Hackers are buzzing with ideas from Pi-powered arcade machines and drones to the home automation and low-cost tablets. 10 coolest uses for the Raspberry Pi article tells that TechRepublic has delved into the Raspbery Pi’s developer forums, and here’s our round-up of the best ideas so far, ranging from the eminently achievable to the massively ambitious. You can use your Raspberry Pi for example as media streamer, arcade machine, tablet computer, robot controller and home automation controller. Rasberry Pi homepage offers also some more interesting projects like Retro games and a retro joystick.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Okay, Google. Start the Jeep!
http://hackaday.com/2015/08/21/okay-google-start-the-jeep/
When [wizardpc] bought his Jeep, it came with an Avital 3100L car alarm system; but after it started going on the fritz, he needed to replace it. So he opted for a new alarm system with the same harness type — and then he decided to hack it.
When installing the new alarm system, an Avital 5103L combo unit, he realized there was an extra wire that when grounded, starts the vehicle — Avital had included the hardware upgrade before the software came out on this specific model. Score.
From there it was a pretty easy hack. All he needed was a Raspberry Pi 2, a relay board, and a few dirt simple lines of code. On the mobile end of things is a collection of hacks; he’s using Tasker with his Android phone to add a special command to Google Now. He tells Google to ‘Start the Jeep’ and after a few seconds, she turns right on.
Okay, Google. Start the Jeep!
http://gunscarstech.com/2015/08/15/okay-google-start-the-jeep/
Here is the entirety of the code that I wrote for this project:
system ( “gpio -g mode 4 out && gpio -g write 4 1″);
system ( “gpio -g write 4 0″);
sleep ( 1 );
system ( “gpio -g write 4 1″);
That’s saved as RemoteStart.PHP.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi-based Fanless CANbus Controller
http://www.eeweb.com/news/raspberry-pi-based-fanless-canbus-controller
Saelig Company, Inc. rolled out its emPC-A/RPI – a compact, fanless embedded controller based on the Raspberry Pi 2 B board, but with Janz Tec add-ons to implement additional features needed for industrial applications. Intended for wall or DIN-rail mount, the emPC-A/RPI includes extra features that expand the usefulness of the Raspberry Pi computer, including a CANbus interface. The compact 24-pin multi-connector provides access to many of the emPC-A/RPI interfaces such as SPI, I2C, 8 x digital I/O lines, RS232/485, etc. Two USB interfaces are also available on the connector panel.
The compact (4.0” x 3.8” x 1.2”) and lightweight ( 0.9lb) emPC-A/RPI is powered by a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 BCM2836 processor with 1GB SDRAM.
The use of CODESYS runtime control system software is also possible for the emPC-A/RPI. This is a soft PLC program created by 3S-Smart Software Solutions GmbH. Using this IEC 61131-3 programming system in combination with the Janz Tec emPC-A/RPI system makes it ideal for test and educational applications because the controller can make use of the additional interfaces the emPC-A/RPI offers, such as digital IO, CAN, RTC, and RS232/RS485.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Smart-Thermostat for Win 10 IoT Core RP2
Open Framework for implementing automated Thermostat rulesets and data-logging.
https://hackaday.io/project/6227-smart-thermostat-for-win-10-iot-core-rp2
A Smart-Thermostat for the home designed around the Windows 10 IoT Core operating system for Raspberry Pi 2. The thermostat receives data from remote temperature, humidity, and motion sensors. An AVR daughterboard was designed for interfacing the remote sensors and Furnace/AC to Windows 10 Core. The thermostat requires one primary remote-control module and may optionally use up to 3 additional remote sensing modules.
Node.js is running on Windows 10 IoT Core and serves an AngularJS single page applet as the default route. The Node.js state-machine sends data to an online data aggregator.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Two-Axis Solar Tracker
http://hackaday.com/2015/08/25/two-axis-solar-tracker/
Solar panels are an amazing piece of engineering, but without exactly the right conditions they can be pretty fickle. One of the most important conditions is that the panel be pointed at the sun, and precise aiming of the panel can be done with a solar tracker.
The core of the project is a Raspberry Pi, chosen after [Jay] found that an Arduino didn’t have enough memory for all of the functionality that he wanted. The Pi and the motor control electronics were stuffed into a Pelican case for weatherproofing. The actual solar tracking is done entirely in software, only requiring a latitude and longitude in order to know where the sun is. This is much easier (and cheaper) than relying on GPS or an optical system for information about the location of the sun.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Building a Better Mousetrap With The Raspberry Pi
http://hackaday.com/2015/08/31/building-a-better-mousetrap-with-the-raspberry-pi/
Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door, but what about a smarter mousetrap? [Alain] decided to find out by making a Raspberry Pi-powered, Internet-connected smart trap. The brains of the operation is a Pi running Arch Linux. Connected to that is a IR trigger, a servo to unlatch the sliding door, and a camera to see your new friend.
RaspiTrap V1.0
How to catch a mouse with a Raspberry Pi?
https://hackaday.io/project/7463-raspitrap-v10
RaspiTrap is an animal friendly mousetrap, with photo, video and email function.
You may ask, why somebody would build such a mousetrap?
Why not?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Voice Command with No Echo
http://hackaday.com/2015/08/30/voice-command-with-no-echo/
[Naran] was intrigued with the Amazon Echo’s ability to control home electronics, but decided to roll his own. By using a Raspberry Pi with the beta Prota OS, he managed to control some Phillips Hue bulbs and a homebrew smart outlet.
Prota has a speech application, which made the job simpler.
