Tag Archives: GPIO

Hackspace security system

via Raspberry Pi

NESIT is the New England Society of Information and Technology in Connecticut, and they have a made a security system for their hackspace that gives us terrible feelings of envy. Their old RFID door lock, powered by an Arduino, was getting old and came bundled with some problems: it didn’t allow for easy modifications to the database of users (the old setup wrote user information straight to the Arduino’s eeprom), couldn’t output video, and would have been expensive to hook up to the network; running its server all the time would have cost about $200 in electricity over a year.

Running a Pi for a year costs about $3.

So Will, one of the hackspace members, set to work getting a Pi interfacing with an RFID reader, and finding some housing for the whole setup. It had to be secure, lockable and robust: somehow he squirreled up an old outdoor telephone network box made of heavy-duty plastic, which he cleaned up, using a Dremel to modify the door of the box so it could accommodate an LCD screen originally intended for a car reversing system.

Before…

…after. Note glistening result of elbow grease application.

Guts

Will really went to town on this build. He could have stopped there, but has also made sure that the system will tweet when someone enters or leaves. It also monitors temperature, can be controlled from his phone, sends an email alert if someone tries to tamper with the case, and detects motion: if it spots someone walking past, it’ll play a short video about the hackspace.

NESIT’s put details of the build online, and have made this video of the system in action. We note that the “beep” you’re using doubles as an excellent cat-scarer, Will; I have the scratches to prove it.

Bird photography with a Raspberry Pi and a DSLR

via Raspberry Pi

Tricky things, birds. Even when you’ve got yourself sorted out with boxes and feeders to entice them into your garden, it can be very difficult to get a decent photograph – they don’t stay still for long, especially if they see you coming (and it is amazing just how adept birds are at spotting the slightest movement – the sort of movement you might make to operate the zoom lens on your camera, for example), and many feeding birds will only visit the table for a few seconds at a time, even if you’re well hidden.

Enter Adrian Bevan and his Raspberry Pi.

Adrian had built a shutter release for his Canon1000D SLR, and decided to extend his new knowledge by making a DIY remote release. He’s been activating it manually, but has also made instructions available for using it with a motion detector (Adrian’s currently using a webcam and a second Pi for this part of the kit), so that the SLR can fire automatically when the Pi it is attached to senses that there was a bird on the table using information streamed from the outdoor Pi.

Your best bet here is to set the camera up in continuous shooting mode so that it’ll take several shots over a few seconds once your target has been spotted. Adrian has put exhaustive instructions on making your own setup on his blog, complete with circuit diagrams and code, alongside some video of the shutter in action.

Speaking of birds, I was, sadly, nowhere near a camera when a sparrowhawk dropped out of the sky to disembowel a blue tit on my front lawn this morning. Rotten shame, that. Oh – and if anybody has any tips on how to stop my bird-feeders being reliably emptied within ten minutes of filling by a horde of marauding starlings, I’m all ears.

Adrian has used that old Pi hackers’ standby, Tupperware, to house the webcam, battery pack and associated Pi in a waterproof environment. Securely housing your DSLR outside in a way that means it won’t get wet but can still take pictures is, obviously, a bit trickier; his is, I think, set up indoors, pointing out of a window, with a whacking great zoom lens attached to the front. If you’ve any ideas on how to set up and leave a good camera outdoors without it getting wet or stolen, please let us know in the comments!

 

 

 

 

 

Oliver and Amelia make a bee box

via Raspberry Pi

Oliver is five, and has produced this lovely bee box for school. He did the modelling, the painting and some of the soldering, and had lots of help from his very talented big sister Amelia, who is seven and did all the programming for this project in Scratch.

bee box

The bee is made of clay, and has a magnet inside his body. His location is determined by some reed switches inside the box, which are connected to the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi, as are the LEDs in the flower and the hive. Amelia’s Scratch program, running on the Pi, then uses a TV to display what the bee’s up to (and, to a very enthusiastic Oliver’s great pleasure, emits a buzzing noise).

I mean it about the enthusiasm. Seriously. If you could bottle this stuff you’d make a fortune.

