March 14th is “Pi Day”, for reasons which should be obvious to our more mathematically inclined readers. As you are not reading this post on March 14th, that must mean we’re either fashionably late to Pi Day 2019, or exceptionally early for Pi Day 2020. But in either event, we’ve got a hack for you that celebrates the day using two things we have it on good authority most hackers overindulge in: food and needless complexity.
This project comes from [Mike MacHenry], and it’s just as straightforward as it looks. Put simply, he’s using a load cell connected to the Raspberry Pi to weigh an actual pie and monitor its change over time. As the pie is consumed by hungry hackers, a pie graph (what else?) is rendered on the attached screen to show you how much of the dessert is left.
One might say that this project takes a three dimensional pie and converts it to a two dimensional facsimile, but perhaps that’s over-analyzing it. In reality, it was a fun little hack [Mike] put together just because he thought it would be fun. Which is certainly enough of a motive for us. More practically though, if you’re looking for a good example for how to get a load cell talking to your non-edible Raspberry Pi, you could do worse than checking this out.
We’ve also got to give [Mike] extra credit for including the recipe and procedure for actually baking the apple pie used in the project. While we’re not 100% sure the MIT license [Mike] used is actually valid for foodstuffs, but believe it or not this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Git used in the production of baked goods.
Materials and instructions are the best part.
The ingredient list looks as if GLaDOS overheard the jokes about “The cake is a lie, but pi is always true.”
That’s an apple pie in the picture, it looks good but it’s not raspberry. Just saying…
You would need to have diamond-tipped teeth and some crazy-ass stomach acid to successfully eat a raspberry pi
LOL, exactly. Do not eat the wrong pi(e) in this picture.
That’s why they invented the Pi Zero.
Yeah zero calories is what that stands for, right?
“most hackers overindulge in: food and needless complexity.”
That may change when the New Improved Purina Bachelor Chow comes out, “Now with Flavor!”
Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2372/6989/products/image_i8sum_black_41_590x.png?v=1510578142
Bummer, I totally thought this was being done with camera vision. Bad assumption made because the missing pie wedge was oriented the same as the pie chart.
Yeah I considered camera vision but I liked the aesthetic of the scale much more than hanging a camera over the pie. But the photo’s orientation was very deliberately rotated to match the pie chart’s orientation.
Put the pie on a plastic, ceramic, or glass dish and it should be possible to use capacitance sensing from the bottom. (Maybe even just using a touchscreen panel with low level commands.) Or if you want to keep it in the aluminum dish, ultrasonic sensing is worth looking into.
That sounds like a pretty fun idea. This was a lot easier to achieve what I wanted though.A capacitive sensor, if it worked, could let you get all sorts of weird shapes in the event your party guest don’t cut the pie in the expected way though.
This is all well and good but where is the attached shotgun to kill the SOB who’s eating my pie!?
I really should add some kind of warning message and then an auto Nerf gun output for anyone eating the last slice of pie.
“There is no data that can be displayed in a pie chart, that cannot be displayed better in some other type of chart.”
— John Tukey
¯\_(ツ)_/¯