raspberry pi

1647 Articles

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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Traffic Light Tells You If The Internet Is Up

September 12, 2015 by 21 Comments

Some of us are not blessed with an always on, high availability internet connection. Sick of answering the constant “Is the internet up?” questions, go-to IT support dude [PatH] took matters into his own hands and developed an unmistakable traffic light display of internet status for his apparently low-reliability connection.

A toy traffic light from Amazon forms the core of the UI, and the lights are driven by a Raspberry Pi that pings a suite of 10 sites in round robin fashion. If a site is found to be unavailable, the Pi goes into “deep probe” mode to determine the extent of the outage, and lights up accordingly. If the light is green, the connection’s clean; if it lights up red, best go to bed. As a bonus, logs are kept of all deep probes, which may prove useful for diagnosing ISP issues.

A display like this could go a long way toward making sure you stay connected, and can reduce the workload for you as de facto IT support. Of course for a little more information about the connection speed with retro styling, you might want to throw a Dekatron at the job.