Here’s Pi In Your Eye – HUD Goggles

January 17, 2014 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

[John Ohno] has found what is perhaps the best possible use for steampunk goggles: framing a monocular display for a Raspberry Pi-based wearable computer. [John]’s eventual goal for the computer is a zzstructure-based personal organizer and general notifier. We covered [John]’s zzstructure emulator to our great delight in July 2011. Go ahead and check that out, because it’s awesome. We’ll wait here.

[John] has been interested in wearable computing for some time, but is unimpressed with Google Glass. He had read up on turning head-mounted displays into monocular devices and recognized a great opportunity when his friend gave him most of an Adafruit display. With some steampunk goggles he’d bought at an anime convention, he started on the path to becoming a Gargoyle. He encountered a few problems along the way, namely SD card fail, display output issues, and general keep-the-parts-together stuff, but came out smelling like a rose. [John] has ideas for future input additions such as simple infrared eye tracking, the addition of a chording keyboard, and implementing a motorized glove for haptic learning.

Want to make your own wearable display but have an aversion to steampunk? Check out this homebrew solution with (mostly) 3-D printed frames. And it has servos!

[Thanks John]

Automated Decanting Machine Pairs Wine With Pi

January 12, 2014 by Kristina Panos 12 Comments

[Logi.cals], a German software company focused on process, automation, and facilities planning has devised an automated wine decanting machine to demonstrate its logi.CAD 3 PLC programming tool. Sommeliers use these simple machines to handle heavy, expensive bottles of wine. [Logi.cals] added sensors and a stepper motor to a very nice looking specimen and automated the decanting process with a Raspberry Pi.

The outstanding feature of this design is the built-in redundancy. A pair of micro switches detect the presence of both a bottle and a glass. Failing these, a load cell is there to weigh the bottle, reporting naturally whether one is present. The load cell also plays a part in monitoring the liquid level in the bottle, as do capacitive sensors that register the wine flow. The design also includes strain gauges that measure the weight in the glass as well as the liquid level. To bring it full circle, they also verify that a glass is present.

[Logi.cals] used two expansion boards, the Quick2Wire interface with an I²C analogue board and the PiFace. The I²C analogue board takes information from the strain gauges over its ADC, and the Quick2Wire communicates with the load cell’s measurement amplifier over the serial connection. The PiFace handles the remaining sensors and the stepper motor, and provides high voltage protection for the Pi.

If you’re fresh out of heavy, expensive bottles of wine but have some cheap ones lying around, you could use a Pi to make them dance.

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Raspberry Pi Tablet — The PiPad

January 10, 2014 by James Hobson 21 Comments

[Michael Castor] wanted a tablet, but not just any tablet. He wanted an all-in-one system running Linux, and he wanted it to look good. So he made himself a wooden PiPad.

He started the project at the beginning of 2013, and like many of our projects, it took a little while to get some momentum going. He bought most of the components early on but then it got pushed to the back burner. Two weeks before the Maker Faire Bay Area 2013, [Michael] decided he wanted to show it off, and thus began the mad dash to finish it in time.

The build consists of a very nice piece of 1/2″ Baltic birch plywood which was cut to shape using a CNC router. A scrap piece of carbon fiber makes for a stylish but not too flashy back cover — He even managed to get [Eben Upton] to sign it! Inside is a 10,000mAh lithium ion battery, a Raspberry Pi, a cellphone battery charging system and a capacitive touchscreen LCD. Almost all touchscreens run off 12V, but [Michael] managed to find a 5V HDMI to LVDS converter, which works perfectly. The device gets about 6 hours of battery life, which is more than enough for [Michael]. The device looks great, and he’s even made it through airport security with it!

We love seeing unique projects like this — don’t forget to submit your own projects through our Tip line!

From EPaper Badge To Weather Station

January 8, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 7 Comments

[Jeremy Blum] converted his 2013 Open Hardware Summit badge, also known as the BADGEr, into an ePaper weather station. We’ve looked at the 2013 OHS badge in the past, and the included open source RePaper display makes it an interesting platform to hack.

