View-Master Video Player!

November 13, 2013 by James Hobson 18 Comments

view master 3d video player

[Alec] just sent us this great project he’s been working on. Converting an antique View-Master from the early 50’s into a modern 3D video player, capable of reading Mini-CDs.

Most View-Masters don’t have much space for tinkering, let alone adding a Raspberry Pi, two displays and a CD drive, so [Alec] really lucked out when he found this model — complete with light and D-cell battery pack. Tons of space! He originally looked into getting some cheap digital photo frame LCDs from China, but soon realized the effort involved with making those work just wouldn’t be worth it, so instead he picked up some 0.9″ OLED displays from Adafruit. He still forgot to check if they had drivers for the Raspberry Pi though, and ended up on another detour of modifying FBTFT drivers to make it all work.

After that headache he got to the fun part — cramming all the hardware inside. He picked up a cheap laptop CD drive off of eBay, and discovered that using the 80MM Mini-CD standard, the discs would just fit inside of the View-Master, sticking out just a little bit, kind of like the original photo wheels!

Quite a bit of fiddling later, he managed to assemble the entire thing in layers, without damaging the external shell of the View-Master. Since it is an antique, it was important for him that his hack be reversible — and for the most part, it is! Stick around after the break to see a short video explanation!

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39 Raspberry Pi 3D Scanner

November 13, 2013 by James Hobson 30 Comments

[Richard] just posted an Instructable on his ridiculously cool 39 Pi 3D Scanner! That’s right. 39 individual Raspberry Pies with camera modules.

But why? Well, [Richard] loves 3D printing, Arduinos, Raspberry pies, and his kids. He wanted to make some 3D models of his kids (because pictures are so last century), so he started looking into 3D scanners. Unfortunately almost all designs he found require the subject to sit still for a while — something his 2-year old is not a fan of. So he started pondering a way to take all the pictures in one go, to give him the ability to generate 3D models on the fly — without the wait.

He originally looked at buying 39 cheap digital cameras, but didn’t want to have all the images on separate SD cards, as it would be rather tedious to extract all the images. Using the Raspberries on the other hand, he can grab them all off a network. So he set off to build a very awesome (and somewhat expensive) life-size 3D scanning booth. Full details are available on his blog at www.pi3dscan.com

Stick around after the break to see it in action at Maker Faire Groningen 2013!

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Upstagram: A Flying Raspberry Pi

November 12, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 5 Comments

This tiny paper house, modeled after the one in Disney’s UP, contains a Raspberry Pi, battery pack, camera, and 3G stick. The Upstagram, built by the folks at HackerLoop, took to the skies of Paris to snap and share photos on Instagram.

We’ve seen Raspberry Pis in flight before, but this build pulls it off using simple party balloons. It took around 80 balloons to get the house to a height of 300 feet. A kite string was used to tether the device and control its flight.

This hack also required some reverse engineering of Instagram. Since the photo sharing service only allows the official Android and iOS apps to upload, they had to use a reverse engineered Instagram client. This allows the unsupported Raspberry Pi to interact with the service, snapping pictures periodically and sharing them on the device’s stream.

After the break, check out a quick video overview of the project.

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Self-Balancing Robot Keeps Getting More Features

November 10, 2013 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

self-balancing-robot-gets-more-features

It’s a lot of fun to see a self-balancing robot project. Rarely do they go much further than being able to keep themselves upright while being piloted remotely and annoyingly shoved by their creator as proof of their ability to remain standing on two wheels. This little anthropomorphic guy is the exception to the rule. It’s the product of [Samuel Matos] who says he didn’t have a specific purpose in mind, but just kept adding features as they came to him.

Starting with a couple of carbon fiber plates [Samuel] cut the design by hand, using stand-offs to mount the NEMA 17 stepper motors and to connect the two halves of the chassis. It looks like he used some leftover material to make a nice little stand which is nice when coding at his desk as seen above. There’s also a carbon-fiber mask which makes up the face atop an articulated neck. It has two ultrasonic range-finding sensors as eyes, and the Raspberry Pi camera module as the nose. The RPi board powerful enough to run OpenCV which has kept [Samuel] busy. He set up a course in his living room containing tags directing where the little guy should go. It can also follow a tennis ball as it rolls around the room. What we found most impressive in the clip after the break is its ability to locate the next tag after making a turn.

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The Raspberry Pi Becomes A Form Factor

November 6, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 61 Comments

Despite the cries for updated hardware, the Raspberry Pi foundation has been playing it cool. They’re committed to getting the most out of their engineering investment, and the current board design for the Raspi doesn’t support more than 512Mb of memory, anyway.

What you see above isn’t a Raspberry Pi, though. It’s the Carrier-one from SolidRun. All loaded out, it has a system-on-module with a quad core ARM Cortex-A9, 2GB of RAM, 1000 Mbps Ethernet, USB host ports, eSATA, and LVDS display connector, a real time clock, and everything else you get with a Raspberry Pi, header pins included. It’s all the awesomesauce of the newer ARM boards that will still work with all your Raspberry Pi hardware.

If you’re thinking this is a product announcement, though, think again. The folks at SolidRun are merely using this Raspberry Pi form factor board as a prototyping and development platform for their CuBox-i device, In its lowest configuration, the CuBox-i1 is still no slouch and would be more than able to keep up with the most demanding Raspberry Pi applications.

Still, though, a hugely powerful board with lots of I/O is something we’d all love, and if SolidRun gets enough ~~complaints~~ praise, it seems like they might be willing to release the Carrier-one as an actual product.

Can An 8 Node Raspberry Pi Cluster Web Server Survive Hackaday?

November 5, 2013 by Adam Fabio 50 Comments

Plenty of folks have used their Raspberry Pi as a web server. [Steve] however is the first 8 node load balanced pi cluster server we’ve run into. While we have seen pi clusters before, they’ve never been pressed into service as a public facing web server. [Steve] has created a really nice informative website about the Raspberry Pi, and Linux in general. As his page views have increased, he’s had to add nodes to the server. Currently [Steve] sees about 45,000 page views per month.

At first glance it would seem that the load balance system would be the weak link in the chain. However, [Steve] did realize that he needed more than an Pi to handle this task. He built the load balancer using an old PC with 512MB of RAM and a 2.7GHz x86 CPU. The most important thing about the balancer is dual network interfaces, one side facing the internet, the other facing the Pi cluster. The balancer isn’t a router though. Only HTTP requests are forwarded. The Pi nodes themselves live on their own sub net. Steve has run some basic testing with siege, however nothing beats a real world test. We figured a couple of links in from Hackaday would be enough to acid test the system.

Raspberry Pi Becomes A Universal Translator

November 2, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 59 Comments

hola-me-nombre-david-conroy

We’re still about 150 years away from the invention of the universal translator by [Lt Cdr Sato] of the Enterprise NX-01, but [Dave] has something that’s almost as good: a speech recognition, translation, and text to speech setup for the Raspberry Pi that theoretically allows anyone to speak in sixty different languages.

After setting up all the Linux audio cruft, [Dave] digs in and starts on converting the guttural vocalizations of a meat speaker into something Google’s speech to text service can understand. From there, it’s off to Google again, this time converting text in one language into the writings of another.

[Dave]’s end result is a shell script that works reasonably well for something that won’t be invented for another 150 years. The video below shows the script successfully translating English to spanish, but it should work equally well with other languages such as dutch and latin, as well as less popular language such as esperanto and french.

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