If you wanted another way to make the Raspberry Pi listen, try Jasper. Or you could always just do it all with–what else–an Arduino and uSpeech.
DIY alternative to Amazon Echo smart home voice control
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-alternative-to-Amazon-Echo-smart-home-voice-co/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Audiophile grade car stereo/computer
Not your average stereo… or even your high end stereo… but MORE!
https://hackaday.io/project/7527-audiophile-grade-car-stereocomputer
After some serious investigation into the car stereo market, my “partner in crime” (and co-worker) and I have realized that there are no “Audiophile” grade car systems within a mid-grade engineer’s budget. So off to find a solution that would not only be more customizeable than higher end systems, be more interactive, and cheaper.
Tomi Engdahl says:
It’s an Upright Piano, It’s a Looper, It’s a Pi Project
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/06/its-an-upright-piano-its-a-looper-its-a-pi-project/
Building an analog looping piano
http://blog.majormega.com/looping-piano
This is the story of our new product, “Quaver: The Multiplayer Piano”. We turned an old piano into a song writing machine using magnetic pickups and a Raspberry Pi.
We knew from the beginning that we didn’t want to rely on a display, so we tried to design around a minimal interface with only a few buttons and lights.
I knew we wouldn’t have much space inside the piano, and I’ve been itching to play with the new Raspberry Pi 2, so it seemed like a good fit for this project. Plus with plenty of GPIO pins it left us many options for controlling our interface.
It’s basically a pickup like you would find in an electric guitar, but built for the strings in a piano. The sound is amazing, there is no feedback, and we can feed the signal directly into our sound card. We both breathed a sigh of relief as we knew our idea was still possible. Helpinstill FTW!
All of this is captured through a C-Media chipset based USB audio interface, Amazon is littered with these little guys and we got ours for $8!
Sean was kind enough to sacrifice some ancient Bose speakers from the 80’s, and we picked up a cheap Pyle 150W amp from Amazon to drive them.
I opted to run everything with Node.js given my familiarity with javascript and limited python experience. Here is a breakdown of the basic setup:
Jack takes care of all audio routing from the sound card to SooperLooper and back
node-OSC sends commands to SooperLooper.
onoff to control LEDs and listen for button presses.
node-serialport was initially used to control the display, however when compiling a custom kernel (more on that later) I could not get it to compile correctly. I ended up just using echo to issue commands directly to /dev/ttyUSB0
lame for encoding the SooperLooper’s wav output to mp3
ffmpeg to concatenate copies of the mp3 loop into a longer “song”.
Parse to handle file uploading and make it easy for us to produce a front-end on the web.
The other issue we ran into is that resetting the machine took at least 20 to 30 seconds…totally unacceptable if people wanted to start a new song.
If you’ve never heard of it, Buildroot is quite the amazing tool for compiling Linux for embedded devices. I started with rpi-buildroot as a base and started adding all of the audio packages I would need. It took about five days full of trial and error as I had to patch just about every package to get it to compile properly, but at the end of the day I had our Raspberry Pi 2 booting in 2.9 seconds! To me, the slow boot time was always the worst part about the pi and this has blown my mind. I’m excited to try and chip away at the boot time even more as I will definitely be using the pi 2 in more projects!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Teensy Super Audio Board
Professional quality, 24 bit, 192kHz audio breakout board for Teensy 3.x, Raspberry Pi, and more.
https://hackaday.io/project/5912-teensy-super-audio-board
Professional quality audio breakout board, mainly targeted towards Teensy 3.x and Raspberry Pi 2, but also should be compatible with any boards having an I2S and I2C interface broken out (FPGA boards with enough GPIO included).
The hardware design is open sourced under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-NC v4.0 license.
I started the design by choosing the audio codec. The best one that I could find for a moderate price and in a package conducive to hand soldering (ie, no QFN, BGA, etc) was the Cirrus CS4272.
The CS4272 is a really high quality codec. It can do sample rates up to 192kHz at a bit depth of 24 bits. It’s banner specs are a THD+N of -100dB and a dynamic range of -114dB. It is an ideal choice for a professional quality sound board.
One issue with the CS4272 is that it doesn’t include the analog input and output buffers that are commonly integrated into lower quality audio codecs. This necessitates a lot of additional external circuitry that must be carefully designed to avoid compromising the audio quality of the codec itself.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Traffic Light tells you if the Internet is up
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/12/traffic-light-tells-you-if-the-internet-is-up/
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.
Raspberry PI answers, “Is the internet up?”
http://whiskeytangohotel.com/internetup
What it does and how it works:
The Raspberry PI runs a Python program that test pings 10 internet sites that you to determine to provide the status of your internet connection.
GREEN: 7 or more sites return a successful ping.
Green LED on. Updates the stats.
YELLOW: 6 to 4 sites return a successful ping.
Yellow LED on. Updates the stats.
RED: 3 or fewer sites return a successful ping.
Red LED on. Updates the stats.
To make the program run faster and not burden the network with outgoing pings, all 10 sites are not pinged on each run. The ping test rotates through the 10 sites.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 Raspberry Pi Projects For Learning IoT
http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/10-raspberry-pi-projects-for-learning-iot/d/d-id/1320757
The Raspberry Pi isn’t just a great platform for building Internet of Things project: It’s a super platform for learning about the IoT. Here are ten projects to help built IoT skills.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pi/Arduino Prototyping
https://hackaday.io/project/7655-piarduino-prototyping
An all-in-one development platform featuring a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino, a HDMI display screen and a breadboard area.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Playing Pong with Construction Crane Controllers?
