Author: Sven Gregori

143 Articles

660 FPS Raspberry Pi Video Captures The Moment In Extreme Slo-Mo

August 10, 2019 by 18 Comments

Filming in slow-motion has long become a standard feature on the higher end of the smartphone spectrum, and can turn the most trivial physical activity into a majestic action shot to share on social media. It also unveils some little wonders of nature that are otherwise hidden to our eyes: the formation of a lightning flash during a thunderstorm, a hummingbird flapping its wings, or an avocado reaching that perfect moment of ripeness. Altogether, it’s a fun way of recording videos, and as [Robert Elder] shows, something you can do with a few dollars worth of Raspberry Pi equipment at a whopping rate of 660 FPS, if you can live with some limitations.

Taking the classic 24 FPS, this will turn a one-second video into a nearly half-minute long slo-mo-fest. To achieve such a frame rate in the first place, [Robert] uses [Hermann-SW]’s modified version of raspiraw to get raw image data straight from the camera sensor to the Pi’s memory, leaving all the heavy lifting of processing it into an actual video for after all the frames are retrieved. RAM size is of course one limiting factor for recording length, but memory bandwidth is the bigger problem, restricting the resolution to 64×640 pixels on the cheaper $6 camera model he uses. Yes, sixty-four pixels height — but hey, look at that super wide-screen aspect ratio!

While you won’t get the highest quality out of this, it’s still an exciting and inexpensive way to play around with slow motion. You can always step up your game though, and have a look at this DIY high-speed camera instead. And well, here’s one mounted on a lawnmower blade destroying anything but a printer.

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C++20 Is Feature Complete; Here’s What Changes Are Coming

July 30, 2019 by 105 Comments

If you have an opinion about C++, chances are you either love it for its extensiveness and versatility, or you hate it for its bloated complexity and would rather stick to alternative languages on both sides of the spectrum. Either way, here’s your chance to form a new opinion about the language. The C++ standard committee has recently gathered to work on finalizing the language standard’s newest revision, C++20, deciding on all the new features that will come to C++’s next major release.

After C++17, this will be the sixth revision of the C++ standard, and the language has come a long way from its “being a superset of C” times. Frankly, when it comes to loving or hating the language, I haven’t fully made up my own mind about it yet. My biggest issue with it is that “programming in C++” can just mean so many different things nowadays, from a trivial “C with classes” style to writing code that will make Perl look like prose. C++ has become such a feature-rich and downright overwhelming language over all these years, and with all the additions coming with C++20, things won’t get easier. Although, they also won’t get harder. Well, at least not necessarily. I guess? Well, it’s complex, but that’s simply the nature of the language.

Anyway, the list of new features is long, combining all the specification proposals is even longer, and each and every one of these additions could fill its own, full-blown article. But to get a rough idea about what’s going to come to C++ next year, let’s have a condensed look at some of these major new features, changes, and additions that will await us in C++20. From better type checking and compiler errors messages to Python-like string handling and plans to replace the #include system, there’s a lot at play here!

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Weather Station Can Rock You Like A Hurricane

July 22, 2019 by 5 Comments

People love to talk about the weather. It’s the perfect small talk, whether you’re trying to start a conversation or keep one going by avoiding an awkward silence. In the same fashion, weather stations are an ideal starting point for any sort of sensor-related project ideas. You get to familiarizing yourself with communication buses, ADCs, general data acquisition, and you learn a lot in figuring out how to visualize it all.

What if your weather station didn’t visualize anything? [OttoNL] is answering that question with a MIDI-generating Weather Station that uses the mood of the music to convey the condition of the elements outside.

Using an ESP8266 programmed via the Arduino IDE, [OttoNL] hooked up a light dependent resistor, a rain sensor, and the all-round workhorse BME280 for temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity to it. Reading the sensors, the ESP will generate MIDI notes that are sent to a connected synthesizer, with each sensor influencing a different aspect of the generated MIDI signals. A sadder, slow tune will play during rain and a fast upbeat one during sunshine. While it doesn’t use the ESP’s WiFi functionality at all at this point, a future version could easily retrieve some weather forecast data from the internet and add it into the mix as well.

Connect this to your alarm clock, and you can start your day off in the appropriate mood. You can even customize your breakfast toast to really immerse your morning routine in abstract weather cues.

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Raspberry Pi Catches The Early Bird

July 4, 2019 by 11 Comments

If you live in an area with high bird activity, setting up a bird feeder and watching some hungry little fellows visit you can be a nice and relaxing pastime. Throw in a Raspberry Pi with some sensors and it can also be the beginning of your next IoT project, as it was the case for [sbkirby] with his Bird Feeder Monitor project.