To fetch weather data, the badge is connected to a Raspberry Pi using an FTDI cable. A Python script uses the Python Weather API to poll for weather data. It then sends a series of commands to the BADGEr using pySerial which selects the correct image, and inserts the current weather data. Finally, a cronjob is used to run the script periodically, providing regular weather updates.

If you happen to have one of the badges, [Jeremy] has provided all of the files you’ll need to build your own weather station on Github. Otherwise, you can take a look at the RePaper project and WyoLum’s eReader Arduino Library to build your own ePaper project.

Recliner Sofa Given The Power Of The Pi

January 4, 2014 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

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If you go to buy a sofa these days you’ll not only be greeted with the option of one or more reclining positions, but a fully modern unit comes with motorized reclining. That simply wasn’t convenient enough for [Nicki] and [Kevin] who wanted to control the feature from a smartphone rather than a physical interface (buttons) on the side of the furniture. What resulted is the PiSofa, a Raspberry Pi connected to the furniture’s electronics with the help of a relay board.

This is most certainly a hack, but no doubt one with a lot of finesse. Check out that white PCB. That’s right, it’s a factory spun board to keep things nice and neat. They went with one of our favorite tricks by housing everything inside of a food storage container. After some Ruby coding the Pi now has complete control of the sofa. We’re not overstating this. It literally is the only way to control it because the original buttons no longer work. But that’s okay, turns out not only does it work with their smartphones, but with a [Kevin’s] Pebble watch as well.

We can’t think of any past hacks that specifically targeted the couch. But here’s a hammock that you can drive down the street.

Building A Raspberry PI Digital Photo Frame

January 4, 2014 by Kevin Darrah 3 Comments

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Digital photo frames aren’t very interesting on their own these days, but building one with a Raspberry Pi and strapping it with a bunch of useful features just might motivate you to check out this tutorial on building a ‘living’ digital photo frame.

This is [Samuel’s] first project with the Raspberry Pi, so he decided to build a digital photo frame that has the ability to download random pictures from his Flicker account and display them in a slideshow format. With all that extra IO on the Raspi, it was easy to incorporate a status LED and PIR sensor. When motion is detected by the PIR sensor, the photo frame is enabled; after 60 seconds of no movement, the photo frame is disabled by turning off the monitor port.

We love finding detailed write-ups like this because there is so much useful information in here like using the Flicker API, GPIO control, image handling, how to configure scripts to run on boot-up, and even some great troubleshooting code. If you’d rather ditch the Raspi altogether and take things down a few levels, check out this PIC based 100% DIY digital picture frame.

Arcade Briefcase (the Briefcade)

January 3, 2014 by James Hobson 8 Comments

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[Travis Reynolds] is part of an arcade club at work — the only problem? He’s the only one with an arcade machine, so they always end up at his place. So he decided to make his own portable, arcade briefcase to take to the office.

It all started with a quick trip to Goodwill where he found a beautiful maroon briefcase from the 80’s, for only $5! He then took apart a spare LCD monitor he had sitting around, and it worked incredibly well in his favor. He was able to reuse the LCD’s internal mounting brackets to secure it to the briefcase, and the video cables were just long enough to reach the Raspberry Pi.

The next problem he faced was the joystick height. He picked a Sanwa style joystick which is fairly small, but even that was too tall for the briefcase. So unfortunately, he needs to remove the ball of the joystick before closing the case. After testing out the proposed button layout, he cut a plywood mounting plate to hold everything in place. A bit of black spray paint later plus a power connector through the side of the case, and it’s complete!

He’s running Shea Silverman’s PiMame, which has an easy to use menu, quick setup, and great support. It’s an awesome project, and very well documented in case you’re itching to do something similar — I know we are!

Of course, if you have the space, a coffee table arcade machine is pretty sweet too…

[Thanks Brendan!]