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/20/playing-pong-with-construction-crane-controllers/
Here’s a project that will leave you scratching your head! Ever wonder what it would be like to play Pong using those big heavy duty shop crane controllers? No? We haven’t either, but that didn’t stop [hwhardsoft] from trying it anyway!
The project has a Raspberry Pi 2 at the heart with a Pong game written in Python. The fun part was connecting the controllers.
Each controller is wireless with a separate control box, so they were able to modify the control box to avoid making any changes to the actual controller. But since they wanted to use the joysticks, they still had to use an additional ATMEG328 microcontroller to perform the analog to digital conversion for the Pi — it wasn’t exactly plug and play.
Playing pong with crane remotes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j92sWwhzWk0
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pi-Go
https://hackaday.io/project/7631-pi-go
There’s always room for Pi in your Amateur Radio Go Kit. Top it off with the Pi-Go and plug right into your station power – or even your car
Hi everyone! I just started a new Kickstarter project for the “Pi-Go”. This is a topper for your Raspberry Pi that converts a typical 12V Amateur Radio Go-Kit power setup with Anderson connectors to the 5V needed to run the Pi and any connected USB peripherals. 5VDC @ 3A is made available from inputs anywhere between 10-16VDC. Great for your embedded auto computers as well!
The Pi-Go connects to the GPIO header and supplies a solid 5V at up to 3A for the Pi and its connected peripherals. The board is designed to maintain the 5V output with an input anywhere from 10V to 16VDC. A real fuse is on-board for over-current protection. Genuine Anderson Powerpole connectors are provided for direct use with the de-facto ARES power configuration.
Two momentary switches are provided on GPIO 23 and GPIO 25. If you’re a fan ofAmateurLogic.TV, then you may have seen episode 76 where Tommy uses a Python script for shutdown and reboot. These two switches will work directly with that script, or they could be used for another purpose.
AmateurLogic 76: Shutdown Pi, ISS SSTV, Modulation on a Scope
http://www.amateurlogic.tv/blog/?p=715
Tomi Engdahl says:
Old LISP Language Used for New Raspberry Pi OS
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/23/old-lisp-languaged-used-for-new-raspberry-pi-os/
On the scale of awesomeness, writing an operating system ranks near the top for software hackers and ranks just below writing a whole new language. [Lukas F. Hartmann] is reaching for the epic status with the Raspberry Pi operating system dubbed Interim. In an interesting mixture of old and new, it’s written in LISP!
LISP (LISt Processing) is the second oldest high-level programming language that received wide-spread usage. The only one older is FORTRAN (FORMula TRANslation), and that is just by one year.
Welcome to Interim OS, a minimal operating system featuring a language oriented kernel.
http://interim.mntmn.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi Weather Station In Progress
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/24/raspberry-pi-weather-station-in-progress/
[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.
Make a Weather Station With a Raspberry Pi 2
https://www.jeremymorgan.com/tutorials/raspberry-pi/how-to-weather-station-raspberry-pi/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi Opens Doors
http://hackaday.com/2015/09/28/raspberry-pi-opens-doors/
The Raspberry Pi is a cheap credit card sized computer that has opened the doors of embedded Linux to millions of people. But in this case, it’s literally opening a door.
The door handle was more difficult to turn than the old one. Nothing that a NEMA 17 stepper couldn’t handle, however.
After printing a few gears and wiring up an Easy Driver board between the Raspi and stepper motor, they had the basics of a door opener in place.
https://cclub.cs.wmich.edu/planet/2015/01/26/raspberry-pi-door-opener-redux.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi Sentry Turret Is The Enemy Of All Mankind
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/03/raspberry-pi-sentry-turret-is-the-enemy-of-all-mankind/
War, huh, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, except as an excuse to build a Raspberry Pi powered sentry turret that will track and fire upon your enemies. That’s what [Matt Desmaris] decided to do, and he has released the full details of his build.
It lacks the polished elegance of most military hardware, but what do you expect of a quick and dirty hack?
A sentry turret style robot which will detect motion, then track and fire at the object. (RaspberryPi + OpenCV python + driver from AdaFruit.)
https://github.com/matt-desmarais/SentryTurret/
Tomi Engdahl says:
RFID Enabled Robot Plays Music for 3 Year Old
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/03/rfid-enabled-robot-plays-music-for-3-year-old/
[Ronald] has a three year old daughter who loves music, but hasn’t quite gotten the hang of complex MP3 players or the radio yet — what gives, three is pretty old?! Inspired by an RFID enabled cassette player he saw, [Ronald] decided to make her something that was cute — and easy to use.
He started with the adorable KNG Andrew Home Invader speaker, and proceeded to jam a Raspberry Pi inside. What he wanted to do was be able to put RFID tags on certain objects that his daughter could associate with her favorite music — only problem, he didn’t know how to use RFID tags! Luckily he found another article which explained how to write a script in Python in order to easily use an RFID system.
Attendance system using Raspberry Pi and NFC Tag reader
http://www.instructables.com/id/Attendance-system-using-Raspberry-Pi-and-NFC-Tag-r/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi Tablet Based on Sailfish OS
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/18/raspberry-pi-tablet-based-on-sailfish-os/
There are so many hacks in this project it’s hard to know where to start. So let’s start at the SailPi tablet which is a Raspberry Pi running the Sailfish OS on an LCD touch screen powered by a cell phone battery pack. The design looks more like a high-tech sandwich with the Pi in the middle than a tablet. Despite the appearance it works, at that’s what counts. COs98UBWsAAQNh5The creator, [Aleksi Suomalainen] expended a lot of effort pulling all the pieces together on this project.
