Self-Balancing Robot Keeps Getting More Features

November 10, 2013 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

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It’s a lot of fun to see a self-balancing robot project. Rarely do they go much further than being able to keep themselves upright while being piloted remotely and annoyingly shoved by their creator as proof of their ability to remain standing on two wheels. This little anthropomorphic guy is the exception to the rule. It’s the product of [Samuel Matos] who says he didn’t have a specific purpose in mind, but just kept adding features as they came to him.

Starting with a couple of carbon fiber plates [Samuel] cut the design by hand, using stand-offs to mount the NEMA 17 stepper motors and to connect the two halves of the chassis. It looks like he used some leftover material to make a nice little stand which is nice when coding at his desk as seen above. There’s also a carbon-fiber mask which makes up the face atop an articulated neck. It has two ultrasonic range-finding sensors as eyes, and the Raspberry Pi camera module as the nose. The RPi board powerful enough to run OpenCV which has kept [Samuel] busy. He set up a course in his living room containing tags directing where the little guy should go. It can also follow a tennis ball as it rolls around the room. What we found most impressive in the clip after the break is its ability to locate the next tag after making a turn.

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Web Connectivity And Other Addons For An Automatic Schnauzer Feeder

September 8, 2013 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

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[Ben Miller] and his dad combined forces to create this automatic dog feeder. It not only keeps their two schnauzers happy, but gives them peace of mind as they can double-check that he feeding happened by pulling up an image on the Internet. Make sure you make it through all three posts of the build to get the entire picture.

The project started with some research which turned up a project that used a commercially available automatic feeder. That one used Arduino, but because of the cost the board plus a WiFi shield is a bit high, [Ben] went with a Raspberry Pi and a USB WiFi dongle instead. The Pi is much more powerful and adds the functionality for capturing images via a webcam.

After a convoluted process of connecting the Pi to the existing button traces on the automatic feeder it was time to start coding. The system runs from a Perl script which monitors a Gmail account for remote commands (in addition to a regular feeding schedule). The final touch is a bit of mechanical engineering which splits the output into two bowls so the dogs each have their own serving.

We still use the Autodine we built several years back but its single-serving limitation has always kept a second version on our project list. Hopefully seeing a well-executed system like this will motivate us to get building!

Build A File Server Inside An Old External Optical Drive Enclosure

September 1, 2013 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

This one nearly ended up in today’s Links post, but on second look we think it deserves a feature of its own. [Profezzorn] designed some mounting brackets to house a file server inside of an external drive enclosure. Click on the instructions tab to get a bit more of the story.

The enclosure that he’s using is meant for a 5.25″ optical drive. It comes with a USB to SATA converter which is how he connects the hard drive to the Raspberry Pi serving the files. His mounting system uses the original holes in the enclosure, the threaded holes of the drive, and the holes in the RPi PCB to mount everything with just ten screws. The enclosure included a Molex power connector. He sacrificed an old connector to make a custom cable for the Pi’s power.

Add a portable power supply, do a little work with the Linux configuration, and you could easily turn this into a pirate box.

Spoofing WiFi AP Based Geolocation

August 27, 2013 by Mike Szczys 39 Comments

[Pierre Dandumont] just finished up a little project that will give Google Maps’ location feature a run for its money. It’s a technique that spoofs WiFi networks in order to relocate the positional data reported via WiFi networks.

He starts with an explanation of the different ways modern devices acquire location data. GPS is the obvious, and mobile network triangulation is pretty well know. But using WiFi networks may be a new trick for you. We’re not 100% certain but we think Google is able to look up location data based on known IP addresses for WiFi access points (this would be a good comments discussion). To trick the system all you have to do is feed some captured AP data into the computer before Google Maps tried to lock onto a location. The video after the break shows Maps with the legit location displayed. After running a quick script whose output is shown above the map position is changed to the spoofed location.

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Voice Controlled Home Automation Uses Raspberry Pi And LightwaveRF

August 11, 2013 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

It’s not quite artificial intelligence, but saying “Jeeves, lights!” will switch on the bulbs in the room. [Chipos81] built the voice-activated home automation around a Rapsberry Pi board with LightwaveRF devices switching lights and outlets.

The LightwaveRF system offers a WiFi link which provides Internet connectivity for all of those devices in your house. This makes it a snap for [Chipos81] to control them from the RPi. To provide speech recognition he’s using CMU Sphinx. It’s an open source speech recognition library developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and released under a BSD license. It seems to do a great job in the video of quickly parsing several sets of commands.

“Jeeves” will even talk back to you to confirm a command. This is generated by Festival, a package developed by the University of Edinburgh. This provides some entertainment in the last seconds of the video as we detect a distinct Scottish accent when it says “See you tomorrow”.

The GPIO pins provide a bit of feedback, using three colored LEDs to let you know what is going on with the system. There’s even an IR LED used to add voice control to your Television.

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Raspberry Pi Camera Built As Part Of Advertising Campaign

August 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

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Here’s yet another example of well targeted advertising. This camera built around a Raspberry Pi is a giveaway from Sprite. The “lucky” winner of the camera will have the pleasure of seeing the Sprite logo as a watermark on all of the images they snap with it. But in the right hands it’s a simple hack to remove that “feature” (they published the Python script that adds the watermark) or to just scrap the parts for another project. Either way, Sprite got us to say their name three times in this paragraph so the campaign worked.

The most obvious part of this build is the custom cast resin case that they came up with which is a gaudy cartoon-like monstrosity. It protects the case-less Raspberry Pi board, and mounts the Pi Camera board so that the lens is positioned correctly. The lipstick-sized module mounted in the lower back half of the case is a 2400 mAh portable power supply with a USB charging port sticking out the side. This makes us wonder, do you have to wait for the RPi to power up before snapping a picture? If the size and color didn’t get you noticed by everyone the shutter sound will. it shouts the name of the soda company whenever you press the shutter release button.

If you’re more of a high-end photography enthusiast this DSLR wedded with an RPi will be of more interest.

No Computer Ambilight Clone Uses A Computer

August 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 37 Comments

It may seem confusing that you’re looking at a Raspberry Pi when this hack is about an Ambilight clone system that doesn’t need a computer. The point here is that this system works no matter what your video source is, where many projects in the past have required the video to be playing from a computer.

This hack follows in the same path of the ARM based custom job we was almost a month ago. Just like that project you use an HDMI splitter to gain access to the feed going to your television. The split signal is fed into an HDMI to composite video adapter. The composite signal is captured by a USB video encoder. The GPIO header drives a strip of addressable RGB LEDs. The whole thing is powered as one using a bit of cable hacking.

It’s slightly convoluted. But all of the components are easy to source and relatively cheap. The one caveat is that it works best if you are already using a hardware HDMI source selector instead of the one build into your TV. That way there is just one HDMI cable going to the television, and this can siphon off of that feed.

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