Maker Jen Fox took to hackster.io to share a Raspberry Pi–powered trash classifier that tells you whether the trash in your hand is recyclable, compostable, or just straight-up garbage.
Jen reckons this project is beginner-friendly, as you don’t need any code to train the machine learning model, just a little to load it on Raspberry Pi. It’s also a pretty affordable build, costing less than $70 including a Raspberry Pi 4.
“Haz waste”?!
Hardware:
Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
Raspberry Pi Camera Module
Adafruit push button
Adafruit LEDs
Watch Jen giving a demo of her creation
Software
The code-free machine learning model is created using Lobe, a desktop tool that automatically trains a custom image classifier based on what objects you’ve shown it.
The image classifier correctly guessing it has been shown a bottle cap
Training the image classifier
Basically, you upload a tonne of photos and tell Lobe what object each of them shows. Jen told the empty classification model which photos were of compostable waste, which were of recyclable and items, and which were of garbage or bio-hazardous waste. Of course, as Jen says, “the more photos you have, the more accurate your model is.”
Loading up Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi Camera Module attached to Raspberry Pi 4
As promised, you only need a little bit of code to load the image classifier onto your Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi Camera Module acts as the image classifier’s “eyes” so Raspberry Pi can find out what kind of trash you hold up for it.
The push button and LEDs are wired up to the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins, and they work together with the camera and light up according to what the image classifier “sees”.
Here’s the fritzing diagram showing how to wire the push button and LEDS to the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins
You’ll want to create a snazzy case so your trash classifier looks good mounted on the wall. Kate cut holes in a cardboard box to make sure that the camera could “see” out, the user can see the LEDs, and the push button is accessible. Remember to leave room for Raspberry Pi’s power supply to plug in.
Jen’s hand-painted case mounted to the wall, having a look at a plastic bag
The trick with spy devices is to make sure they look as much like the object they’re hidden inside as possible. Where Raspberry Pi comes in is making sure the foam camera can be used as a real photo-taking camera too, to throw the baddies off the scent if they start fiddling with your spyware.
The foam-firing bit of Nathan’s invention was relatively simple to recreate – a modified chef’s squirty cream dispenser, hidden inside a camera-shaped box, gets the job done.
Squirty cream thing painted black and mounted onto camera-shaped frame
Ruth and Shawn drew a load of 3D-printed panels to mount on the box frame in the image above. One of those cool coffee cups that look like massive camera lenses hides the squirty cream dispenser and gives this build an authentic camera look.
THOSE cool camera lens-shaped coffee cups, see?
Techy bits from the build:
Raspberry Pi
Infrared LED
Camera module
Mini display screen
All the bits mentioned in the list above
The infrared LED is mounted next to the camera module and switches on when it gets dark, giving you night vision.
The mini display screen serves as a ‘lid’ to the blue case protecting the Raspberry Pi and mounts into the back panel of the ‘camera’
The Raspberry Pi computer and its power bank are crammed inside the box-shaped part, with the camera module and infrared LED mounted to peek out of custom-made holes in one of the 3D-printed panels on the front of the box frame.
The night vision mini display screen in action on the back of the camera
The foam-firing chef’s thingy is hidden inside the big fake lens, and it’s wedged inside so that when you lift the big fake lens, the lever on the chef’s squirty thing is depressed and foam fires out of a tube near to where the camera lens and infrared LED peek out on the front panel of the build.
Watch the #KidsInventStuff presenters test out Nathan’s invention
Animator/engineer Ashok Fair has put witch-level finger pointing powers in your hands by sticking a SmartEdge Agile, wirelessly controlled by Raspberry Pi Zero, to a golf glove. You could have really freaked the bejeezus out of Halloween party guests with this (if we were allowed to have Halloween parties that is).
The build uses a Smart Edge Agile IoT device with Brainium, a cloud-based tool for performing machine learning tasks.
The Rapid IoT kit is interfaced with Raspberry Pi Zero and creates a thread network connecting to light, car, and fan controller nodes.