Deployment and use of the SailPi tablet as real standalone tablet.
https://sailpi.wordpress.com/2015/10/11/deployment-and-use-of-the-sailpi-tablet-as-real-standalone-tablet/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi Powers the Desk of the Future
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/21/raspberry-pi-powers-the-desk-of-the-future/
Recent science fiction movies always show people sitting at stylish semi-transparent desks that have all kinds of strange and wonderful gadgets in them. Our desks look like something your grandfather might have sat at. [Frederick Vandenbosch] must have seen those same movies so as part of contest he decided to build the desk of the future.
The desk is as much a furniture project as an electronics project, but it does have a Raspberry Pi, a scavenged laptop LCD, embedded touch sensors and LEDs, a wireless charger, and a built-in sound system.
Fredrick] used Python to get the major functions of the desk programmed.
Project: PiDesk – A Raspberry Pi controlled, futuristic desk
http://frederickvandenbosch.be/?p=1237&utm_source=PiHunt&utm_medium=post
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi Sense HAT Super Weather Dashboard
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/25/raspberry-pi-sense-hat-super-weather-dashboard/
[InitialState] posted a great multipart tutorial about building what he calls a “Hyper-local Weather Dashboard.” In plain language, he created a Raspberry Pi-based web page that fuses weather data from Wunderground along with locally sensed weather data.
Hyper-local Weather Dashboard: Wunderground + Pi Sense HAT
https://github.com/InitialState/wunderground-sensehat/wiki
Tomi Engdahl says:
Listen to the Rain, Raspberry Pi Style
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/listen-to-the-rain-raspberry-pi-style/
So how do you detect rainfall? If you are [lowflyerUK], you use the microphone in your web camera and a Raspberry Pi.
The idea was to reduce irrigation usage based on rainfall, so an exact measurement isn’t necessary. The Python code that analyzes the audio input is calibrated with three configuration parameters and attempts to remove wind noise. Even so, it needs to be in a room that gets a lot of noise from rainfall and ambient noise can throw the reading off.
Microphonic rain gauge
http://www.instructables.com/id/Microphonic-rain-gauge/
The Raspberry Pi also controls my irrigation system, and I wanted to reduce the water consumption by stopping the irrigation when it has rained.
What you need:
Raspberry Pi – mine is a Pi 2 model B with Rasbian Jessie on a 16Gbyte microSD card.
Power Supply for the Raspberry Pi – mine can supply 2A, but I guess that anything over 1A would be OK.
Internet connection for the Raspberry Pi – either wired or Wi-Fi.
USB webcam, with microphone, that works on the Raspberry Pi – mine is an old Logitech QuickCam.
Python program that analyses the sound from the microphone.
Yes, there is no other hardware, just the microphone in the USB webcam.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi Halloween Voice Changer
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/30/raspberry-pi-halloween-voice-changer/
[Dave’s] voice changer uses a Raspberry Pi which isn’t all that complicated. The Pi uses Linux, and Unix–the predecessor to Linux–has a long history of having little tools you can string together to do big jobs. So once you have a Pi and a sound card, the rest is just some Linux command line wizardry.
[Dave’s] voice changer is pretty much just some off the shelf parts and a script so simple it hardly qualifies as programming in any real sense. In fact, it is essentially one line of “code”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dalek-Berry-Pi Mower
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/02/dalek-berry-pi-mower/
There’s something about lawn mowers and hackers. A desire to make them into smart, independent robots. Probably in preparation for the day when Skynet becomes self-aware or the Borg collective comes along to assimilate them into the hive. [Ostafichuk] wanted his to be ready when that happens, so he’s building a Raspberry-Pi powered, Dalek costumed Lawn Mower that is still a work in progress since starting on it in 2014. According to him, “commercial robot lawn mowers are too expensive and not nearly terrifying enough to be any fun, so I guess I will just have to build something myself…”
RaspiMower
http://www.ostafichuk.com/raspberry-pi-projects/raspimower/
Tomi Engdahl says:
RPiTX Turns Rasberry Pi into Versatile Radio Transmitter
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/04/rpitx-turns-rasberry-pi-into-versatile-radio-transmitter/
Since the discovery that some USB TV tuner dongles could be used to monitor radio waves across a huge amount of spectrum, the software-defined radio world has exploded with interest. The one limiting factor, though, has been that the dongles can only receive signals; they can’t transmit them. [Evariste Okcestbon, F5OEO] (if that is his real name!) has written some software that will get you transmitting using SDR with only a Raspberry Pi and a wire.
There have been projects in the past that use a Pi to broadcast radio (PiFM), but this new software (RPiTX) takes it a couple steps further. Using just an appropriately-sized wire connected to one of the GPIO pins, the Raspberry Pi is capable of broadcasting using FM, AM, SSB, SSTV, or FSQ signals.
The RPiTX code is available on GitHub if you want to try it out. And it should go without saying that you will most likely need an amateur radio license of some sort to use most of these features, depending on your locale.
Transmitting FM, AM, SSB, SSTV and FSQ with just a Raspberry Pi
http://www.rtl-sdr.com/transmitting-fm-am-ssb-sstv-and-fsq-with-just-a-raspberry-pi/
Transmit FM using Raspberry Pi and no additional hardware
http://hackaday.com/2012/12/10/transmit-fm-using-raspberry-pi-and-no-additional-hardware/
F5OEO/rpitx
https://github.com/F5OEO/rpitx
Tomi Engdahl says:
RaspiDrums
Electronic drums using a Raspberry Pi and ±200g accelerometers.
https://hackaday.io/project/7499-raspidrums
Electronic drums usually use piezoelectric sensors as triggers.
