ayan-sensor2notion-dashboard+raspberryPi

Know Which Way The Wind Blows, Whether Weather Boosts Your Mood

March 31, 2022 by Michael Shaub 4 Comments

As a quantified-self experiment, [Ayan] has tracked several daily habits and moods for a couple of years and discovered some insights. Too much coffee is followed by anxiety while listening to music leads to feelings of motivation and happiness. There was a strong correlation in the data, but [Ayan] wondered if external factors like the weather and air quality also played a role.

To find out, [Ayan] extended the custom dashboard built in Notion.so with weather data and some local sensors. Working at Balena.io (yes, the makers of the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi SD card flashing tool, Etcher), [Ayan] turned to balenaCloud to translate the data from (you guessed it) a Raspberry Pi into the dashboard via Notion’s API beta. We think Notion holds a lot of promise for all sorts of web-based dashboards as a research notebook and organizational tool. Who knows where the API will lead any interested readers?

Check out the full tutorial where [Ayan] walks you through the hardware used and each step to connect the APIs that bring it all together. [Ayan] plans to add a coffee-maker integration to automate that data entry and would welcome help getting a manual trigger set up for the data integrations.

Pi Zero Streams Video From “Fake” Security Camera

June 20, 2019 by Tom Nardi 39 Comments

Fake security cameras are advertised as a cheap way to deter anyone who might be up to no good. This isn’t a crime and punishment blog, so we’re not really in a position to say how accurate that claim actually is, but we see enough of these things for sale that somebody out there must believe they’re worth having. Though if it were us, we’d take this tip from [Daniel Andrade] and convert our “fake” camera into a real one with the Raspberry Pi and WebRTC.

There are an untold number of makes and models of these fake cameras out there, but it seems that many of them share a fairly common design in that the enclosure they use is actually pretty useful for putting your own hardware in. They’re hollow, relatively well protected from the elements, and as most of them use a blinking LED or some other feature to make them look more authentic, they already have a functional battery compartment.

As it turns out, the one that [Daniel] picked up for $9 USD is pretty much perfect for the Raspberry Pi Zero and its camera module. He even wired the blinking LED up to the Pi’s GPIO pins so it will still look the part, though replacing it with an RGB LED and appropriate scripts to drive it would be a nice way to get some visual feedback on what the system is doing.

The software side of things is done with Balena, a suite of tools for setting up and managing Linux Internet of Things devices. They provide everything from the SD card image that runs on the Pi itself to the cloud infrastructure that pulls all the data together. [Daniel] dove a little deeper into the software stack when he created his Bitcoin traffic light last year.

For any readers who may feel a sense of déjà vu looking at this project, you aren’t going crazy. We recently saw a similar project that used an ESP8266 and a PIR sensor to add motion sensing capabilities to one of these fake cameras. Now all we need is somebody to put an Arduino in one of them, and we’ll have the Holy Trinity represented.

Balena Introduces DIN-Capable Pi Compute Module Carrier Board

March 1, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

Although you don’t hear about it very much over the clamor of emulating old video game systems, one of the biggest uses of the Raspberry Pi outside its educational roots is in industry. The Pi makes for a great industrial control system, and if you mount it to a DIN rail, you’re golden. This is the biggest reason the Pi foundation is still making the Pi 1, and it’s one of the big motivations behind the Pi Compute Module.

Now that the Pi Compute Module 3 and 3+ have been out for a while, it’s only fitting that these modules get a great carrier board. The balenaFin 1.1 is out now, and it’s the perfect carrier board for the Pi compute module.

Balena (formerly resin.io) is a software stack designed for managing fleets of Linux devices, and there’s no better example of that than a factory filled with Pis fiddling relays and such. Balena has found its way from tracking sea turtles to monitoring oil rigs, and with that comes a need for a developer kit. The Pi compute module is supposed to have a very long support life, so the obvious solution is to make a great carrier board for this fantastic module.

Features of note include two camera connectors, PoE (with a Hat), USB headers, an RGB indicator LED, an industrial temperature range, and a case designed for a DIN rail. So far, so goo, but there’s also a microcontroller with a Bluetooth radio that can operate without the compute module being turned on, and an RTC for time-based operation. There’s a mini PCI express slot designed for cellular modems, and a SIM card slot just for fun.

While most Pi builds we see could make use of these features, they are assuredly one-off builds. You’re not going to be deploying hundreds of Pis if you need to 3D print an enclosure for each one. That’s when actual engineers need to get involved, and if you’re doing that, you might as well go with the Raspberry Pi compute module. If you’re looking for a fleet of Pis, you could do worse than to look at this very nice compute module carrier board.