb Diamond Rio and a hi-tech cassette adapter instead.)

Back in the 21st century, Derek Knaggs at Flamelily I.T has made the thing of my dreams: a low cost, low maintenance, general purpose car computer. There are other Pi-based car computers about but we especially liked this one because it’s simple, cheap and it looks like a factory fit. Very smart.

A quick swap of SDs and Raspbmc meets all of your multimedia needs

The Raspberry Pi is stored in the centre console and all wires routed underneath. Audio is fed through the aux socket of the car’s radio so no additional hardware is needed for this. A wifi dongle provides internet connectivity on the move via a mobile phone hotspot.

Neatly tucked away in the console — note the wifi dongle for internet on the move.

Full details including a shopping list are on Derek’s blog. I’m off to make one.

Long term, deep water, satellite connected ocean monitoring system

via Raspberry Pi

Conservation, hackspaces and Raspberry Pis. And sharks. How could this not be the blog of the day? Gary Fletcher of ZSL sent us this report.
—

Marine Conservation Camera

ZSL have developed low cost cameras to monitor marine biodiversity in large marine protected areas (MPAs) using the $35 Raspberry Pi single board computers and standard webcams and running opensource Motion tracking software. ZSL reached out to UK hackspaces to help design the cameras and achieved unprecedented economy and features.

 Why Raspberry Pi?

Traditionally it has been incredibly difficult to capture events underwater – all of the usual apparatus such as PIR/heat, infrared and ultrasonic sensors simply do not work underwater. The Raspberry Pi literally opened up a new door with its low power consumption and processing power. It allowed us to deploy a solution which really fits the bill and without it would have been very troublesome to achieve!

Hardware

Each camera was deployed on an anchored buoy. Mounted directly onto the buoys were two solar panels for charging two deep cycle 90Ah lead-acid gel batteries, the aerial, and a waterproof box containing the communications system. This was then connected to a 50m SWA cat-5 cable running down to the pressure vessel containing the camera itself.

Pressure Vessel

The cameras are designed to operate at depths between 20 and 50 meters. Rlab’s (Reading Hackspace) Ryan White suggested basing the design around a clear polycarbonate tube, with machined HDPE end caps secured by threaded rods and double o-rings. One end-cap had a threaded hole which SWA cat- 5 cable was run though, anchored to the inside and then potted. This cable runs the power and communications.

BuildBrighton’s Mike Poutney and Paul Strotten machined the endcaps on their lathe and offered some great technical advice which was very well received.

The outer pressure vessels easily survived a 100m pressure test in a hydrostatic chamber. It should go significantly deeper had the internal structure not failed at that point.

Internal Structure

Rlab’s (Reading Hackspace) Barnaby Shearer designed the internal support structure. This was laser cut from 3mm acrylic. The designs were done in 3D in OpenSCAD to check all the components fitted together, then projected into 2d for laser cutting. The acrylic was glued with tensol.

Cable waterproofing

The junction box was 3d printed and then sealed using potting compound and left to dry for some time also forming a mechanical join between the inside and the cable gland.

Communications

Attached to the buoy in a waterproof case was a Raspberry Pi to coordinate the communications. This had an Ethernet link to the Raspberry Pi in the pressure vessel. It also had a WiFi dongle running in access point mode to allow easy monitoring and reconfiguration form the research vessel. The Pi also has a serial connection to an Iridium satellite modem so it can stream pictures of the images captured.

The satellite image transfer software was specially developed by Cambridge Consultants and the equipment and satellite bandwidth for this trip was kindly sponsored by Iridium.

Electronics

Attached to the bottom Pi was an Eve board to provide the Pi a RTC and a temperature sensor. Also attached was Ciseco’s Humble Pi hosting an AVR and a mosfet to to turn the Pi off at night (and critically back on each morning). This Pi wake was developed by Miles and Matt from Ciseco, who make an amazing range of Raspberry Pi and microelectronics and are well worth a look – http://www.ciseco.co.uk/

These boards were slightly modified to handle a HackHD camera via the AVR so we could capture high definition footage as well as stills.

The boards were assembled at Nottingham Hackspace.

Camera

The camera used is the Microsoft LifeCam Cinema HD, a cost effective camera conforming to the UVC specification. The only gotcha proved to be that it seems to only respond to a few ‘magic’ exposure settings (5,10,20,39,78,156,312,625,1250,2500,5000,10000,20000), and you have to wait 100ms and reset the brightness after any exposure change.