Although they are cheap, they require quite a bit of signal conditioning.
I decided to spend more money on sensors that don’t require any additional components.
I decided to use the ADXL377 3-axis accelerometer, mainly because it’s really easy to find on breakout boards.
As it has 1kHz low-pass filters at each output, the signal is very clean, and always stays between 0 and 3.3V.
As you hit the drums, an analogue accelerometer transforms the vibrations of the drum head into an electric signal. This signal is then converted by the ADC in a sequence of bits that depends of the acceleration measured by the accelerometer. The Raspberry Pi reads those bits, and converts them into a value that is proportional to the drum head’s acceleration. Thus, the stronger you hit the drum, the higher this number is. This value is used to set the volume of the drum sound, which is sent to the soundcard, and ultimately to your headphones
Tomi Engdahl says:
Processing for Raspberry Pi
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/15/processing-for-raspberry-pi/
You know Processing? It is the programming language and IDE aimed at the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities. [Gottfried Haider] recently got Processing working on the Raspberry Pi and included a hardware input/output library to manipulate the Pi’s I/O pins.
If you want to experiment with Processing, you can download it right on your Pi
Now Available for Download: Processing
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/now-available-for-download-processing/
I’m a long-time fan of Processing, a free open source programming language and development environment focused on teaching coding in the context of visual arts. It’s why I’m so excited that the latest version, Processing 3.0.1, now officially supports Raspberry Pi. Just as Sonic Pi lets you make your first sound in just one line of code, Processing lets you draw on screen with just one line of code. It’s that easy to get started. But don’t let that fool you, it’s a very powerful and flexible language and development environment.
We owe a huge thank you to Gottfried Haider, who did the heavy lifting to get Processing running smoothly on the Raspberry Pi and create a hardware input/output library. That’s right, this version of Processing works with the GPIO pins right out of the box.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Ommatid Is an Awesome “Thing”
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/23/the-ommatid-is-an-awesome-thing/
[Jonathan Foote] made a really cool device: the Ommatid spherical display and controller. Part woodworking craft project, part art, and part tremendous hack, the Ommatid is something that we don’t really have a name for
The sphere design started out with a “20-sided regular polyhedron”
Each facet contains an RGB LED and an IR sensor so that it can tell when a hand is nearby. All of this input and output is run through a Raspberry Pi, so both the sensing and display interactions are easily modified.
Ommatid Spherical Display: constructing the enclosure and optical globe
http://www.instructables.com/id/Ommatid-Spherical-Display-constructing-the-enclosu/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Inferno OS on Raspberry Pi
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/22/inferno-os-on-raspberry-pi/
Unix isn’t the only operating system that came out of Bell Labs. In an effort to decouple hardware from user interfaces over a network, Bell also developed an OS named Plan 9 (named after the famously bad Ed Wood movie). While Plan 9 is still in use, it never got the momentum that Unix did. In 1996, Bell Labs (now AT&T) decided to shift its focus to Inferno, an operating system that was meant to challenge Java as a cross-platform virtual machine environment. Now LynxLine Labs has ported Inferno to the Raspberry Pi.
Not only did they do the work, they documented it in 26 labs if you want to follow along.
http://lynxline.com/projects/labs-portintg-inferno-os-to-raspberry-pi/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Metalab Bypasses IR Remote with Audio Circuit
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/27/metalab-bypasses-ir-remote-with-audio-circuit/
Infra-red (IR) remotes are great, unless you’re in a hackerspace that’s full of crazy blinking lights and random IR emissions of all kinds. Then, they’re just unreliable. Some smart folks at Metalab in Vienna, Austria cut out the IR middle-man with a couple transistors and some audio software. They call the project HDMI Whisperer, and it’s a cute hack.
Fortunately, the particular switch has a remote-mounted IR receiver that connects to the main unit through a stereo audio jack. Plugging this sensor into a laptop and running Audacity while pressing the buttons on the remote got them audio files that play the remote’s codes. Simply playing these back out of the Raspberry Pi’s audio out and into the switch’s IR input through a tiny transistor circuit does the trick. Now they have a networked five-way HDMI switch for $10.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Transmitting Tee Vee From A Pi
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/27/transmitting-tee-vee-from-a-pi/
Want to set up your own television station? This hack might help: [Jan Panteltje] has worked out how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a DVB-S transmitter. DVB-S is a TV transmission standard originally created for satellite broadcasts, but Hams also use it to send video on the amateur bands. What [Jan] did was to use software on the Pi to encode the video into the transport stream, which is then fed out to the home-made transmitter that modulates the data into a DVB-S signal.
That’s a big step, though, and I hope that [Jan] holds off and does a bit more documentation first. At the moment, the schematics for this are all hand-drawn, and the prototype is a wire-wrapped bit of protoboard. This is a very impressive hack, though: there are amateur DVB-S transmitters available, but most put the encoding onto a dedicated chip.
The Raspberry Pi as DVB-S digital TV transmitter.
Some extra hardware and software changes the Raspberry Pi into a DVB-S digital TV transmitter.
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/raspberry_pi_dvb-s_transmitter/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Transmitting HD Video From A Raspberry Pi
http://hackaday.com/2015/03/28/transmitting-hd-video-from-a-raspberry-pi/
Turn your Raspberry Pi into a live HDTV transmitter
http://www.oz9aec.net/index.php/dvb/490-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-live-hdtv-transmitter
The setup I am using performs the following tasks:
Capture H.264-encoded video from the camera using the raspivid application.