Full instructions on how to make your own bee box (it’s a really enjoyable project for parents to set up with their kids, and I’m sure you can think of a million ways to customise it) are available at Dad Stewart’s website, along with the Scratch code you’ll need, some GPIO instructions and a costed parts list.

Thanks to Oliver and Amelia from all of us at the Foundation – we are flapping our arms and shouting “BUZZ” right along with you.

Matt Richardson and the world’s smartest bike light

via Raspberry Pi

Our friend Matt from Make (whom I totally failed to hook up with for drinks when we were in NYC last month – sorry Matt! We’ll see you at Maker Faire San Mateo) has been busy. This demo is absolutely superb. He’s rigged up a light on the front of his bike that works as a headlight and as a projector to show what speed the bike’s travelling at – Matt has plans to add some more features and make the whole thing rather more beautiful, and we’ll be putting video of the finished article up here as soon as he’s ready.

Matt’s book, Getting Started with Raspberry Pi is published by Make – check it out!

Flag-waving, without use of arm muscles

via Raspberry Pi

Eben met Alex from RasPi.tv earlier this week, and was given this rather fantastic flag-waving kit for our demo table. (If you’ve got something you think we could use in demos at schools, in talks, and when we chat to the press, give me a shout at liz@raspberrypi.org – we’re always looking for new kit to show off.)

This demo is something you can very easily set up yourself at home, if you’re interested in learning how to use servos. Alex’s setup means you won’t require any expansion boards – you’ll be ready to go with just a servo (very cheap from your local electronics shop – Alex’s cost him £3), some wire, some batteries and a few bits of wood.

And a flag.

Instructions are at RasPi.tv – if you make your own, please send us some video!

Recantha’s only gone and made a tricorder.

via Raspberry Pi

I’ve been waiting for…ooh, just over a year, for someone to do this. Recantha, an old hand here in the comments and on the forums, has built a tricorder.

There surely can’t be anyone here without a passing familiarity with Star Trek, but just in case: the tricorder is a made-up thing used by the crew of the Enterprise to measure stuff, store data and scout ahead remotely when exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilisations, and all that jazz. Despite its made-up-ness, the tricorder remains a terribly desirable thing. I’ve always wanted to be able to tell whether my planet is M-class or not.

Recantha has bodged together his home-made tricorder using a Pi, some sensors (two for temperature, and one each for magnetism and distance), an LCD display, some switches, a light-resistant resistor, a thermistor and an Arduino Leonardo clone. We hope he keeps adding sensors to it, and maybe, later on, a camera board, until he runs out of space. How about a Geiger counter (this one already works with the Pi)?

Here’s a spot of video explaining what everything on the Picorder does:

(Best of all, the whole thing is cased in LEGO.)

And here’s some more video, showing the thing in action.

If you’re interested in reproducing or building on this project, Recantha’s blogged about it (he has an excellent website, all about Raspberry Pi), and has left a guide to the project over at Pideas, the new site for collecting Raspberry Pi projects. (Go and add something of your own!) Thanks very much for this, Recantha; our office costume parties will now have a dash of added realism. Jamesh has drawn the short straw and will be dressed as Nog.

24-port GPIO on a PCI card

via Hack a Day» hardware

btgpio

So you’ve got a project running on an x86 board and you’d like some GPIO pins. Whether you want to read a few buttons, light up a few LEDs, put an accelerometer in your computer or whatever, you’ve got a problem. Luckily there’s an easy way to get 24 GPIO pins on an x86 board using a PCI card for just a few bucks.

The key component of the build is a PCI TV Tuner card made by Hauppague under the WinTV brand. If you’ve got one of these cards with either a Brooktree bt848, bt849, bt878 or bt879 video capture chip, having 24 GPIO pins is just a spool of magnet wire, a soldering iron, and a steady hand away.

It’s a great build if you’d like some GPIO action without going through the usual parallel port mess, and especially useful since these WinTV capture cards can be had from the usual Internet suppliers for just a few bucks. You’ll need a driver, of course, but the relevant Linux kernel driver - bt8xxgpio – should be included any reasonably modern distro.

Special thanks to [Dex Hamilton] for notifying us of this build.