Software

Rlab (Reading Hackspace), Gary Fletcher and Doug Snead provided a simple command line program to control the camera, and a slimmed down version of MJPEG-Streamer optimized for this camera and with some additional time stamping.

This stream then fed into Motion which starts saving the frames as JPEGs after it detects an event. The JPEGs are then rsynce’d up to the top Pi (backups are always a good thing). ImageMagick then thumbnails and montages the images for efficient sending over the (slow) satellite link.

Stereo Vision

The project did spur off onto some stereo vision development work with Doug Snead and Gary Fletcher but could not be completed in time for deployment. It was hoped that it would be possible to develop this solution as so it could automatically size the passing fish to add to our conservation data.

Image showing the accurate sizing of a fish tied to the ceiling flapping in front of an oscillating fan.

What did it Look Like

The deepest ever Pi?

At 50 meters deep – could this be the deepest Pi to date?

Where was it Deployed?

The system was tested at ZSL in London Zoo behind the scenes and then went onto to open Ocean tests in the largest marine protected area in the world, the Chagos Archipelago.

Gary Fletcher and Barnaby Shearer test the camera at ZSL London Zoo, behind the scenes

Results

Well as you can see the results speak for itself, but there is still quite a lot of development work to do but once these sentient units are complete, it will offer a low-cost monitoring system that, when deployed as a network, will greatly expand ocean areas that can be observed.

For those that would like a little further reading on the actual deployment, please have a look here on the Chagos Trust website http://chagos-trust.org/projects/latest/feb-2013-expedition/battling-heat

Acknowledgements

Gary Fletcher, Barnaby Shearer, Ryan White, Richard Ibbotson, Doug Snead, Paul Strotten, Mike Pountney, Miles Hodkinson, Matt Lloyd, Adam Markwell, Gary Fletcher Senior, Anna Fletcher, Charles Turner, Marty Morriss, David Curnick, Matthew Gollock, Heather Koldewey, Alasdair Davies, Charles and Anne Shepard, Yannick Mandarin, Ronan Roche, Reece Pitts, Richard Traherne, Marion Campbell, Jonathan Pallant, Ant Skelton.

Raspberry Jam at the National STEM Centre York, Saturday 8th June 2013

via Raspberry Pi

A post from Mr Raspberry Jam himself, Alan O’Donohoe.  This one promises to huge and fabulous, and the National STEM Centre is an outstanding venue. I am strangley drawn to joining the trans-Pennine convoy from Preston.

“You may have seen that we are holding a big Raspberry Jam in York on Saturday 8th June, 3 weeks today. Tickets are available here.

I’ve been working with the folks at the National STEM Centre there to help establish a presence in Yorkshire for Raspberry Jams. There are a lot of people in Yorkshire who have bought Raspberry Pi computers or who have not bought one but are interested in discovering just what you can do with them and this event is to give them a taste of the Raspberry Pi.

This event is going to be much larger than our regular Raspberry Jam events and we know that people  are travelling from far across the UK to attend. I will be travelling in a convoy of cars from Preston bringing old friends and new friends on the journey across the Pennines. Road-trips like these add an enormous amount to the whole experience.

Our busy programme of talks, demonstrations, stalls and hands-on classes is now filling up. We are delighted to have Pete Lomas of the Raspberry Pi foundation speaking and leading a workshop, he is the gentleman who actually designed the Raspberry Pi. We also have Amy Mather the 14 year old who learnt how to program Conway’s Game of Life on the Raspberry Pi, her film on YouTube has attracted over 27000 views.

If you look at our programme , you will see that we have a wide range of classes from how to switch on a Raspberry Pi to building weather stations, interfacing, networking, robotics, game making for all the family and programming in Python. David Whale will be running a workshop on how you can set up an after school Raspberry Pi club.

‘import random’, the start of great game! A Raspberry Jam programming class.

We hope to attract a diverse range of people to attend this family friendly event:

  • Teachers - who want to know if the Raspberry Pi is something they can use to support the teaching of Computing
  • Families - who together want to develop and nurture an interest in technology and computing
  • Hobbyists - who want to meet other people with a desire to share what they have been doing with their Raspberry Pi
  • Anyone - who has an interest in the Raspberry Pi at any level.