Convert the H.264 bitstream to constant bitrate and DVB compliant MPEG-TS stream using ffmpeg 2.2.2.
Send the MPEG-TS stream to the UT-100C modulator using tsrfsend application.
In my own setup I also use a 20 dBm power booster to increase the range.
Tomi Engdahl says:
RasPi LED Panel Library is Nyan-tastic
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/29/raspi-led-panel-library-is-nyan-tastic/
Quick–in a pinch, let’s have ourselves a giant RGB LED Matrix! As marvelous as it sounds, it’s pretty easy to forget that there’s a battle to be won against picking the right parts, debugging drivers, and sorting out our spaghetti wiring. Rest assured, [Hzeller] has done all of the heavy-lifting for us with a Raspberry Pi RGB LED Matrix Implementation that scales to multiple panels and runs on any Pi model to date!
Offering 24-bit color at about 100 Hz for up to a grand total of 36 panels, [Hzeller’s] library is no slouch. The library enables customization of your panel arrangements, and a separate project (also [Hzeller’s] handiwork) makes this setup compatible with the pixel-pusher protocol as a network device.
Controlling RGB LED display on Raspberry Pi GPIO via PixelPusher protocol
https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-matrix-pixelpusher
Tomi Engdahl says:
AVR Programmer for Raspberry Pi
https://hackaday.io/project/8143-avr-programmer-for-raspberry-pi
A simple board that lets you use the SPI interface on a Raspberry Pi to program ATMEL AVR microcontrollers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Listening to the Sounds of the Earth
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/01/listening-to-the-sounds-of-the-earth/
A geophone is a specially built microphone for listening to the Earth. [JTAdams] found them at a reasonable price so bought some to play with. A geophone is used to detect vibrations from earthquakes, explosions, rumbling trucks, and vibroseis vehicles. To be useful it needs an amplifier and a recording device to capture the signals.
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[JTAdams] used a standard amplifier design for an LT1677 op-amp, fed the signal to an MCP3008 A/D converter, and read the output using a Raspberry Pi. A Python script records the data to a CSV file for processing.
Geophone Sensors
http://jtadams.ca/articles/14/geophone-sensors
Tomi Engdahl says:
The LED Roundsystem
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/02/the-led-roundsystem/
Gavin Morris has been working on his awesome sound responsive LED sculptures for a while. Technically the sculpture is an interesting application of WS2812 RGB LEDs, Raspberry Pis and a load of styrofoam cups and flower pots. However the artistic development, and inspiration for this project is equally interesting. Gavin shares his thoughts and a brief technical description of the project below.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Poor Man’s Raspberry Pi Turtlebot
Autonomous ROS-powered robot vacuum cleaner project
https://hackaday.io/project/8629-poor-mans-raspberry-pi-turtlebot
This is a Poor Man’s Turtlebot
End goal: Vacuum my Roomba hostile apartment
Software
-Raspberry Pi 2: ROS Indigo on Arch Linux for Arm
-Laptop: ROS Indigo on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Installing the Turtlebot stack on the Pi is a very involved process.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Retro TV Breathes New Life with a Raspberry Pi
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/09/retro-tv-breathes-new-life-with-a-raspberry-pi/
There’s just something so satisfying about industrial design from the years past. [Kenneth] found an old “portable” tube TV and decided to give it a little upgrade so he could keep it around the house.
It was a black and white Singer TV, with a whopping 6″ tube display.
Using his trusty screwdriver set he took the whole thing apart, keeping only the frame and outer casing. Inside he jammed a 5″ LCD display, a Raspberry Pi and a power supply — with some room to spare.
The end result is a pretty snazzy little device capable of playing movies, games
Tomi Engdahl says:
Turning a Pi Into a PDP
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/12/turning-a-pi-into-a-pdp/
There’s no better way to learn how to program a computer than assembly, and there’s no better way to do assembly than with a bunch of blinkenlights and switches. Therefore, the best way to learn programming is with a PDP-11. It’s a shame these machines are locked up in museums and the garages of very cool people, but you can build your own PDP-11 with a Raspberry Pi and just a few extra components.
How to Program in Binary Machine Code – Raspberry Pi PDP-11
http://jonatron.me/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi Communication Via LASER
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/12/raspberry-pi-communication-via-laser/
[Nick Touran] wanted to make two Raspberry Pi’s communicate wirelessly. There are lots of options, but [Nick] used a LASER and a photoresistor, along with Morse code. If you don’t find Morse code fancy enough, you could always refer to it as OOK (on/off keying). The circuit uses a common LASER module and an ordinary photoresistor that varies in resistance based on light. A resistor forms a voltage divider with the photoresistor and an external A/D reads the resulting voltage.
Sending and receiving Morse code with a laser and a Raspberry Pi
http://partofthething.com/thoughts/?p=835
Tomi Engdahl says:
Augmenting Human Vision With Polarimetric Cameras
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/15/augmenting-human-vision-with-polarimetric-cameras/
While cameras and the human eye can see different wavelengths or colors of light, they can’t easily detect polarization. [David] did remind us that the human eye is capable of detecting polarization, due to a phenomenon called Haidinger’s brush. He did, however, challenge everyone to tell the difference between two pieces of polarizing film. No one took him up on that challenge.
DOLPi – RasPi Polarization Camera
https://hackaday.io/project/6958-dolpi-raspi-polarization-camera
A polarimetric imager to locate landmines, detect invisible pollutants, identify cancerous tissues, and maybe even observe cloaked UFOs!