To track the arrival and departure times of his avian visitors, [sbkirby] attached a set of capacitive touch sensors to each side of his bird feeder, and hooked them up to a Raspberry Pi Zero W via a CAP1188 breakout board. The data is published via MQTT to another Raspberry Pi that serves as backend and stores the data, as well as to an optional additional camera-equipped Pi that will take a picture of each guest along the way. Taking into account that precipitation might affect the sensor readings, he also checks the current weather situation to re-calibrate the sensors if necessary, and also to observe a change in the birds’ presence and eating behavior based on weather conditions.

It seems that sensor-based animal feeding will always serve as inspiration for some new projects, whether feeding the animal itself is the goal, like most recently this fish feeder has shown, or whether the eating behavior is monitored and used for further research such as this squirrel-based weather forecast system.

Plasma Globe Reveals Your Next Clue

June 24, 2019 by 7 Comments

If you like solving puzzles out in the real world, you’ve probably been to an escape room before, or are at least familiar with its concept of getting (voluntarily) locked inside a place and searching for clues that will eventually lead to a key or door lock combination that gets you out again. And while there are plenty of analog options available to implement this, the chances are you will come across more and more electronics-infused puzzles nowadays, especially if it fits the escape room’s theme itself. [Alastair Aitchison] likes to create such puzzles and recently discovered how he can utilize a USB powered plasma globe as a momentary switch in one of his installations.

The concept is pretty straightforward, [Alastair] noticed the plasma globe will draw significantly more current when it’s being touched compared to its idle state, which he measures using an INA219 current shunt connected to an Arduino. As a demo setup in his video, he uses two globes that will trigger a linear actuator when touched at the same time, making it an ideal multiplayer installation. Whether the amount of fingers, their position on the globe, or movement make enough of a reliable difference in the current consumption to implement a more-dimensional switch is unfortunately not clear, but definitely something worth experimenting with.

In case you’re planning to build your own escape room and are going for the Mad Scientist Laboratory theme, you’ll obviously need at least one of those plasma globes sparking in a corner anyway, so this will definitely come in handy — maybe even accompanied by something slightly larger? And for all other themes, you can always resort to an RFID-based solution instead.

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Life After IRC – Your Move, Mozilla!

May 23, 2019 by 56 Comments

Last year marked the 30th anniversary of the Internet Relay Chat protocol (IRC) and it is hard to imagine that [Jarkko Oikarinen] could have foreseen the impact his invention would one day have on the world as we know it. How it would turn from a simple, decentralized real-time communication system for university-internal use into a global phenomenon, connecting millions of users all over the world, forming its own subculture, eventually reaching mainstream status in some parts of the world — including a Eurodance song about a bot topping European music charts.

Those days of glory, however, have long been gone, and with it the version of an internet where IRC was the ideal choice. What was once a refuge to escape the real world has since become the fundamental centerpiece of that same real world, and our ways of communicating with each other has moved on with it. Nevertheless, despite a shift in mainstream and everyday communication behavior, IRC is still relevant enough today, and going especially strong in the open source community, with freenode, as one of the oldest networks, being the most frequently used one, along some smaller ones like OFTC and Mozilla’s own dedicated network. But that is about to change.

Last month, Mozilla’s envoy [Mike Hoye] announced the decommissioning of irc.mozilla.org within “the next small number of months“, and moving all communication to a new, or at least different system. And while this only affects Mozilla’s own, standalone IRC network and projects, and not the entire open source community, it is a rather substantial move, considering Mozilla’s overall reach and impact on the internet itself — past, present, and now even more the future. Let’s face it, IRC has been dying for years, but there is also no genuine alternative available yet that could truly replace it. With Mozilla as driving force, there is an actual chance that they will come up with a worthy replacement that transforms IRC’s spirit into the modern era.

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Thumbs Up For This CRT Handheld Gaming Console

May 6, 2019 by 10 Comments

Despite all the progress video game graphics have made, it is safe to say that we won’t see any decline in oldschool 8-bit games any time soon. For some it’s about nostalgia, for others it’s just a great and simple-enough first step into game development itself. For [gocivici] it was a bit of both when he built this camcorder style, one-button gaming console.

With a Raspberry Pi Zero running PICO-8 at its core, [gocivici] salvaged the viewfinder of an old camcorder for the display, and that way turned it into a whole other kind of handheld console. For full ergonomic handling, one single, thumb-operated push button serves as only control option. This of course makes it a bit challenging to re-use existing games that would require more input options, so he and some friends decided to just write a suitable game on their own with the hopes that others might follow.

Unfortunately we don’t see a lot of projects using these old camcorder viewfinders, and considering modern LCD and OLED options it’s not really that surprising, but there’s just something intriguing about these tiny CRTs. So in case you want to see more of them, have a look at this tiny Atari display, and the DIY night vision monocle from a few years back. And to keep your eyes safe and sound, [gocivici] got you covered as well.

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