If you have never been to the National STEM centre before, this is a fantastic opportunity to come and discover what is there http://www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/

Minecraft in the classroom?

via Raspberry Pi

Last week I ran a short session at Campus London with a roomful of students from local schools. Only one of the students had seen a Raspberry Pi before and only a couple had used a command line interface or seen a computer program. In just over an hour they learned how to set up the Raspberry Pi, did a bit of Linux and then hacked Minecraft using Python. Here’s what they thought of it:

“I used a raspberry pi and it showed me how exciting and useful new technology can be. Also learning simple coding was very useful and made me want to learn more. It made me more interested in technology and coding. It made me really consider my careers options involving technology.” —William

“This has pushed me to finish my game I am currently developing.” —Joseph

“It has made me interested about learning coding. I have realised coding isn’t as hard as I thought.” —Lara

“I want to learn more about programming, because it was really interesting.” —Ellie

“The most important thing I learned was how to use Raspberry Pi.” —Finley

Running minecraft from the command line

“The most important thing I learned was how to change the commands to Mine Craft.” —Harjoat

“We had a go using a device called a Raspberry Pi which let us hack into a game and let us give it commands. It was really fun and exciting to learn all these new things.” —Jasmine

Reading these comments makes me smile, it was a fantastic session and shows what you can learn in short amount of time. A few lessons jump out from the feedback:

  1. When given the opportunity, most young people find computing to be a powerful and exciting thing.
  2. Everyone gets something different out of learning how to tell a computer what to do.
  3. Play is a powerful way to learn and computers are a good way to play.

These lessons are hardly new—it’s where Logo, Scratch and Lego Mindstorms come from—but what has changed is the accessibility and opportunity. With a £30 computer and a free game you can learn computer science in a beautiful, constructionist sandbox. (“Why dig when you can code?” “Are you an Alpha or an Epsilon?” “Hack with your brain, not with your pickaxe.” And other rubbish aphorisms coming soon to a T-shirt near you.) Quite simply, you can teach yourself to think in powerful ways while messing about. I don’t know about you, but as a teacher I think that this is quite profound.

Hacking Pi Minecraft using the API and Python.

I’m going to blog more about Pi Minecraft in future; I think that its potential as a teaching and learning tool is huge.  I’ll be writing lesson plans for it and hopefully not just computing lessons: Martin O’Hanlon’s analogue clock for example would be a brilliant to teach trig and geometry in the constructionist stylee. If anyone out there—teachers, programmers, Notch, whoever—want to help then get in touch. The School of Minecraft has a nice ring to it don’t you think?

P.S. Campus is an amazing place: if you are a tech start-up or entrepreneur (or would like to be!) and can get down there, check it out. I love it.

Raspberry Pi Competition Results

via Raspberry Pi

A few months ago PA Consulting Group ran a competition that challenged young people to make the world a better place using a Raspberry Pi. Last Wednesday I went along to help judge the 14 teams who made it to the final.

Walking into the presentation room there was a real creative buzz as the contestants set up their projects and carried out last minute tweaks. They were excited and nervous and proud to have made something both cool and useful. The room was suffused by the Essence of Awesome that I’d love to put in an atomiser and spray on people who proudly tell me that they don’t see the point of the Raspberry Pi.

It was also great to see mixed and all-girl teams well represented and something that we need to see more of.  The creative side of computing often gets overlooked but was very evident here.  As well as writing code, the contestants had built mini wired-up houses; roving robots; prototypes from Lego; hacked an energy monitor; hooked up RFID sensors to time races and built lots of other practical computing stuff that we think is a powerful hook to get people into computing.

Despite what Hollywood would have us believe, computing isn’t about millions of lines of scrolling, arcane code: it’s about concepts and ideas and it’s about solving problems. The fun bit for me is in taking an idea and making it real. What was once only in your head is now alive and kicking in the real world. Better still, you can easily share your creation with the rest of the world via the Net. It doesn’t get much better than that if you like making things. What all of the entries had in common was a useful idea plus a level of creativity that the Raspberry Pi always seems to encourage.

The winners

8-11 years The Richard Pate School who designed a system to help elderly or disabled people answer the door. A great idea that was well thought out and we were impressed by the teamwork.

12-16 years: Dalriada School with their web-controlled pill dispenser. We were impressed with the professional level of research and prototyping as well as the clever idea.

