Raspberry Pi Camera Board Incoming

February 6, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 56 Comments

camera

Your Raspberry Pi has on-board connectors for cameras and displays, but until now no hardware demigod has taken up the challenge of connecting an image sensor or LCD to one of these ports. It seems everyone is waiting for official Raspi hardware designed for these ports. That wait is just about over as the Raspberry Pi foundations is hoping to release a camera board in the coming weeks.

The camera module is based on a 5 megapixel sensor, allowing it to capture 2560×1920 images as well as full 1080 video with the help of some drivers being whipped up at the Raspberry Pi foundation.

Considering the Raspi USB webcam projects we’ve seen aren’t really all that capable – OpenCV runs at about 4 fps without any image processing and about 1 fps with edge detection – the Raspberry Pi camera board should be less taxing for the Pi, enabling some really cool computer vision projects.

The camera board should be available in a little more than a month, so for those of us waiting to get our hands on this thing now, we’ll have to settle for the demo video of the Pi streaming 1080p video to a network at 30fps after the break.

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Complete Siri Home Automation Controls Everything But The Kitchen Sink

February 6, 2013 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

complete-siri-home-automation

[Elvis Impersonator] spent three full days but in that time he managed to hand control of everything in his house over to Siri. The technique used is a familiar one. A Raspberry Pi running SiriProxy listens for commands from the iPhone and acts on them based on [Elvis’] predefined configuration. The difference here is that it’s not just a single device (read: lamp) that is being controlled to prove the concept. His video (embedded after the break) shows him operating an entire range of devices in his home.

The demonstration starts off with his garage door being opened and closed. From the YouTube video description we know that he’s using Trendnet IP cameras and it looks like one of them lets him see if he remembered to close the garage. Next he disarms his home security system as shown in the image above. From there he adjusts the Nest thermostat, switches off the living room lights, and changes the TV channels.

We think the need to give voice commands would get old pretty quickly. But that aside we applaud his work to pull everything together into one single interface.

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Rack Mount Home Automation With A RPi

February 6, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 19 Comments

[Patrick] wanted to have centralized sensing and control over various parts of his house. His Raspberry Pi Home Automation System integrates a bunch of functionality in one rack mount package, salvaged from an old network switch.

The automation system is based on a Raspberry Pi running Arch Linux, which talks to an ATmega over SPI. We’ve seen this setup used many times before to add additional ports to the Raspberry Pi, but what makes [Patrick]’s build unique is the amount of control he’s built into the system.

The box controls outdoor lighting at sunset and sunrise, generates wakeup calls, controls IR cameras, and plays sounds based on events. It’s capable of monitoring sump pump water level, the state of a house alarm, and more. A custom REST API is used to interact with the device. This allows for programs on any platform to interface with his home, and acts as an API for his house.

[Patrick] provides a lot of details in his build log, which should be helpful to anyone looking to roll their own home automation system. The source is also provided.

Web Connected Treat Dispenser Appeases The Pets

February 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

web-connected-treat-dispenser

[John] was looking for a project for his newly acquired Raspberry Pi and decided to include his dog in the fun. although his finished project looks a lot like an old time camera, it’s actually a web-connected treat dispenser that uses his dog’s email address for dispensation.

Let’s take a look at the hardware from top to bottom. There’s a camera with a eagle’s eye shot of his furry friend waiting for treats. The cylinder below that is the motor which drives the treat dispenser. You can see the chain tensioner on the back which connects the motor to the tube dispenser in the center of the box. Just above that outlet is the character display which gives feedback to anyone watching the dispenser. Nearing the bottom is a hopper that catches the treats, then flips over to dump them onto the floor. And finally at the bottom is a slot for the Raspberry Pi which drives everything.

Most of [John’s] projects revolve around CNC work. In addition to the demo video found after the break there’s a second that focuses on CAD design. About half way through that clip he gives us a close-up tour of all the hardware.

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Easy Web Interface With GPIO Access Runs On Raspberry Pi

February 2, 2013 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

Here’s a Raspberry Pi hack that adds web control using PHP and MySQL. As you can see in the image, it serves up a webpage (using the Apache2 server) which allows you to change the state of the GPIO pins. It’s not super-complicated, but it is nice to see a step-by-step guide for installing and configuring the package.

Web interface GPIO control is one of the features we loved about the Adafruit Web IDE. But this offering is loaded completely from the RPi (the Adafruit package uses cloud based code) and utilizes the tools most Linux network admins will be used to. A MySQL database manages the connection between GUI commands and GPIO modification. The webpage is served up by a PHP script which takes care of polling and changing database values. Configuration requires a new database, plus the username and password which has access to it.

Controlling A Raspberry Pi With Real Life Redstone

January 30, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

minepi

We’ve seen computers built in Minecraft out of redstone, the game’s version of electricity, circuits, and digital logic. We’ve even seen a few redstone contraptions controlling real-world devices. [Angus]’ build, though, takes things to a whole new level. He’s created a bridge between Minecraft circuits and their real life counterparts using a Raspberry Pi.

[Angus]’ build relies on a mod for Minecraft servers running as a Bukkit plugin. Blocks powered by redstone are labeled with an in-game sign, and messages regarding the state of a block are passed over the network using the MQTT protocol.

The hardware side of the build is a Raspberry Pi with a PiFace expansion board. With this setup, [Angus] can control LEDs on the PiFace by toggling Minecraft levers, or light up redstone lamps using the PiFace’s buttons.

If you’d like to try this out for yourself, you can grab the Bukkit plugin over on [Angus]’s git. Check out the video of the real life redstone in action after the break.

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Raspberry Pi Becomes A Guitar Effects Processor

January 28, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

One of the more interesting use cases for the Raspberry Pi is exploiting its DSP capabilities in interesting ways. There’s a lot of horsepower inside the Raspberry Pi, more than enough to do some very interesting things with audio, all while being powered by a small wall wart adapter. [Pierre] over on the Pure Data mailing list has a proof-of-concept working that uses the Raspi as a guitar effects processor. The results are very encouraging – [Pierre] is able to use his Raspi as a delay, pitch shifter, and of course a classic flanger, phaser, and chorus with a latency of about 16 ms.

There are a few steps necessary to get low latency with the Raspi’s audio interface. [Pierre] is running his Pi headless, and allocated more RAM to the CPU.

If you’d like to try this out for yourself, [Pierre] has a tutorial for setting up Pure Data with the Raspberry Pi. He’ll be updating his blog soon with more tutorials and verified USB audio interfaces later.

Check out the processor in action after the break.

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