Destroy My Vegetable Garden? Oh Hail No!

January 20, 2020 by Kristina Panos 13 Comments

Building and maintaining a garden takes a lot of work. And unless you have a greenhouse, you’re forced to leave your hard work outside to fend for itself against the double-edged sword of the elements. Rain and sun are necessary, but hard, pelting hail is never welcome. Just ask [Nick Rogness]. He didn’t go through all the trouble of building a 12’x12′ garden and planting tasty vegetables just to have Mother Nature spew her impurity-filled ice balls on it every other night during the summertime.

[Nick] did what any of us would do: fight back with technology. His solution was to build a retractable roof that covers the garden with a heavy duty tarp. A Raspberry Pi Zero W controls pair of linear actuators via motor controllers, and [Nick] put a limit switch in each of the four corners to report on the roof status. He can run the roof manually, or control it with his phone using MQTT. The whole thing runs on a 12V marine battery that gets charged up by a solar panel, so part of the interface is dedicated to reporting the battery stats.

[Nick] ran out of time to implement all the features he wanted before the season started, but there’s always next year. He has big plans that include soil moisture sensors, rain detection sensors, and an automatic watering system that collects and uses rain water. We planted the bite-size demo video for you after the break — just wash the dirt off and you’re good to go.

Maybe someday [Nick] will create a system that can automate the entire garden, like the FarmBot. Hey, we’re just trying to plant seeds of ideas.

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Raspberry Pi 4 And The State Of Video Game Emulation

January 14, 2020 by Drew Littrell 40 Comments

The modern ideal of pixel art is a fallacy. Videogame art crammed onto cartridges and floppy discs were beholden to the CRT display technology of their day. Transmitting analog video within the confines of dingy yellow-RCA-connector-blur, the images were really just a suggestion of on-screen shapes rather than clearly defined graphics. Even when using the superior RGB-video-over-SCART cables, most consumer grade CRT televisions never generated more than about 400 lines, so the exacting nature of digitized plots became a fuzzy raster when traced by an electron beam. It wasn’t until the late 90s when the confluence of high resolution PC monitors, file sharing, and open source emulation software that the masses saw pixels for the sharp square blocks of color that they are.

More importantly, emulation software is not restricted to any one type of display technology any more than the strata of device it runs on. The open-source nature of videogame emulators always seems to congregate around the Lowest Common Denominator of devices, giving the widest swath of gamers the chance to play. Now, that “L.C.D.” may very well be the Raspberry Pi 4. The single board computer’s mix of tinker-friendly IO at an astonishingly affordable entry price has made it a natural home for emulators, but at fifty bucks what options unlock within the emulation scene?

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In Soviet Russia, Doorbell Rings You

January 13, 2020 by Al Williams 11 Comments

We can imagine that the origin of the doorbell is truly ancient. if you lived in a cave, you probably had a stick and a rock nearby for people to get your attention without invading your cave. In 1817 a Scot named William Murdoch had a bell in the house that visitors rang via a compressed air system, but the electric doorbell had to wait until 1831. Since then, little has changed with the basic idea. [Erientes] — who lives in the Netherlands, not Russia — wanted a smarter doorbell. In particular, he’s read about older people being victimized by people who ring the doorbell for entry. So [Erientes] used a Raspberry Pi to make a doorbell that supports facial recognition.

The exercise is really more of an operations challenge than a technical one thanks to a high-quality Python library for face recognition powered by DLib. However, we did like the user interface aimed at non-technical users. The metaphor is a traffic light in which a red light means do not allow entry. The lights are buttons, so you can use them to whitelist or blacklist a particular person.

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A Luggable Computer For The Raspberry Pi Era

January 10, 2020 by Tom Nardi 25 Comments

Today, computers are separated into basically two categories: desktops and laptops. But back in the early 1980s, when this ideological line in the sand was still a bit blurry, consumer’s had a third choice. Known as “portable computers” at the time, and often lovingly referred to as luggables by modern collectors, these machines were technically small enough to take with you on a plane or in the car.

Improvements in miniaturization ultimately made the portable computer obsolete, but that doesn’t mean some people still don’t want one. [Dave Estes] has been working on his own modern take on idea that he calls Reviiser, and so far it looks like it checks off all the boxes. With the addition of a rather hefty battery pack, it even manages to be more practical than the vintage beasts that inspired it.

In the video after the break, [Dave] walks us through some of the highlights of his luggable build, such as the fold-down mechanical keyboard, gloriously clunky mechanical power switches, and the integrated touch screen. We also really like the side-mounted touch pad, which actually looks perfectly usable given the largely keyboard driven software environment [Dave] has going on the internal Raspberry Pi 4. With a removable 30,000 mAh battery pack slotted into the back of the machine, he’ll have plenty of juice for his faux-retro adventures.