Filed under: hardware

Pi Matrix

via Raspberry Pi

A very quick post: I’m about to run out of the door to meet TechCrunch at Adafruit. Have a squizz at the video below; this is a really cute little add-on for your Pi that’s just been put out by w8bh.net. It’s an 8×8 matrix of LEDs that you can plug directly into your Pi’s GPIO and program to do neat stuff. You can buy one at mypishop.com. Discuss it among yourselves – I have to go and jump in a taxi!

 

Emma’s second-grade poster project

via Raspberry Pi

Emma is in the second grade (7-8 year olds). And she’s already well on her way to being a fully fledged engineer.

Every year, Emma’s school runs a State Board project, where each kid in the second grade is assigned a US state to make a trifold poster about. Emma’s already a Maker Faire veteran who knows how to solder and how to use a milling machine. She programs in Python, and she’s very keen on electronics; so with some help from Dad she used a Raspberry Pi to turn her poster into an all-singing, all-dancing interactive Vermont extravaganza.

Here’s a great bit of video of Emma showing off her soldering skills; she’s constructing a Perma-Proto that’s used in the project. She learned how to solder at Maker Faire in NY last year; those adults among you who sometimes comment here saying you haven’t ever done any soldering and don’t feel you have the time to learn should hang your heads. (And then go and buy a soldering iron.) Remember: Soldering is Easy.

When I was Emma’s age, I was glueing fake fur, lentils and macaroni onto a large cut-out ankylosaurus. If I remember correctly, I wasn’t allowed to use the scissors on my own, so someone else did the cutting-out for me. I feel a little outclassed.

Well done Emma – we’re all really impressed by your project and your technological skills, and we hope you’ll let us know if you use a Raspberry Pi in any of your future schoolwork!

You can learn more about Emma’s State Board project at Dad’s website.

Meltwater’s RGB LED libraries lesson

via Raspberry Pi

Meltwater (of MagPi fame) has been working on some affordable teaching add-ons for the Pi. He’s demonstrating what you can do with one of his little kits with this natty tutorial where you’ll be creating your own Python library, and using it to do some low-level control of the GPIO. You’ll need one of his RGB LED kits if you want to be able to use your brand new library to play with making disco rainbows (Meltwater’s selling them for a very reasonable £14.49, and they’re a superb teaching tool) – but if you don’t have the kit you can still use the tutorial, with a little adaptation, for your own GPIO projects. And everybody should know about Python libraries, so if you don’t, get to it.

RGB LED teaching kit, with a rev1 Pi. Click to enlarge.

When you’ve worked through the tutorial, you’ll have learned how to use Python libraries, and you’ll be able to make (tiny) blinky disco lights in many colours. But Meltwater’s not doing all the work for you: there are further tasks in there for extra credit and a (pretend) gold star. For extra credit, you’ll be working out on your own how to make the LEDS output the first five colours of the rainbow, which, as any fule kno, are red and yellow and pink and green, orange…

These little teaching kits come with a useful manual too. Fancy sending us one for the demo table, Meltwater? :)

 

Raspberry Leaf

via Raspberry Pi

Dr Simon Monk (who has written a book on the Pi and Python – check it out on Amazon) has come up with a really useful idea: a bit of paper you can install over the GPIO pins of your prototyping Pi (and leave there) to remind you which pin is which.

The simplest ideas are the best, aren’t they? Visit Simon’s site to download and print your own version for free.

Bilingual R2D2

via Raspberry Pi

Sadly, I don’t have any more information on this project besides what you can see in the video. Which is a grave shame, ‘cos it’s brilliant. Greensheller, who is somewhere in China, has made his girlfriend an interactive, multilingual, face-recognising R2D2 for her birthday, using a Pi and some other off-the-shelf electronics. I am in no small way VERY JEALOUS.

If anybody reading can find out more about this project, please let us know; we’re all ears!

 

Friday grab bag

via Raspberry Pi

Adafruit Web IDE

First up, Adafruit’s Raspberry Pi Web IDE is now in Alpha, and they’ve made some improvements which I think you’ll find very helpful. The package now includes:

  • Python step debugger
  • Node.js update to 0.8 from 0.6 for faster navigation, and page loads.
  • Package node binaries with the WebIDE for faster, and easier installs

You’ll need to reinstall to take advantage of the new features.