Dalriada School’s brilliant pill dispenser. Various prototypes (front) are made from Lego and 3d-printed.

16-18 years: Team Meteoros from Westminster School, whose AirPi gathers air quality data and provides a web interface for monitoring and analysis.  The judges loved the teamwork, passion and the potential (each AirPi will feed information to a central server). It was my personal favourite: I’ll be making one with my son to stick in our garden and will blog about this as we put it together. Full build instructions and how to get involved are on their site.

AirPi: senses 99.9% of all known stuff

Open category: UNOP who reverse-engineered the communication protocol of an off the shelf electricity monitor to make better use of the data. I loved the hacker ethos: “this doesn’t do what I want it to so I’m going to make it better.”

These projects were a taster of exactly what the Raspberry Pi Foundation set out to do and we look forward to see more and more of this as people get a chance to mess about on an open and accessible platform. We want what was happening in that room to start happening in schools and clubs and homes everywhere.

So congratulations to the winners, thanks again to PA Consulting for running a quite brilliant competition and a special thanks to all of the young people who showed us yet again that given the opportunity and a Raspberry Pi they will surprise us with their ideas, creativity and tech skills. It was a pleasure to be there.

N.B. I have used the words ‘creative’ and ‘creativity’ a lot. I make no apologies. Get a Raspberry Pi. Get creating. I’m off to pitch Essence of Awesome™ to Chanel.

Scouts land in the Fubra Universe

via Raspberry Pi

Scout groups pop up regularly on the Raspberry Pi blog. The special mix of enthusiastic young people, talented leaders and technology makes for brilliant projects that really sum up why the Raspberry Pi was created. The 2nd Aldershot Scout Group’s project is particularly splendid: roving robots, chicken wire, papier mache, programming, Raspberry Pis and more. It doesn’t get much better than that— we love it!

Hannah Bird of Fubra tells us what they’ve been up to:

—

On Monday 26th November the 2nd Aldershot Scout group landed in the Fubra Ltd offices to launch stage 2 of the Fubra Universe project.

The Fubra Universe project is a scheme set up by Fubra Ltd to introduce children to programming.  Once the children have learnt basic programming on a Raspberry Pi workstation then they will be able to program a mini Mars Rover around a Mars terrain that the children created.  The project has started with the 2nd Aldershot Scouts as it helps them achieve their IT badge.  If it is a success then it may be rolled out nationally.

During the first stage of the Fubra Universe project the team set up 10 Raspberry Pi workstations for the Scouts to use for their annual Jamboree on the Internet.  This event introduced the Scouts to Raspberry Pis and the workstations they will be using to program the mini Mars Rover in the new year.

Workstations ready for setup

This week’s second stage got the children working on the Raspberry Pi workstations again but this time to learn some programming.  Using Scratch the children made a cartoon version Psy (the man behind the most memorable song in the world right now) dance to his song Gangnam Style.  A few of the whiz kids sped through the course and made some cheeky amendments to the program, making Psy a sniper’s target for shooting practice!

Programming in Scratch

While half of the Scout group worked on destroying a poor old cartoon version of Psy, the other half got their hands dirty creating a Mars terrain.  They created the terrain out of MDF, chicken wire, boxes, newspaper and papier mache.  In the new year, once the children have learnt more about programming, they will be able to program a mini Mars Rover and navigate the robot over the terrain they created.

It was a particularly messy evening creating the terrain but the children (and supervising adults) seemed to love an excuse to get their hands dirty throwing glue and paper over the terrain.  They also got into creating some lumps and bumps in the terrain to make it more realistic.  Since the event the Scout leaders said they got some great feedback from the parents of the Scouts, many of whom told them their children could not stop talking about the project.

Making a Mars-scape from chicken wire and papier mache

This coming Monday stage 3 of the project will be initiated; painting the Mars terrain with sand and spray paint and starting the children on a Codecademy course.  Follow @FubraUniverse to keep up to date with the project.

Guest post #8: School trip to Sony UK Tec by Lucy Bunce

via Raspberry Pi

Since summer 2012 the Raspberry Pi has been produced in the UK, specifically in the Sony factory in Pencoed, South Wales.  As the school I teach in (Y Pant Comprehensive) is about 4 miles away I decided to arrange a trip for the GCSE Computing class.  Richard Wilkins, Senior Manager thankfully thought this was a great idea so on 13th November we went for a tour of the facility, including the Raspberry Pi production line.

