Let Your Pi Make A Pie Chart For Your Pie

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.

16 thoughts on “Let Your Pi Make A Pie Chart For Your Pie

    1. 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.

      1. 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.

        1. 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.

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