[Dave] mentions that eventually he’s looking to add support for “cartridges” which will allow the user to easily slot in new hardware that connects to the Pi’s GPIO pins. This would allow for a lot of interesting expansion possibilities, and fits in perfectly with the Reviiser’s vintage aesthetic. It would also go a long way towards justifying the considerable bulk of the machine; perhaps even ushering in a revival of sorts for the luggable computer thanks to hardware hackers who want a mobile workstation with all the bells and whistles.

Right now there isn’t a lot of detail on how you can build your own Reviiser, but [Dave] says more info will be added to his site soon. In the meantime, you can check out some of the similar projects we’ve seen recently to get some inspiration for your own Luggable Pi.

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Tiny Tree Is A Thermometer For Christmas Fever

December 24, 2019 by Kristina Panos No comments

Tired of the usual methods for animating all those RGB LEDS for your holiday display? How about using trendiness in a non-trendy way?

[8BitsAndAByte] caved in to increasing holiday madness and bought the cutest little Christmas tree. A special tree deserves special decorations, so they packed it with NeoPixels that turn from red to green and back again one by one. Here’s where the trendiness comes in: the speed at which they change is determined by the popularity of “Christmas” as a search term.

The NeoPixels are controlled by a Raspberry Pi 3B+ that uses PyTrends to grab a value from Google Trends once an hour. The service returns a value between 0 to 100, where 100 means the search term is extremely popular, and 0 means it’s probably the dead of January. Each NeoPixel is wired to the underside of a translucent printed gift box that does a great job of diffusing the light.

You know how Christmas trees have a tendency to stick around well into the new year? This one might last even longer than usual, thanks to the bonus party mode. Press the arcade button on the box cleverly disguised as a present, and the lights change from red to green and back at warp speed while the speaker inside blasts the party anthem of your choice. Be sure to check out the demo/build video waiting for you ~~under~~ after the break.

How could this little tree get any more special? Well, a rotating platform couldn’t hurt.

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Ted The Talking Toaster

December 23, 2019 by Sharon Lin 9 Comments

The team behind [8 Bits and a Byte] have built a talking toaster. More accurately, they retrofitted their existing toaster with some hardware components to make it appear to talk and get angry at its users. While the actual toaster functionality isn’t necessary for the build, it certainly allows the project to have a more whimsical vibe.

The project uses a Raspberry Pi 3 and a Google AIY kit, consisting of a HAT, microphone, and speaker. Servos control the movement of the toaster’s eyebrows with the help of the HAT. Some decorative materials in the form of googly eyes and pipe cleaners help bring other features of the talking toaster to life.

The control flow for the chatbot makes use of Google’s speech-to-text for picking up text from audio input, the Dialogflow API to match intent, and Text-to-Speech to pipeline possible answer back to the Raspberry Pi to play over a speaker. They also used Remo.tv to broadcast live updates from the toaster to anyone on an online feed, allowing users in a chatroom to talk directly to Ted.

While Ted’s communications may be quite limited, there’s certainly no limit to the number of interactions he’ll be having online now!

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All Your SDR Software In A Handy Raspberry Pi Image

December 20, 2019 by Jenny List 29 Comments

The SDR revolution has brought a bonanza of opportunities for experimentation to the radio enthusiast, but with it has come a sometimes-confusing array of software for which even installation can be a difficult prospect for an SDR novice. If you’re bamboozled by it all then help may be at hand courtesy of [Luigi Cruz], who has packaged a suite of ready-to-go popular SDR software in an OS image for the Raspberry Pi.

On board the Raspbian-based OS image are SDR Angel, Soapy Remote, GQRX, GNURadio, LimeUtil, and LimeVNA. In hardware terms the RTL-SDR is supported, along with the LimeSDR, PlutoSDR, Airspy, and Airspy HF. All are completely ready-to-go and even have desktop shortcuts, so if the CLI scares you then you can still dive in and play. More importantly it’s designed for use with SDR transmitters as well as receivers, so the barrier for full SDR operation for radio amateurs has become significantly lower too.

This year has seen the seven-year anniversary of the RTL-SDR hack that probably did most to kickstart the use of SDRs in our community. Our colleague [Tom Nardi] wrote a retrospective that’s worth a look for its overview of some SDR tricks that have evolved over that time. Meanwhile if you don’t mind restricting your outlook somewhat, it’s possible to turn the Raspberry Pi 3 into an SDR all without any extra hardware.