For most students this was their first visit to a high tech manufacturing facility.  Donning anti-static jackets and shoes, we had the full tour. The main Sony product manufactured in Pencoed is their range of broadcast cameras.  They have a clean room where dust particles are measured in order to produce high quality optical blocks. Sony also have a repair centre onsite and students were surprised to learn that the PSP one of them had sent back for repair would have been fixed here.

We had to wear anti-static jackets before entering the factory

Utilising the expertise, equipment and space in Pencoed, Sony also offer Contract Electronic Manufacturing – such as the Raspberry Pi.  They are now producing around 16,000 Raspberry Pis a week and employing 30 people on the production line.We followed a batch of 6 Raspberry Pis up the production line and saw how the basic boards arrive in the factory 6 to a board.

Raspberry Pi circuit boards at two different stages of production

Students saw the solder paste squeegeed onto the boards through a mask, then the high speed robotic arms attaching the smaller components from tape reels. The larger components are then fitted in a separate machine which moves at a slower pace to avoid knocking them out of position.

The first stage of the construction process – applying the solder paste to the boards using a mask

The small components are bought in on reels and stuck to the solder by a robotic arm

At this point the boards are checked to ensure they have all the correct components before being put into the oven.  This carefully controlled environment fixes the solder.  The boards are run through a second production line to repeat the process for the underside (SD card mount etc.).  As you’d expect, Raspberry Pis are tested for quality control and functionality within the factory and students were interested to see that software has been written to do some of this.  Computing is used in the manufacture of computing, something that hadn’t occurred to many of the students.

Checking the finished product – here we can see the stacked RAM and CPU chips

As well as seeing the Raspberry Pi production we also saw some of the other products built there such as LED streetlighting.  For fun Sony showed us how some of their broadcast filming and editing kit can be used – with a green-screen allowing them to try out Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak!  We also saw some short film clips using the 4K projector which are maintained in Pencoed.

Free office space at Sony has been turned into a Business Incubation Centre hosting many smaller companies and tech startups.  One of these, Wales Interactive, gave us a great talk.  Their 15 or so employees (in roles as programmers, animators, artists and musicians) have created a number of games and apps for iOS, Android and consoles entirely in house.  Many of the staff are graduates of the University of Glamorgan’s BSc in Computer Games Development .  For my students, seeing just some of the study and employment options open to them within a few miles of home if they choose to follow a career in Computing was a real eye opener.

Sony are producing 16,000 Raspberry Pis a week

We don’t currently have Raspberry Pis in school (I’ve been making sure one of the IT suites is kitted out with USB keyboards and mice, and screens with DVI inputs first – we’re pretty much there).  One of the students has a Raspberry Pi at home and all are now looking forward to getting their hands on some at school.

Quote from a student, Gareth:

“I thought it was really nice to find out finally where my Raspberry Pi was made, and to see all the technology and effort it takes to make one.

I use my Raspberry Pi for many things including watching videos on YouTube and basic web browsing and some small bits of coding. I also like the program scratch which allows me to build fun but basic games in my free time which comes free with the Raspberry Pi. If the school were to get some Raspberry Pi’s I think it would be fun to learn to code, on and to experience a different OS than the standard windows that we are used to.”

–Lucy Bunce, Y Pant Comprehensive School

A personal Raspberry Pi retrospective

via Raspberry Pi

One year ago I had just joined the Raspberry Pi forum. I’d heard about this little, low cost computer that you could plug into a screen and, well, just do stuff. As a teacher of ICT and Computing this interested me a lot, especially bearing in mind the Foundation’s mission and the state of Computing and ICT in many UK schools.

Back then I was one of 3000 forum members; now I’m one of 42000, many of them actively involved in everything from learning to code to robotics to near space flights to… well, just look at a typical Raspberry Pi Grab Bag. Amazing, inspiring stuff. Despite hiccups along the way—who can forget the server-crashing launch?—the Raspberry Pi is unequivocally a great British success story. In fact it’s great success story full stop (that’s ‘period’ for youse lot elsewhere).

It bears repeating that this time last year the Foundation thought that they might sell just 10000 Raspberry Pis: they are currently well on their way to a million. And whilst the Raspberry Pi itself may not be around in a few years’ time—the Foundation have always encouraged competition—something will fill this vital (important and invigorating) niche. The Raspberry Pi has set something profound in motion, and although we may not see the large scale benefits for some time, we will see them. As Eben says:

We don’t claim to have all the answers. We don’t think that the Raspberry Pi is a fix to all of the world’s computing issues; we do believe that we can be a catalyst.