The Brainium app is installed on Raspberry Pi and bridges between the cloud and Smart Edge device. MQTT is running on Python and processes the Rapid IoT Kit’s data.
The device is mounted onto a golf glove, giving the wearer seemingly magical powers with the wave of a hand.
NXP Rapid IoT Prototyping Kit (the square blue screen stuck on the adaptor board with the Raspberry Pi Zero)
Brainium AI Studio app
Golf glove
Waking up the Rapid IoT screen
To get started, the glove wearer draws a pattern above the screen attached to the Raspberry Pi to unlock it and wake up all the controller nodes.
The light controller node is turned on by drawing a clockwise circle, and turned off with an counter-clockwise circle.
The full kit and caboodle
The fan is turned on and off in the same way, and you can increase the fan’s speed by moving your hand upwards and reduce the speed by moving your hand down. You know it’s working by the look of the fan’s LEDs: they blinker faster as the fan speeds up.
Make a pushing motion in the air above the car to make it move forward, and you can also make it turn and reverse.
“Driving glove”
If you wear the glove while driving, it collects data in real time and logs it on the Brainium cloud so you can review your driving style.
Design Engineering student Ben Cobley has created a Raspberry Pi–powered sous-chef that automates the easier pan-cooking tasks so the head chef can focus on culinary creativity.
Ben named his invention OnionBot, as the idea came to him when looking for an automated way to perfectly soften onions in a pan while he got on with the rest of his dish. I have yet to manage to retrieve onions from the pan before they blacken so… *need*.
The full setup (you won’t need a laptop while you’re cooking, so you’ll have counter space)
Ben’s affordable solution is much better suited to home cooking than the big, expensive robotic arms used in industry. Using our tiny computer also allowed Ben to create something that fits on a kitchen counter.
What can OnionBot do?
Tells you on-screen when it is time to advance to the next stage of a recipe
Autonomously controls the pan temperature using PID feedback control
Detects when the pan is close to boiling over and automatically turns down the heat
Reminds you if you haven’t stirred the pan in a while
A thermal sensor array suspended above the stove detects the pan temperature, and the Raspberry Pi Camera Module helps track the cooking progress. A servo motor controls the dial on the induction stove.
Labelling images to train the image classifier
No machine learning expertise was required to train an image classifier, running on Raspberry Pi, for Ben’s robotic creation; you’ll see in the video that the classifier is a really simple drag-and-drop affair.
Ben has only taught his sous-chef one pasta dish so far, and we admire his dedication to carbs.
Training the image classifier to know when you haven’t stirred the pot in a while
Ben built a control panel for labelling training images in real time and added labels at key recipe milestones while he cooked under the camera’s eye. This process required 500–1000 images per milestone, so Ben made a LOT of pasta while training his robotic sous-chef’s image classifier.
Ben open-sourced this project so you can collaborate to suggest improvements or teach your own robot sous-chef some more dishes. Here’s OnionBot on GitHub.
Following on from Rob Zwetsloot’s Haunted House Hacks in the latest issue of The MagPi magazine, GitHub’s Martin Woodward has created a spooky pumpkin that warns you about the thing programmers find scariest of all — broken builds. Here’s his guest post describing the project:
“When you are browsing code looking for open source projects, seeing a nice green passing build badge in the ReadMe file lets you know everything is working with the latest version of that project. As a programmer you really don’t want to accidentally commit bad code, which is why we often set up continuous integration builds that constantly check the latest code in our project.”
“I decided to create a 3D-printed pumpkin that would hold a Raspberry Pi Zero with an RGB LED pHat on top to show me the status of my build for Halloween. All the code is available on GitHub alongside the 3D printing models which are also available on Thingiverse.”
Components
Raspberry Pi Zero (I went for the WH version to save me soldering on the header pins)
Unicorn pHat from Pimoroni
Panel mount micro-USB extension
M2.5 hardware for mounting (screws, male PCB standoffs, and threaded inserts)
“For the 3D prints, I used a glow-in-the-dark PLA filament for the main body and Pi holder, along with a dark green PLA filament for the top plug.”