Web IDE debugger in action – click to visit Adafruit

Crunchies

We’ve been nominated for one of Techcrunch’s Crunchie awards! We’re up for Best Hardware Startup, and you can vote for us here. You can vote once a day; we’d really appreciate it if you could take a minute to show your support!

Pinball

Mark Baldridge is taking a year out between high school and university, and he’s spending that year on hobby projects. This is one of them: a home-made pinball machine with a Raspberry Pi for brains.

Click to visit TechFruits for a tour of the system, and some video

We thought this was a brilliant project. Eben and I have always fantasised about having the time to refurbish an old pinball machine, but we’d never thought of building one from scratch – we’re in awe. Mark is also blogging his progress on his own website – check it out!

Getting Started with Raspberry Pi

O’Reilly have just published a new Raspberry Pi book under the Make banner. Full disclosure: I haven’t actually got my hands on a copy of Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi yet, so I can’t review it here. But I do know Matt Richardson from Make, who wrote it; and I know that he’s a great teacher and demonstrator, and a very engaging writer, so I feel pretty confident in telling you to go and check it out. When I last spoke to Matt, he mentioned that the book would contain a chapter on using the Pi with Arduino, which was something we didn’t include in Eben and Gareth’s The Raspberry Pi User Guide (the two books should complement each other nicely, if you have room on your sheves) – Matt’s book also contains a chapter on working with webcams. Click the image to visit the Getting Started with Raspberry Pi Amazon page.

Raspberry Jam

Alan O’Donohoe led another London Raspberry Jam last week. We’re really excited to see that his message is getting out: every one of these events seems to be larger and more diverse than the last. (Alan has started holding the events at weekends, which makes them much more accessible for kids.)

Around 70 children, parents and teachers came to learn what they could do with a Raspberry Pi at a number of workshops – we sent Rob Bishop, our roving engineer, to join in. Alan has a short post about the event, and a photo album you can have a flick through. He’s looking for sponsorship so he can make the jams even bigger and better – if you can help, please email me at liz@raspberrypi.org, and I’ll pass your message along.

Train times

Finally, here’s a project from Gareth James, a man who lives five minutes from the train station but always seems to get there just as the train is leaving. He’s made a very handsome picture frame which displays train times, powered, of course, by a Raspberry Pi. You can find out how he did it on his website.

Little Box of Geek from Geek Gurl Diaries

via Raspberry Pi

The magnificent Miss Philbin from Geek Gurl Diaries has been having fun with a Raspberry Pi, a thermal printer (the sort that till receipts are printed out on) and a big shiny button. She’s made a little Python fortune-telling box, which prints off geek pronouncements when the button’s pressed.

Miss Philbin is the sort of teacher you always wanted. She has some video which will take you step-by-step through setting up the printer, connecting it to the Pi’s GPIO, sorting out the serial port on your Pi, pulling thermal printer Python libraries off Github and getting the thing printing. That sort of thing might sound intimidating to beginners, but Carrie Anne is so good at explaining what’s going on that even those who have never picked up a Pi or used Linux before will be able to follow the tutorial. It’s a really good project if you’re somebody who wants to dive straight in to electronics engineering from a standing start. You’ll learn something, you’ll have made something fun, and you’ll never be afraid of wire strippers again.

There’s a full and very detailed blog post to accompany this video at Geek Gurl Diaries. You’ll find part two of the tutorial at Geek Gurl Diaries too (part two is, if anything, even more fun) along with more video. Get to it – and let us know if you give it a whirl!

Thanks Carrie Anne!

Manuel, the talking moose

via Raspberry Pi

I notice a certain silliness – not to say outright frivolity – surrounding some of your Christmas projects. I’d like to introduce Manuel. He’s a talking moose with a Raspberry Pi for brains, who will repeat your tweets in a Scottish accent, live on video. Manuel is a Christmas installation in the office at Torchbox – head over and make him intone your festive messages.

Manuel undergoes mandibular surgery

Manuel (who, if the above photographs are anything to go by, may well be an antlered donkey rather than a moose) has been hacked about, has had new brains (including a profanity filter) inserted, and has been elegantly mounted on the office wall, the better to intone your tweets. I hope he doesn’t end up in a cupboard after Christmas.