So here I am on writing a eulogy to the Raspberry Pi on the Foundation’s very own blog. GAK! Doesn’t it make you puke? But I won’t apologise for that. My own site only had three visitors last year (and two of them were the cat stepping on F5) so what would be the point? Yes, I have gone mad for the blogging, just like my doctor warned me. And I’ve changed all the passwords (well, 123456 was rubbish) so that an embarrassed Liz can’t delete this.

There: I’m biased.  But I also genuinely think that if you have been part of this then you have been part of computing history, in the same way that us codgers who were around in the 80s were. (Teacher Tip: never try to impress teenagers by gushing, “I had ZX Spectrum you know—I used to spend all night typing hex listings in!”).

So this evening, before the plug is pulled on me, I’d like to raise a glass of Blue Nun to Eben and Liz; the Raspberry Pi  Foundation; the volunteers; the developers; the contributors; and most of all you, the community. I hope that you feel a mild urge to do the same (at least toast yourself for flip’s sake: it’s a lovely, warm confidence booster.)

I’m off now. Cheers, and thanks for being around for the past fortnight.

clive

[Disclaimer: this piece is personal opinion and is completely and utterly biased. Anyone commenting that I am completely and utterly biased will be agreeing with me, which I enjoy. No money changed hands in the writing of this panegyric (for that is, of course, what it is.) In fact I only wrote it so I could use the word ‘panegyric’ in a blog. Skills badge!]

 —

> e
Your path is blocked by a floor waxer driven by Mooncake the cat

>examine Mooncake
Mooncake gives you the look that only cats can:  an oxymoronic glare of pure innocence and deep, predatory malevolence. Around her neck is a curious RFID tag.

>get tag
Mooncake gently bats your hand a way. It’s a casual gesture, but one clearly designed to tell you, “I have razor sharp, retractable claws you know.”

>i
You have That Thing Your Aunt Gave You Which You Don’t Know What It Is, a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, a laser pointer and a lardy cake.

>shine laser pointer at floor
Mooncake leaps down and chases the red dot like a cat chasing a laser pointer. Whilst she is distracted you quickly unclip the curious RFID tag from her neck.

>e
Back door

>say to Thorin “unlock door with curious tag”
Thorin takes the RFID tag from you and waves it at the door. As if by magic a small flap swings open.

>climb through flap
The opening is too small.

>climb through flap
No, really – there’s no way you’ll get through there.

>climb through flap
You stick your head through the hole, followed by one arm. You are now wearing a door. (We did tell you, but you didn’t listen.)

>lubricate flap with lardy cake
You slather the fat-rich dough around the frame and then rub some on yourself for good measure. After some panicked wriggling you manage to squeeze through with only a few scrapes. You find yourself in an overgrown garden. The only exit is east through a small wooden gate.

>e
*** CONGRATULATIONS, YOU HAVE ESCAPED!! ***

Your score is 3 of a possible 100, in 2493 moves. This score gives you the rank of complete and utter dullard.

Would you like to: RESTORE, RESTART or QUIT?

Guest blog #7: Bird table webcam by Francis Agius

via Raspberry Pi

“You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird … So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” – Richard Feynman (well, his dad Melville really)

And how do you see what the bird is doing? With a Raspberry Pi of course. Francis Agius tells us how :

—

A robin visits the table: click for video

Inspired by other web cam posts I wanted to set up a web cam that I could use to record my garden bird table. New to this sort of thing there were several hurdles to overcome! The main two were getting a reliable wireless set up and also being able to run the Raspberry Pi off a battery so I could leave it running free standing outdoors. I also wanted if possible to use Arch Linux as it is a very lean OS, less than 10 seconds to boot up! For wireless network I have used a Tplink WN722N USB stick, this is supported by Arch Linux without any extra difficult setup.

The innards

For power I already had a spare 12 volt car battery and found a fantastic DC to DC converter at Maplin which has two outputs, USB 5v at 0.6 amps good for the the RPi and a second 5 volt output at up to 3 amps perfect for a powered USB hub which runs the camera and the WiFi stick, making it possible to run the whole setup from a single 12 volt car battery power supply. There are probably cheaper ways to get 5 volts from a 12 volt car battery but the Maplin product is very tidy and easy to use. My Raspberry Pi is running Arch Linux with additional packages motion and ffmpeg installed, there are lots of post on how to set these up. I can forward info on my setup if this this will help anyone.

