raspberry pi

1627 Articles

Raspberry Pi Weather Station In Progress

September 24, 2015 by 13 Comments

[Jeremy Morgan] is building a weather station from scratch using a Raspberry Pi, and he has put together a nice write up that shows where he is at, and how it works. Currently, his setup is in the breadboard stage and is measuring humidity, temperature, pressure and light level using sensors that connect over one wire and I2C. He also shows how he is using Google Docs to store the data, by getting the Pi to write to a Google Spreadsheet over email: the Pi emails the data to Google every 30 seconds.

There is an analysis portion, with a Microsoft Azure web site that graphs the data over time. It’s a bit of a dogs breakfast (he might have used one interface technology for all of the sensors, for instance), but it is still a nice overview of the overall process.

Automatically channeling data into an easily accessible medium has been the target of many hacks going way back. We’ve seen a ton of companies pop up to help satisfy the need but between those and the hacked together (usually) open source solutions, there doesn’t seem to be a clear winner. What’s your favorite method of gathering and displaying data from projects like this onto the web? Let us know in the comments.

Echo, Meet Mycroft

September 23, 2015 by 50 Comments

The Amazon Echo is an attempt to usher in a new product category. A box that listens to you and obeys your wishes. Sort of like Siri or Google Now for your house. Kickstarter creator [Joshua Montgomery] likes the idea, but he wants to do it all Open Source with a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino.

The Kickstarter (which reached its funding goal earlier this month) claims the device will use natural language to access media, control IoT devices, and will be open both for hardware and software hacking. The Kickstarter page says that Mycroft has partnerships with Lucid and Canonical (the people behind Ubuntu). In addition, they have added stretch goals to add computer vision and Linux desktop control to Mycroft.

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Getting Biometrics In Hand

September 20, 2015 by 7 Comments

It is amazing how quickly you get used to a car that starts as long as you have the key somewhere on your person. When you switch vehicles, it becomes a nuisance to fish the key out and insert it into the ignition. Biometrics aims to make it even easier. Why carry around a key (or an access card), if a computer can uniquely identify you?

[Alexis Ospitia] wanted to experiment with vein matching biometrics and had good results with a Raspberry Pi, a web cam, and a custom IR illumination system. Apparently, hemoglobin is a good IR reflector and the pattern of veins in your hand is as unique as other biometrics (like fingerprints, ear prints, and retina vein patterns). [Alexis’] post is in Spanish, but Google Translate does a fine job as soon as you realize that it thinks “fingerprint” is “footprint.” The software uses OpenCV, but we’ve seen the same thing done in MATLAB (see the video below).

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Hacking A Pi Camera With A Nikon Lens

September 19, 2015 by 66 Comments

Cell phones have killed many industries. It is getting harder and harder to justify buying an ordinary watch, a calculator, or a day planner because your phone does all those things at least as well as the originals. Cell phones have cameras too, so the days of missing a shot because you don’t have a camera with you are over (although we always wonder where the flood of Bigfoot and UFO pictures are). However, you probably still have a dedicated camera tucked away somewhere because, let’s face it, most cell phone cameras are just not that good.

The Raspberry Pi camera is about on par with a cheap cell phone camera. [Martijn Braam] has a Nikon camera, and he noticed that he could get a Raspberry Pi camera with a C-mount for lenses. He picked up a C to F adapter and proceeded to experiment with Nikon DSLR lenses on the Raspberry Pi camera.

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Tiny Headless Servers Everywhere

September 17, 2015 by 30 Comments

Quick, what do “cloud compute engines” and goofy Raspberry Pi Internet of Things hacks have in common? Aside from all being parody-worthy buzzword-fests, they all involve administering remote headless (Linux) installations. It’s for exactly that reason that a new Ubuntu distribution flavor, Ubuntu (Snappy) Core, targets both the multi-bazillion-dollar Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and the $55 BeagleBone Black.

If that combination seems unlikely to you, you’re not alone. But read on as we hope to make a little more sense of it all.
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Hackaday Prize Semifinalist: An Open Smartphone

September 13, 2015 by 22 Comments

One of the biggest trends in DIY electronics, both now and fifty years ago, is creating at home what is usually made in a factory. Fifty years ago, this meant radios and amplifiers. Today, this means smartphones. It used to be the case that you could pull out a Heathkit catalog and find kits for every electronic gadget imaginable. There are no kits for DIY smartphones.

For [Gerard]’s entry for The Hackaday Prize, he’s tapping into the spirit of the decades-old DIY movement and building his own cell phone. He’s calling it the libresmartphone, and it’s able to make calls and send emails, just like any other portable, pocketable computer.

The libresmartphone is built around a Raspberry Pi, with a large battery, HDMI display with touchscreen, and a GSM and GPS module rounding out the build. He’s also rolling his own software to make calls, read SMS, and take a peek into some of the phone’s hardware, like the charge state of the battery.

[Gerard]’s libresmartphone is one of the purest examples of modern DIY electronics you’ll find; it’s not about building something from a kit, but instead building something that’s needed out of the parts he has on hand. That’s the purest example of the DIY movement, and a great entry to this year’s Hackaday Prize.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Sense Hat Lights Up Pi

September 13, 2015 by 15 Comments

One of our chief complaints about the Raspberry Pi is it doesn’t have a lot of I/O. There are plenty of add ons, of course to expand the I/O capabilities. The actual Raspberry Pi foundation recently created the Sense Hat which adds a lot of features to a Pi, although they might not be the ones we would have picked. The boards were made for the AstroPi project (the project that allowed UK schools to run experiments in space). They don’t appear to be officially for sale to the public yet, but according to their site, they will be selling them soon. Update: Despite some pages on the Raspberry Pi site saying they aren’t out yet, they apparently are.

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