“I’ve been using M2.5 threaded inserts quite a bit when printing parts to fit a Raspberry Pi, as it allows you to simply design a small hole in your model and then you push the brass thread into the gap with your soldering iron to melt it securely into place ready for screwing in your device.”
Threaded insert
“Once the inserts are in, you can screw the Raspberry Pi Zero into place using some brass PCB stand-offs, place the Unicorn pHAT onto the GPIO ports, and then screw that down.”
pHAT install
“Then you screw in the panel-mounted USB extension into the back of the pumpkin, connect it to the Raspberry Pi, and snap the Raspberry Pi holder into place in the bottom of your pumpkin.”
Inserting the base
Code along with Martin
“Now you are ready to install the software. You can get the latest version from my PumpkinPi project on GitHub. “
“Format the micro SD Card and install Raspberry Pi OS Lite. Rather than plugging in a keyboard and monitor, you probably want to do a headless install, configuring SSH and WiFi by dropping an ssh file and a wpa_supplicant.conf file onto the root of the SD card after copying over the Raspbian files.”
“You’ll need to install the Unicorn HAT software, but they have a cool one-line installer that takes care of all the dependencies including Python and Git.”
# How often to check (in seconds). Remember - be nice to the server. Once every 5 minutes is plenty.
REFRESH_INTERVAL = 300
“Finally you can run the script as root:”
sudo python ~/PumpkinPi/src/pumpkinpi.py &
“Once you are happy everything is running how you want, don’t forget you can run the script at boot time. The easiest way to do this is to use crontab. See this cool video from Estefannie to learn more. But basically you do sudo crontab -e then add the following:”
“Note that we are pausing for 10 seconds before running the Python script. This is to allow the WiFi network to connect before we check on the state of our build.”
“The current version of the pumpkinpi script works with all the SVG files produced by the major hosted build providers, including GitHub Actions, which is free for open source projects. But if you want to improve the code in any way, I’m definitely accepting pull requests on it.”
“Using the same hardware you could monitor lots of different things, such as when someone posts on Twitter, what the weather will be tomorrow, or maybe just code your own unique multi-coloured display that you can leave flickering in your window.”
“If you build this project or create your own pumpkin display, I’d love to see pictures. You can find me on Twitter @martinwoodward and on GitHub.”
DJ from the element14 community shows you how to build a red-lensed security camera in the style of Portal 2 using the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera.
The finished camera mounted on the wall
Portal 2 is a puzzle platform game developed by Valve — a “puzzle game masquerading as a first-person shooter”, according to Forbes.
DJ playing with the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera
DJ was pleased to learn that you don’t need to write any code to make your own security camera, you can just use a package called motionEyeOS. All you have to do is download the motionEyeOS image, pop the flashed SD card into your Raspberry Pi, and you’re pretty much good to go.
Dj got everything set up on a 5″ screen attached to the Raspberry Pi
You’ll find that the default resolution is 640×480, so it will show up as a tiny window on your monitor of choice, but that can be amended.
Simplicity
While this build is very simple electronically, the 20-part 3D-printed shell is beautiful. A Raspberry Pi is positioned on a purpose-built platform in the middle of the shell, connected to the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera, which sits at the front of that shell, peeking out.
All the 3D printed parts ready to assemble
The 5V power supply is routed through the main shell into the base, which mounts the build to the wall. In order to keep the Raspberry Pi cool, DJ made some vent holes in the lens of the shell. The red LED is routed out of the side and sits on the outside body of the shell.
Magnetising
Raspberry Pi 4 (centre) and Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera (right) sat inside the 3D printed shell
This build is also screwless: the halves of the shell have what look like screw holes along the edges, but they are actually 3mm neodymium magnets, so assembly and repair is super easy as everything just pops on and off.
The final picture (that’s DJ!)
You can find all the files you need to recreate this build, or you can ask DJ a question, at element14.com/presents.