Sealed up and ready for action

So to summarize I am using Arch Linux running motion and ffmpeg, I use ssh connect to my Rpi and start motion running, pictures are captured to the Rpi sd card. On my windows machine Winscp is installed which is great for moving the captured files from the Raspberry Pi to windows.

Software

Raspberry Pi

  • Arch Linux
  • Motion
  • Ffmpeg

Windows

  • putty for ssh connection
  • Winscp to transfer files

Hardware

  • Tplink WN722N USB wifi adapter
  • Sweex Blackberry Black Usb Hd camera
  • Advent powered USB hub
  • Maplin A79 GW DC to DC converter
  • Old 12 volt car battery
  • Food storage container

Sunday Grab Bag

via Raspberry Pi

They said that it could never be done! But here it is: a Sunday grab bag.  A little something to read while sitting in your shreddies, eating a bowl of Shreddies and singing “It’s a Sunday Grab bag! Doodle ooo doo, doodle ooo do do do doooooo!” to the tune of The Final Countdown. Sorry if it’s a bit rushed — I’m off to the zoo to have poo flung at me by doolally chimps.

—

A one-button audiobook player for the visually impaired

First up is a project that embodies the keep-it-simple principle. I love the elegance and simplicity of this and the fact that it’s extremely useful.

Simple. Elegant. Useful.

Its creator, Michael Clemens, says, “This little Raspberry Pi based project is a gift for my wife’s grandmother for her 90th birthday. Being visually impaired, she is hard to entertain but loves to listen to audiobooks. The problem is, that she isn’t able to handle a ghetto blaster or MP3 player. The solution to this problem was – tadaaaah – a one button audiobook player”

—

Differences between the Rev1.0 and Rev2.0 Raspberry Pi schematics

Over on the ever-useful Wiki, AndrewS details the differences between the two versions, with a very smart and thorough schematic comparison.  “I’m really pleased with how well the ‘graphical difference display’ worked out”, he says. “I also spent a chunk of time adding ‘Rev2.0’ columns (amongst other wiki edits)”.

Raspberry Pi Rev 1.0 and 2.0 schematics overlaid

Thanks for the hard work Andrew and to everyone else contributing to the Wiki.

—

Raspberry Pi driving a huge LED panel

Petr Jakeš is using the Raspberry Pi to drive a large LED panel. He says, “We are using SPI port to control 6144 LEDs (192×32 matrix). The hardware is still flaky a little bit (see glitches in the left bottom corner), but consider it as a proof of concept :D ”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Petr is going to post some details on this when he gets a chance!

—

Emulation isn’t just for games consoles:  the ICL1900

Last month David Holdsworth gave a talk on software preservation to the Computer Conservation Society in the Science Museum in London, where he demonstrated a Raspberry Pi emulating the venerable ICL1900 mainframe and running the George3 operating system and the RSRE Malvern Algol68-R compiler.  You can try it out for yourself. The page also has David’s presentation on software conservation.

—

Pi Cars: Raspberry Pi controlled RC cars

If there is a better way to introduce children (well, anyone) to physical computing and programming than using Scratch to make RC cars skid about the house? No, there isn’t! I’m definitely going to be trying this myself and I’m already wondering if it will work with helicopters. Pi Cars currently have five of their cars to give away to people who come up with the best ideas of what they will do with them (Raspberry Pis not incuded!)

Connecting the Raspberry Pi to a radio transmitter

What do you really think of the Raspberry Pi? No, really!

via Raspberry Pi

[update 25/11/2012: The survey is now finished. Thanks to everyone who contributed.]

By popular demand: a follow up survey with free-comment fields

Following your feedback from the original survey, the MBA team from Cambridge Judge Business School would like to pick your brains once more. The team were hugely impressed by the response and told us, “We greatly appreciate all of the feedback we have received from the community in terms of survey responses and comments on the webpage.”

The short follow up survey is a response to your requests for a chance to air your ideas and thoughts about the Raspberry Pi. It has a big free-text box at the end – so fill your boots! We’ll also post some preliminary data from the original survey here soon.

