Raspberry Pi

1881 Articles

Picture Frame Mashup Taps Subreddits For “Deep Thoughts”

February 24, 2016 by 17 Comments

Remember “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey”? We do, and we always enjoyed the quirky mix of soothing music, soft-focus nature images, and random absurd thought scrolling across the screen as bumpers between segments on Saturday Night Live. Clearly, [tvm78] remembers them, because his picture frame mashups of the r/EarthPorn and r/ShowerThoughts subreddits could have been written by Jack himself.

While [tvm78] shares no photos of his build and offers no tutorials, he makes it clear that this was his first build of any kind. He does offer a few details, like the fact that he’s driving a display with a Raspberry Pi, and he handily references a similar build that includes the code he borrowed to make his frame happen. While we feel that the original mashup works well, several helpful redditors offer suggestions for other combinations, like r/ArchitecturePorn and /r/nocontext, or r/abandonedporn and r/onelinehorror. Of course a straight grab from r/demotivational could be fun too.

We’ve seen tons of web-enabled picture frames before, and plenty of “magic mirror” builds that display useful information on a two-way mirror. But this one appeals to the cynic in us, and would make Jack Handey proud.

Add A Slide Show To Your Fish Tank

February 24, 2016 by 11 Comments

Once in a way we get a hack that makes us wonder – why didn’t we think of that ? [hydronics] tore apart an old LCD monitor and built a fish tank around it. Not sure if the fish notice that they are swimming on the Moon, but it sure makes for an interesting fish tank display.

He starts by ripping apart an old 19″ LCD monitor and built an acrylic fish tank around the display. The backlight of the panel is fixed at the rear side of the fish tank, along with the rest of the electronics from the old monitor.

For an earlier version, he built his own back light, but the second version with the original back light turned out much better. The fish tank pieces were joined together using acrylic glue and left over night to dry, although he still needed to use some silicone to plug leaks.

A Raspberry Pi connected to the monitor’s HDMI input provides the background slide show. [Tony Rieker] helped add bubble animations via some OpenCV code running on the Pi. A live feed of the fish is overlaid on the slide show, adding a level of inception to this tricked up fish tank. The project was recently shown off at the Portland Winter Light Festival.

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Breathing New Life Into An Old Key

February 21, 2016 by 13 Comments

For most of us who have experimented with Morse code, the oldest key we are likely to have used will have been a piece of military surplus kit from the Second World War era. [Kyle Gabriel] however is a lucky man. His grandfather left him his key-on-board telegraph practice set, a vintage key and telegraph sounder arrangement used to learn Morse code in the days when the telegraph was king. Rather than keep the set merely as an heirloom, [Kyle] set about bringing it up to date by interfacing it to a Raspberry Pi and writing a Morse reader program.

Along the way [Kyle] had to contend with debouncing the switching signal from the key, considering an RC network before settling on a software debounce timer. He provides a brief synopsis of the mechanics of Morse decoding software, and a demonstration of the code in action which you can see in the video below the break.

[Kyle’s] decoding software, beatbybeat, is on GitHub. We can see it will be a useful tool for anyone interested in Morse, or who is writing their own Morse software.

Morse code has featured on these pages more than a few times over the years. Of relevance to this piece are an Arduino decoding Morse code, a more up-to-date practice oscillator with a home-made key, and a couple of other vintage telegraphs reading RSS feeds and reading emails.

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TV Control With Hand Gestures

February 17, 2016 by 12 Comments

The cell phones of yesteryear were covered in buttons. Today’s cell phones are mostly a touch display with maybe one or two buttons. As time marches on, we find ourselves using our fingers more for gestures and swipes than button pushing to control our devices. Sadly, the television remote has been stuck in an antiquated state and most are still covered in archaic buttons.

[Frederick] has decided to dig the TV remote out from the stone age and updated it to use simple gestures for control. We’ve seen gesture control before, but this one is certainly the most elegant. He’s using a Raspberry Pi with a Skywriter HAT gesture recognition board. The driver is super easy to install and can be done in a single command line. The Skywriter hat interpreters the hand gesture and the Pi fires the appropriate signal via an IR emitter. This approach made the project fairly simple to put together, with surprisingly good results.

Be sure to check out his blog for all code needed, and take a look at the video below to see the remote in action.
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A Quadcopter Controlled By A Pi Zero

February 16, 2016 by 57 Comments

Flight controllers for quadcopters and other drones are incredible pieces of engineering. Not only do these boards keep an aircraft level, they do so while keeping the drone in one place, or reading a GPS sensor and flying it from waypoint to waypoint. The latest of these flight controllers is built on everyone’s favorite $5 computer, the Raspberry Pi Zero.

The PXFmini controller and autopilot shield is the latest project from Erle Robotics that puts eight servo outputs on the Pi, barometer and IMU sensors, a power supply, and all the adapters to turn the Raspberry Pi Zero into a capable flight controller. Since the Pi Zero will have some computational horsepower left over after keeping a quadcopter level, there’s a possibility of some very cool peripherals. Erle Robotics has been working with depth cameras and Lidar on more than a few drones. This makes for some interesting applications we can only imagine now.

The schematics for the PXFmini are open source in the best traditions of the RC and drone community and will be available soon. You can check out a video of the FXPmini flying around an office below.

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The Internet Of Cats

February 15, 2016 by 70 Comments

With the miniaturization of technology, we’re now able to do some pretty crazy things with computers the size of credit cards. [Dennis] has been working on a rather unique project — he calls it the Cat Exploit — we call it the Internet of Cats.

By making pet-wearable tech (is that a new term?), it’s possible to create a mini war-driving server that stray cats (or other small animals) could wear. As they roam the streets, their feline-augmentation searches and taps into open or badly secured WiFi networks, repeating and spreading the signal to other Server Entities (other network-enabled cats), opening up the networks for all to use. Continue reading “The Internet Of Cats” →