The polarization of light carries interesting information about our visual environment of which we are unaware because human vision is virtually insensitive to polarization. Some animals have evolved the capability to see polarization as a distinct characteristic of light, and rely critically on this sense for navigation and survival. Many fish, arthropods, and octopuses use polarization vision as a compass for navigation, to detect water surfaces, and to enhance the detection of prey and predators. Polarization cameras do exist, but at over $50,000, they are mostly research curiosities that have found few practical uses outside the lab. The DOLPi project aims to widely open the field of polarization imaging by constructing a very low cost polarimetric camera that can be used to research and develop game-changing applications across a wide range of fields; spanning all the way from environmental monitoring and medical diagnostics, to security and antiterrorism applications.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Portable Raspberry Pi gaming handheld
https://hackaday.io/project/4258-portable-raspberry-pi-gaming-handheld
Made from a Raspberry Pi 2 B, 4,3″ TFT screen, a powerbank and a modified SNES controller.
A portable ‘gameboy’ that runs many emulators of old consoles build around a Raspberry Pi 2 B.
The software will be the same as my arcade cabinet (except for the config file where the screen is configured).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open Sesame Raspberry Pi Style
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/17/open-sesame-raspberry-pi-style/
[Don] installed an Android tablet into his wife’s vehicle and realized he wanted to allow it to operate and monitor the garage door. His biggest challenge? Meeting the (what he refers to) as the WAF or Wife Acceptance Factor. He decided to use a Web app on a Raspberry Pi, along with a handful of switches and a relay.
The Pi uses two switches to determine the position of the door and relay to trigger the existing garage door opener’s operation button. This simple circuit could serve many different purposes, not just opening a garage door.
The Web app is available on GitHub.
Opening a garage door from the Internet
http://dhowdy.blogspot.fi/2015/10/opening-garage-door-from-internet.html
The code can be found on my GitHub account here: https://github.com/dhowdy/GarageDoor.
Security is accomplished via Apache with ModSSL and basic authentication. The guys at DuckDNS and PortForward have everything that you need to access your Raspberry Pi from the Internet.
Software for the web app to control a garage door
https://github.com/dhowdy/GarageDoor
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi Laser Beam Profiler
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/21/raspberry-pi-laser-beam-profiler/
[Anthony] at UCLA needed to verify the shape of a laser beam. Commercial units for this, as you would expect, are expensive. But a Raspberry Pi with a Pi Noir camera easily handles the task. Not only is the use of the Pi cool but so is the task – they are using lasers to cool molecules to study quantum effects. The Pi camera without the IR filter captures a wide bandwidth making it suitable for use with non-visible lasers. [Anthony] captures the beam along two axes and plots both curves on the LCD touchscreen. That data, based on the pictures, is also available on a host PC.
Raspberry Pi Laser Beam Profiler
https://hackaday.io/project/8655-raspberry-pi-laser-beam-profiler
Fits and displays intensity profile of laser beams using picamera and raspberry pi 2. TFT touch screen and battery pack used for mobility.
Tomi Engdahl says:
World’s Smallest Bat Detector
There are more bats around than you think!
https://hackaday.io/project/8353-worlds-smallest-bat-detector
Most bats navigate at night by echolocation, sending out ultrasonic pings to get a picture of the world around them. This device detects those pings.
The bat calls are received by the microphone and are amplified with a voltage gain of about 10,000 times. Since the reference voltage is about 1.2 volts the LEDs will not light when there are no calls, but when the bat calls the voltage will exceed the forward voltage of the LEDs and light them.
For this project I chose the Knowles SPU0410HR5H MEMS microphone. The response is a bit lumpy and likely drops off somewhat above 80kHz but it is cheap, durable and will work well for this project.
Raspberry Pi Bat Recorder
http://www.afraidofsunlight.co.uk/weather/index.php?page=bat
This project uses a Raspberry Pi and Wolfson Audio Card, with a simple LED and Push Button wired to the GPIO. A home-made ultrasound microphone is plugged into the headphone socket of the Wolfson card.
Update (March 2015): A new Bat Call Recorder is shown below using a Raspberry Pi B+ and Cirrus Logic audio card. This new recorder also contains a GPS module and Temperature / Humidity Sensor, to allow location, temperature and humidity to be logged when each new recording is started. This version integrates the recording button and microphone into a single case, making it much more portable than my previous version. A second LED has been added to show when the GPS has a fix.
Sonograms for bat call analysis are created using Python and Matplotlib.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi : LiV Pi Indoor – Air Quality Monitor
https://hackaday.io/project/2636-raspberry-pi-liv-pi-indoor-air-quality-monitor
LiV Pi is an indoor air quality monitor based on Raspberry Pi. LiV is open source. LiV reports measurements using IM (XMPP/Jabber).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi: Jabber/XMPP client
https://hackaday.io/project/4849-raspberry-pi-jabberxmpp-client
This is about using an Instant Messaging client (Pidgin, ChatSecure, etc…) to send and receive messages to/from your Raspberry Pi.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi Win10 IoT Intercom
Utilizing the Raspberry Pi to be a video intercom using a USB webcam and IO board
https://hackaday.io/project/8959-raspberry-pi-win10-iot-intercom
My cheap China video intercom failed after only 5 years so instead of buying another I thought I’d make one myself to integrate into my home automation system.
A standard video intercom isn’t connected to anything else and integrating it into a HA system opens up a number of possibilities, as follows:
- Real time video of who is at the gate (or front door)
- See who is at the door on your mobile phone over the internet.