Adafruit’s new Raspberry Pi breakout kit: the Pi T-Cobbler

via Raspberry Pi

I have a recurring dream where I am ensconced in the Adafruit warehouse, rocking gently to and fro in the semi-darkness and occasionally reaching out to stroke some random electronics. And mewling. Is this normal? Why yes; yes, I think it is.

Adafruit keep on making great stuff for the Raspberry Pi and their latest product is a funky little breakout board called the Pi T-Cobbler.

Pi-T cobbler

The Pi T-Cobbler. T-shaped for clarity of labelling and overall friendliness

It’s based on the original Cobbler but is less compact and, well, T-shaped to make it easier to read the labels. It will break out GPIO, I2C and SPI pins from the Raspberry Pi header onto a solderless breadboard and looks the business if you fancy connecting your Raspberry Pi to the outside world.

Instructables Raspberry Pi Speed Challenge: the results!

via Raspberry Pi

Amanda from Instructables would like to thank everyone who entered their recent competition:

“The Instructables editors are proud to announce the winners of our two week Raspberry Pi Speed Challenge. In this contest we were looking for all types of content involving the Pi, this included projects, setup guides, troubleshooting tutorials, libraries/software, Raspberry Pi accessories, and more. We were really impressed by the quality of the projects that came in, and we had so many standout entries that we decided to hand out an extra second place prize!  The 1st place prize went to author meztek for his Raspberry Pi Powered Wearable Computer.

meztek's Raspberry Pi powered wearable computer

meztek’s Raspberry Pi-powered wearable computer

This wearable computer uses a pair of video glasses and a tiny keyboard/trackpad to browse the web wirelessly, type documents, remotely connect to meztek’s web server, and even check Gmail. Other winning projects included:

  • Voiceberry Pi by mrmath, a Raspberry Pi that can make free phone calls to anywhere in the US for free using Google Voice
  • Coffee Table Pi  by grahamgelding, a modern take on an arcade game cabinet built into an elegant coffee table enclosure
  • LapPi by SilverJimmy, a wireless and fully functional Raspberry Pi notebook inside a sleek aluminum case
  • Raspberry Pi Smart Target by noelportugal, a target shooting game that posts pictures and outcomes of gameplay to Twitter

All 25 entries can be found on the Raspberry Pi Challenge page. We’re looking forward to running more contests for Raspberry Pi enthusiasts, so stay tuned to our contest page for information about upcoming Raspberry Pi and electronics contests, and while you’re there be sure to check out the other Raspberry Pi projects on Instructables.

Thanks again to everyone who participated!”

—

We’d like to thank Amanda and Instructables for running this, along with everyone who entered. The creativity and the innovation of the entries was remarkable.

Elite: Dangerous — the next game in the Elite series

via Raspberry Pi

…and we could hardly mention Elite without mentioning Elite: Dangerous.

Over a quarter of a century after the original, David Braben of Frontier Developments has launched a Kickstarter project to develop Elite: Dangerous, the next game in the Elite series.

If funding is successful the game is planned to be released on the PC in March 2014. There’s a huge amount of information over on the Kickstarter page, so if you want to see this happen (we do!) or even have a planet named after you then head over and see what all the fuss is about.

elite dangerous docking

I was always rubbish at docking

Note: Mr Braben is also co-founder of a charitable Foundation that produces small, fruity computers. But we’re not bothered about that (I don’t think that the idea has legs myself).

—

Raspberry Pi Gaming Day draws to a close

I don’t think that I’ll be able to top the news of Elite: Dangerous easily so I hereby declare Raspberry Pi Gaming Day closed. Which is lucky because the 24 hours are nearly up.  A huge thanks to all of the contributors — there really is some fantastic stuff going on out there. We must do it again sometime…

How to play Elite on the Raspberry Pi

via Raspberry Pi

We could hardly have a Raspberry Pi Gaming Day without mentioning Elite. Pete Taylor shows how to run the iconic game on the Raspberry Pi. He says:

I grew up playing Elite – originally on a BBC B and then a few years later on it’s 32 bit successor the Archimedes, it was brilliant, addictive and years ahead of it’s time.

 

Elite running on Raspberry Pi

“It’s a bit stretched on my screen, but smooth and playable!”

The game “runs as smoothly as I remember, and is very playable”. At last, a chance to improve on my “Mostly Harmless” rating (and I think I only got that by cheating) — thanks Pete!