- Two way audio communication
- Video recording & recording time/date of when the bell is pressed
- WhatsApp message when the doorbell is pressed
- Open the gate remotely via the home automation system
- As the letter box is next to the gate, I have a sensor on the flap so when a letter is delivered a WhatsApp message is sent.
- Alert when the letter box is opened.
- Motion detection and video recording for anyone who comes to the gate (even if the bell isn’t pressed)
- Light sensor with IR LEDs so video still works at night
Tomi Engdahl says:
Build a Large-Screen Command Center with the RPi 2
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/build-large-screen-command-center-rpi-2
When the folks who make the Raspberry Pi made good on their plan to release a multi-core version of the tiny computer with 1GB of RAM earlier this year, I saw it as the perfect opportunity to put the single-board Linux box to work—real work—in our company’s network operations center.
NYSERNet, Inc., is an optical networking company that provides high-speed connections for New York state’s leading universities and research centers. Part of our job is to keep an eye on a fiber network that stretches from Buffalo to New York City. If something does down, we need to know quickly.
In the past, we had a walk-up command center that featured ten wall-mounted 19-inch monitors powered by two large-form Windows PC towers loaded with heavy-duty video cards and enough VRAM to make everything work. The screens showed network maps, data-center views and weather, among other things.
But during a recent office remodel, we decided all the cabling, clunky-looking PCs and video-card sharing needed to go. We wanted the new space—with two new 50-inch Ultra HD monitors
Enter the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B.
With its powerful new four-core processor and double the RAM of its immediate predecessor, the RPi seemed to be the perfect computer not only to drive our large new 4K monitors, but also to run several important applications used by the NOC team, including a Java-based network map, Iceweasel (a Firefox Web browser derivative) and InterMapper, a proprietary network monitoring tool. Raspbian, a Debian derivative that fits well with our Ubuntu shop, would be an ideal choice for the OS.
necessary—system to a pair of $35 RPis
I ran some preliminary tests on an HP Mini running Windows 8.1 and on the RPi 2 Model B. The Mini could muster only 1080p, but I found the RPi could indeed provide the resolution I wanted with its built-in full-size HDMI port and on-board Broadcom graphics. I also found I could do it without having to set the poor RPi on fire by overclocking it to the max.
For this project, I needed two RPis, one for each new large-screen TV.
Once your RPi is up and running, it’s a good idea to connect it to your network. If something goes wrong with the video settings during this setup, you’ll want another way to edit the configuration files. Giving the RPi an address on your network and setting up SSH will do just that.
If you’re able to find a kit with a pre-installed Raspbian (or NOOBS) SD card, that’ll work fine. Other flavors, such as Arch Linux ARM and Pidora, also may be good options,
Using the raspi-config tool (built in to Raspbian), you can fine-tune how the computer handles memory, video display and a host of other RPi parameters. For my purposes, I used it to work with three things:
Overclocking
Overscan
Memory Split
By the way, these settings also can be modified by editing /boot/config.txt
Out of the box, the RPi commits 64MB of its 1GB to the GPU. That’s not nearly enough to give the pixel resolution we want. After some experimenting, I found that maxing out the memory for the GPU (512) worked best
Once the overscan, overclocking and memory split modifications are complete, the rest of the heavy lifting for this project is done in the boot configuration script: /boot/config.txt
First, disable overscanning:
disable_overscan=1
If the RPi doesn’t automatically detect your HDMI display, uncomment the hdmi_force_hotplug=1 line. That should fix it.
In order to get the RPi to support the Ultra HD screen resolution, you’ll need to use hdmi_group and hdmi_mode to enable custom settings. The hdmi_group parameter sets the type of display you’re using: 0 will auto-detect, 1 will set CEA (typical for televisions), and 2 will set DMT (typical for monitors).
Driving the Vizio TV requires a custom resolution that is not offered in any of the preset modes, so you’ll need to set the HDMI output format to 87, a custom mode:
# Make our custom resolution the default
hdmi_mode=8
With the custom mode set, you now need to add the specific parameters for Coordinated Video Timings (CVT)
I also set the framebuffer width and height to match my hdmi_cvt width and height, and then set a high pixel frequency limit:
max_framebuffer_width=3840
max_framebuffer_height=2160
hdmi_pixel_freq_limit=400000000
After some trial and error, these settings worked well.
Because I have both RPis running in graphical mode, I need a keyboard and mouse
I didn’t want a bunch of keyboards and mice
The answer was SSH and its x2x feature.
With x2x, you can move the mouse (and keyboard focus) from one RPi to the other, one monitor to the other, as though the screens were attached to a single computer. It’s fast and seamless.
I attached a Bluetooth USB dongle to the primary RPi I called rpi01. It was immediately detected by the system and connected my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
The RPi is friendly to most modern Bluetooth USB adapters
Set Up VNC as a Remote-Control Alternative
a good alternative to SSH x2x is VNC.
Create a profile for each RPi to which you want to connect. Give each profile a name, ensure that you’ve selected the VNC protocol, enter the server address for the RPi, use the default RPi account (usually pi unless you’ve changed it), and set the color depth and quality.
I used a color depth of 256 colors and “Poor” quality, because I wanted a better remote-user experience.
Final Thoughts
Because your RPis probably are sitting on a network, it’s a good idea to secure them with a firewall. I set up some iptables rules that block almost all traffic.
Also, to make the RPis even easier to maintain, you may want to install Webmin, a free Web-based administration tool for Linux environments. It works well under Raspbian and doesn’t hog resources when it’s not in use.